Rodarmor, William

William Rodarmor (born June 5, 1942) is an American journalist, adventurer, and translator of French literature. He is notable in the field of literary translation for having won the Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association, and the Albertine Prize. Rodarmor was born in New York City and pursued a bilingual education in English and French. He briefly practiced law in San Francisco but quickly abandoned it to sail to Tahiti. He then spent the 1970s traveling, mountaineering, and sailing. He took odd jobs and wrote freelance. Sailing in the South Pacific, he met singlehanded sailor and author Bernard Moitessier in Tahiti. This led to Rodarmor's first book translation: Moitessier's round-the-world saga, The Long Way. He would go on to translate over forty more books, including Moitessier's popular Tamata and the Alliance, and a number of books by Gérard de Villiers, Tanguy Viel, and Katherine Pancol. Rodarmor concurrently pursued a career in journalism, including working as an associate editor for PC World in the late 1980s, and as the managing editor of California Monthly (UC Berkeley's alumni magazine) during the 1990s. In the 2000s he turned again to freelance writing.