Born in 1936, Otto Orban saw his father taken off to prison in 1944, and was sent to an institute a year later, where he made his name as a child-prodigy poet. By the 1970s he had changed from the 'wunderkid' to the 'enfant terrible' of Hungarian poetry. Having translated Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Orban was regarded for a while as Hungarian's own Beat poet, but he has in his long career also translated Chaucer, Auden, Dylan Thomsd snf Robert Lowell into Hungarian, and is an acknowledged master craftsman.

Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio in 1935. Her first collection American Primitive (1983) won a Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by books including Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990), New and Selected Poems (1992), White Pine (1994), West Wind (1997), Winter Hours (1999), The Leaf and the Cloud (2000), What Do We Know (2002), Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), Why I Wake Early (2004), Blue Iris (2004), New and Selected Poems: volume two (2005), and a CD recording, At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver (2005). Bloodaxe published her first UK selection, Wild Geese: Selected Poems, in 2004, followed by her later collections, Thirst (2007), Red Bird (2008), Evidence (2009) and Swan (2011). Mary Oliver is America's biggest selling contemporary poet. She holds the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair at Bennington College, Vermont, and divides her time between Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Florida.

Douglas Oliver has published several other books of petry. His Paladin selection of petry and prose, Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), includes his much-praised satire on Modern Britain, The Infant and the Pearl. Born in Hampshire of Scottish Stock, he has spent many years working in Europe and America, and now lives in Paris.

John Oldham was an English satirical poet and translator.