JASNA LEVINGER-GOY was born in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. She has a BA in English Language and Literature from Sarajevo University, an MA in Linguistics from Georgetown University, Washington DC, and a PhD, also in Linguistics, from Zagreb University. In the former Yugoslavia she was a university lecturer at Sarajevo University and later at Novi Sad University. In the UK she was a lector in Serbo-Croat at SSEES, University College London and a tutor in interpreting at London Metropolitan University. She has published a number of articles and translations both in Serbo-Croat and in English. While in Sarajevo she translated Emily Dickinson's poetry in cooperation with Marko Vesovic, published by Svjetlost Sarajevo in 1989 and by OKF Cetinje in 2014.

She moved to the UK during the Bosnian civil war and married Edward Dennis Goy, a Cambridge University Slavist. They worked together on various translations, including translations into English of the Yugoslav novels, The Fortress by Mesa Selimovic and The Banquet in Blitva by Miroslav Krleza. In the early 2000s she qualified as an integral psychotherapist and has her own practice in Cambridge.