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.

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.

Don Marquis was considered by many to be the successor to Mark Twain as America's foremost wit. He was a daily newspaper columnist for the New York Sun and, later, the Herald Tribune. He invented a great many characters to express his and their opinions on the issues of the day, partly in order to fulfillthe constant need for material to fill his column. Two of his most memorable and much-loved characters are Archy the Cockroach and Mehitabel the Alley Cat (the pair who, together, make up the Bloodaxe titles Archyology i and ii), who now, over half a century after Marquis' death, are still able to endure.