biography of VN

Brian Boyd (1952- ), University Distinguished Professor, English and Drama, Auckland, New Zealand, has worked on Nabokov since the early 1970s, as an annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator, and on documentary and photographic projects.

Alfred Appel, Jr (1934-2009) was a student in Nabokov's European fiction class at Cornell, where he met his wife, Nina. After a PhD on Willa Cather, and his appointment at Northwestern University, Appel turned to Nabokov, focusing especially on his self-consciousness and metafictionality, particularly in "Nabokov's Puppet Show," a long article in the New Republic (14 and 21 January 1967), which became the basis for his memorable Introduction to the Annotated Lolita (1970).

Dieter E. Zimmer (1934-2020) first wrote on Nabokov in 1959, and soon after became his most frequent translator into German. His 1963 bibliography of Nabokov, based on Véra Nabokov's material, became the basis for all subsequent Nabokov primary bibliography. He interviewed Nabokov more than once for German media. He was a journalist for Die Zeit, becoming editor of its feuilleton, and one of the leading postwar essayists in  German, focusing especially on the subjects of language, science, and technology.