Joan Margarit was born in 1938 in Sanaüja, La Segarra region, in Catalonia. He is an architect, and from 1968 until his retirement was also Professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona’s Technical School of Architecture. He first published poetry in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965, but after a silence of ten years switched to writing and publishing in Catalan. From 1980 he began to establish his reputation as a leading Catalan poet. As well as publishing many collections in Catalan, he has translated most of his own books into Spanish.

Jack Mapanje is a poet, linguist, editor and human rights activist. He received the 1988 Rotterdam Poetry International Award for his first book of poems, Chameleons and Gods (1981) and the USA’s Fonlon-Nichols Award for his contribution to poetry and human rights. His latest collection, Beasts of Nalunga (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Jack Mapanje was head of the Department of English at the University of Malawi when the Malawi authorities arrested him in 1987 after his first book of poems had been banned, and he was released in 1991 after spending three years, seven months and sixteen days in prison, following an international outcry against his incarceration. He has since published four poetry books, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993), Skipping Without Ropes (Bloodaxe, 1998), The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Beasts of Nalunga (Bloodaxe, 2007), as well as three anthologies, Oral Poetry from Africa (1983), Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa (1983) and The African Writers’ Handbook (1999); and he edited the acclaimed Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002). His latest book is his prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011). Mapanje has held residences in the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland and throughout Britain, including two years with the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage in Cumbria. He lives in exile in York with his family, and is currently a visiting professor in the faculty of art at York St John University.

Glasgow-born Mangan has lived and worked in various parts of Scotland and Ireland, and in France, where he now resides. He is a poet, cartoonist, playwright and journalist, having been resident playwright at Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh in the mid-1970s, and later poet-in-residence at Dundee College of Arts; he now writes and illustrates for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. His collection Waiting for the Storm was published by Bloodaxe in 1990.

Osip Mandlestam was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, with a prophetic understanding of its suffering, which he transformed into luminous poetry. Born in 1891, he grew up in St Petersburg. With Akhmatova and Gumilyov he formed the Acmeist movement. Childish and wise, joyous and angry, at once complex and simple, he was sustained for 20 years by his wife and memoirist Nadezhda Mandelstam, who became, with Anna Akhmatova, the saviour of his poetry. His last poems, preserved in his notebooks, were translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane as The Moscow & Voronezh Notebooks. In 1934, Mandlestam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin, and subjected to gruelling interrogations and torture before being exiled to Voronezh. Nadezhda’s Mandlestam's memoir Hope Against Hope includes a moving account of their time in Voronezh, and Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘Voronezh’ describes her visit there. In 1938 he was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' hard labour for 'counter-revolutionary activities', and died that winter, of 'heart failure', in a freezing transit camp in Siberia.