When Geoffrey Strachan was invited to translate an award-winning story by the Russian/French novelist Andrei Makine, he found himself competing in a kind of literary audition. For he discovered that publishers Sceptre were considering an English language edition of Makine's La Testament Français, and had asked two others to give samples of their work.

"Publishers had become excited with La Testament because it became the first novel ever to win two literary prizes in France, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis. They though that here was an author they ought to consider," he said at his home in Charlbury.

Since he did not know the novel, he bought a copy at the European bookshop in London and eventually submitted a passage in translation. "It was then I heard about the other two. I believe Sceptre were looking for a translator who would be acceptable to the Americans. One of the translators fell out in the first round and I had to do another piece and was selected."

Apart from the satisfaction of helping to introduce Makine to a wider reading public, Geoffrey's work on La Testament gained him the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation. While the French title was retained, he was disappointed at the American title, Dreams of My Russian Summers, which does not quite have the same ring as La Testament.

So how do you translate into English the novels of a Russian novelist writing in French? Fortunately, Geoffrey was already an established translator and was a former editor and publishing director at Methuen.

He had learnt Russian in his two years' National Service, and spent a year in Paris as a postgraduate student following a modern language degree at Cambridge.

"I think the essence of a translator is to write how Makine would if he was writing in English. I have some assistance when I translate him, not the least being able to meet him in Paris.

"He is extremely helpful and just says I should write his words as if I was writing the novel. It is useful for a translator to be able to turn to a living author," he said. Translating runs in the family - his father was a Francophile and a translator and his son is a translator in Paris.

He can also call on advice from others, including a Russian friend in Oxford and a pilot friend in Charlbury, whose knowledge of aircraft and flying phrases was useful for one of the novels. When it comes to American editions he has sometimes seeks the aid of Webster's Dictionary. "I have to remember to use railroad in America for railways - and there are a lot of railways in Makine's novels."

Before striking this big success, Makine had suffered more than many writers, and his own story is the stuff of fiction.

Born in Krasnoiarsk, Siberia, in 1957, he learned French as a boy at his grandmother's knee. He became a teacher of French and other subjects, but such was his belief in French and France that he emigrated, arriving in Paris in 1987. Geoffrey says that Makine defected because he believed he could write more freely in French.

"I think he believed French was an expressive language in which he could write novels and France was a conducive place in which authors could work. It is easy to forget that for many years, people in Russia lived with the feeling that the KGB was looking over their shoulders."

At first Makine lived in poverty, sleeping on park benches and in a glass structure in a graveyard. His first novel was rejected by French publishers because they did not believe an unknown Russian could have written a novel in French. So in 1990 he resorted to a new strategy, pretending the novel had been translated by a fictious Frenchman from the Russian.

This time the novel, La Fille d'un Héros de l'Union Soviétique, was published. Geoffrey's English translation, A Hero's Daughter, was published by Sceptre in 2004. His next Makine translation will be published next year, probably as The Man who Loved.

Makine's latest translated novel, The Woman who Waited, is published at £7.99.