William E. Skillend (26 April 1926 – 21 February 2010) was the first British academic specializing in the Korean language, and the first professor of Korean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.
[1] Skillend was born in Liverpool and went on to study Japanese at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class degree and later completed a PhD.
He became one of the generation of British orientalists who started as military translators, in his case at Bletchley Park.
[2] Skillend was responsible for establishing the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) in 1977.
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