Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives.

He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey - are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.

In The Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. The Odyssey is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope.

We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. In fact 'Homer' may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps 'the hostage' or 'the blind one'. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time.

Emily Wilson grew up in Oxford, UK, and studied Classics at Balliol College, and English Literature at Corpus Christi College. Her PhD. is from Yale in Classics and Comparative Literature. She is currently a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in literature, story-telling and how ideas and culture play out through narrative and in words, and in the music of language. She cares about poetry, drama and philosophy of all eras, especially ancient Greek, Roman and early modern. She has written books on tragedy and "overliving", the long afterlife of the death of Socrates, and a life of Seneca. She has also done several verse translations of classical verse drama and epic, including Seneca's tragedies, four plays of Euripides, and Homer's Odyssey.

Her approach to translation is discussed here: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_wilson_odyssey.php

Profiled here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html