Jennifer Maiden was born in 1949 in Penrith, New South Wales, where she still lives. After starting to publish in the late 1960s, she took a BA at Macquarie University, and has been an active presence in the Sydney literary scene for the past four decades. Her first UK publication, Intimate Geography: Selected Poems 1991-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) draws on her four most recent collections: Acoustic Shadow (Penguin Australia, 1993), Mines (Paper Bark, 1999), Friendly Fire (Giramondo, 2005) and Pirate Rain (Giramondo, 2010). She has published ten other books of poetry in Australia along with two novels, the second of which, Play With Knives, was translated into German as Ein Messer im Haus (dtv, 1994).

Among her many accolades are the NSW Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (she is the only writer to have won this three times, most recently for Pirate Rain), the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the H.M. Butterly-F.Earle Hooper Award (University of Sydney), the Grenfell Henry Lawson Festival Prize, the FAW Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry, Melbourne Age Poetry Book of the Year (twice), and Melbourne Age Book of the Year.

As well as writing and running writers' workshops with a variety of literary, community and educational organisations, she has co-written (with Margaret Cunningham) a manual of questions to facilitate writing by torture and trauma victims. She has had residencies at the Australian National University, the University of Western Sydney, Springwood High School and the New South Wales Torture and Trauma Rehabilitation Service, and has been awarded several Fellowships by the Australia Council.

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.

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.