Michael Scammell was born in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England, attended Brockenhurst Grammar School, and after two years working as a copy boy for the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, was drafted into the British army, spending most of his time at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Cambridge and Bodmin, where he was trained as a Russian interpreter.

degree with first class honors in Slavic Studies from the University of Nottingham, and edited the student newspaper, The Gongster.

After moving back to England in 1965, Scammell translated Childhood, Boyhood and Youth by Lev Tolstoy and a detective novel, Petrovka 38, by the Soviet author, Yulian Semyonov.

Many years later, he and Taufer translated a selection of poems by Slovenia's premier modern poet, Edvard Kocbek, under the title, "Nothing Is Lost".

In 1971, Scammell became the first director of the nonprofit Writers and Scholars International (later the Writers and Scholars Educational Trust) in London, and started the quarterly magazine, Index on Censorship, devoted to documenting censorship worldwide and promoting freedom of expression.

In 1976 he was asked to revive the International PEN Club's moribund Writers in Prison Committee and remained chair for the next ten years.

He deemed the discovery important because "Darkness at Noon is that rare specimen, a book known to the world only in translation.

[4] In August 2019, Scammell mentioned the new German original in The New York Times but made no reference to the forthcoming English translation or its publication date.