William Martin (1925-2010) was born in New Silksworth, Co. Durham. During the Second World War, he was a radio technician in the RAF, based near Karachi, where he was inspired by the Eastern religious and philosophical traditions. After being demobbed he became a gas fitter and later served in the Audiology Department of Sunderland Royal Infirmary, retiring as Head of Department. He lived in Sunderland since the 1950s.

He was an active member of CND for many years, taking part in the ritual boarding of nuclear submarines in Holy Loch, Scotland in 1961. He became an artist and had work purchased and exhibited by Sunderland Art Gallery. However, oil paints and a young family were not an easy combination, and poetry became his medium from the mid 1960s onwards.

For some years he wrote without any recognition, but in 1971 he had a book of poetry published to commemorate the Wearmouth 1300 Festival (Tidings of our Bairnsea). This was later followed by Cracknrigg (1983) and Hinny Beata (1987) with Taxus, and Marra Familia (1993) and Lammas Alanna (2000) with Bloodaxe.

Harry Martinson was born at Jämshög, Sweden, in 1904. He was left an orphan at an early age, and after a chequered childhood, in which the children's homes and institutions were as numerous as the escapes, he went to sea at the age of 16, spending six years of his life on board various ships and as a workman in foreign countries.

It was from these travels and years of work in environments of all kinds that he later drew material and inspiration for his literary efforts - a couple of books of prose with glimpses, views and memories of the world of coal-heated ships during the 1920s.

These accounts were followed a few years later by one or two books with an autobiographical strain and fictional recollections of a boarded-out child's existence, especially the child's own way of perceiving and trying to understand life and the people in it.

Side by side with this psychological cognition of the childhood land of memory, there appeared some collections of poetry which were continued by degrees in a series of nature studies in prose, in which words and observation are combined in what the author has called 'thinking out in the meadow'.

In a later work, the novel Vägen till Klockrike, the description of the human side is devoted entirely to the relationship between the settled and the itinerant man within ourselves. A world of journeying in a still wider sense emerges in Aniara, an epic work about an imagined space flight with a perspective in depth towards our own time. In it, jostling for room in our consciousness, are our fears and our questions as to where we are heading, together with the planet that our generation is treating as it does.

Harry Martinson died in 1978.

The above biographical note is reprinted from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993.

Harry Martinson's Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton with an introduction by Staffan Söderblom, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.

John Potter Masterton (known as Jock) was born in 1928. Having recently qualified as a surgeon Masterton participated in the pioneering British North Greenland Expedition from 1952 to 1954 as the expedition's medical officer. The expedition involved a team of over 20 men spending 2 years exploring the north Greenland ice sheet and included pioneering and important research in the fields of glaciology, geology, metrology, gravimetry, physiology and polar logistics. Working alongside another doctor Masterton looked after the medical needs of the party as well as undertaking physiological studies, which would later form the basis of published research.

Masterton went on to have a successful academic and medical career. In the 1960s he emigrated to Australia and joined Monash University in 1963, publishing on surgery and burns alongside working in surgery and with medical students. In 1967 he was instrumental in the establishment of the Victorian Burns Unit at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne and was its director for 28 years until his retirement. In 1991 he was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia for his contribution to the treatment of burns and Australian Antarctic expeditions.