Li-Young Lee has published three collections in the States, Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, The City in Which I Love You (1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection, and Book of My Nights (2001), as well as a memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has received many other awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Writer’s Award from the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. From Blossoms: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) is his first British publication.

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, and has had a teaching post at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has given readings in America, Europe and in Ireland at the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire in 2010.