Harry Maxwell "Max" Hayward was born in Liverpool and educated at Oxford University and the Charles University of Prague. After World War II, during which he worked at the British embassy in Moscow, Hayward returned to Oxford to teach Russian. He taught at Oxford for most of the rest of his life while simultaneously translating dozens of works from the Russian, beginning with the formidable Doctor Zhivago. In 1971, he received the PEN Translation Prize in recognition of his impressive output. The historian Maurice Friedberg called him "the best and most prolific translator of Russian prose into English since Constance Garnett."
