Born in Tashkent, Soviet Union, he studied English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Germanic and Romance Studies at Tashkent State University.
In 2000, he moved to Belgium where he received an MSc degree in Human Ecology and a PhD degree in Environmental Science from the Free University of Brussels (VUB).
He translated and published short stories by Flann O'Brien, T. F. Powys, and Eric Stenbock as well as numerous poems by the 17th – 20th century English and Scottish poets, including Francis Quarles, Jeremy Taylor, Phineas Fletcher, Robert Southey, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, William Soutar, and Robert Garioch.
In 2012, he published his translation of The City of Dreadful Night, a long poem by James Thomson.
Votrin also collected a two-volume Russian edition of plays and short stories by Belgian dramatist Michel De Ghelderode in 2004.