Priscila Uppal is a Canadian poet and fiction writer of South Asian descent. Born in Ottawa in 1974, she lives in Toronto. She has a PhD in English Literature and is a professor of Humanities and English at York University in Toronto. Her first UK poetry selection Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) draws on six collections of poetry published in Canada: How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), Confessions of a Fertility Expert (1999), Pretending to Die (2001), Live Coverage (2003), Holocaust Dream (with photographs by Daniel Ehrenworth, 2005), Ontological Necessities (2006) and Traumatology (2009). Her other books include the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009), and the critical study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009). She also edited the multilingual Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World (2009). Her works have been translated into Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Korean, Latvian, and Italian, and Ontological Necessities was shortlisted for the prestigious $50,000 Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.

When the Ceaucescu regime was toppled, Liliana Ursu was finally able to give readings abroad. The American poet Tess Gallagher heard her in Spain and was stunned. She spoke of "a woman's voice so carnivorous and tender… her poems yielded a humanly political veracity which did not accede to cynicism, but seemed to have witnessed with a clear gaze what had befallen her country, its people."

Miroslav Válek (1927 - 1991) was a Slovak poet, publicist and politician. He was also the Minister of Culture in the government of Slovak Socialistic Republic within the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (1871 - 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher.

Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Since 1985 Venclova has taught Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the New Culture of New Europe Prize, 2005. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius.