Whiteside was born in
County Tyrone in
Northern Ireland in 1959.[5] He graduated with a
First in Modern Languages at
King's College, Cambridge. After he finished his studies, he worked as a business journalist and television producer before translating full-time. As he said in a brief interview, "Did I always want to be a translator? I certainly wanted to do something that involved travel and languages, but even when my work in television took me to far-off places, I kept coming back to translation, first for fun, and eventually as a way of earning a living."[2] Whiteside is the former Chair of the Translators Association of the
Society of Authors.[6] He currently lives in London with his wife and son, where he sits on the PEN Writers in Translation committee, the editorial board of New Books in German, and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, where he regularly teaches at the summer school.[7] He has stated that he would like to "have a go at
Uwe Tellkamp's Der Turm (The Tower), a massive great project but a worthwhile one."[2]