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Safuran Ara was born in Comilla, Bangladesh and came to the UK in 1975 where she presently lives in Sheffield. She is chairperson of the Bengali Women’s Support Group for whom she has co-edited several anthologies, including Kavitanjali, a collection of Bengali women’s poetry, and two bilingual oral history books, Just For Five Years and Home To Home. Her own poetry is published in various anthologies, and a bilingual collection Songs In Exile, with translations by Debjani Chatterjee, was published in 1999. She works for Sheffield Libraries as Senior Information Officer.

Ranjana Ash is a freelance writer, living in London, who concerns
herself with translation from South Asian languages. She is currently
assembling a bibliography of women’s fiction in twenty-two languages of India. She herself translates from Bengali.

Shamim Azad is a bilingual Bengali English poet. She was born in
Bangladesh and came to London in 1990. She has published seven books of fiction, essays and poetry in the Bengali diaspora and also regularly publishes articles as a freelance journalist and overseas columnist in Bengali journals of London and Dhaka. Her poems appear in the Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry (edited by Debjani Chatterjee). She teaches in Tower Hamlets and has worked as a writer in residence in schools and community projects, editing two volumes Telling Tales and Voyages, and most recently on a Year Of The Artist Project as Poet In Residence at the Summer University (2000) in Tower Hamlets. She has written two bilingual plays for the Half Moon Theatre.

Nazand Begikhani was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1963. She did a first degree in English language and literature and left her homeland under difficult circumstances in 1987 to settle in Europe. She lived in Paris where she completed an MA and PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She has lived in the UK since 1997 and among other projects is at present researching media representations of refugees.

Ravil Bukharaev, writer, radio journalist and scholar in the field of cultural, social and political history of the Islamic peoples of the former USSR, was born in Kazan in 1951. He graduated in mathematics from Kazan University and studied computer science at Moscow State University. Bukharaev is the author of a dozen books of poetry, in Kazan Tartar, Russian, English and Hungarian. In 1996 he was nominated for  the Russian Booker Prize for the best Russian novel of the year. His recent books in English are: The Model of Tatarstan under President Mintimer Shaimiev, 1999; Historical Anthology of Kazan Tatar Verse (with David J Matthews), 2000; Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons, 2000. Bukharayev has lived in London since 1992. The poems from Quest: Misty Sonnets were written in English.

María Eugenia Bravo Calderara was a university teacher at the time of the coup in Chile in 1973. With many others she was taken to the National Stadium in Santiago where she was imprisoned and tortured. Her first poems from prison were kept buried in their garden by her mother until they could later be sent to Switzerland in a diplomatic bag. She herself has lived in London since the mid-1970s. Love and exile and the memory of prison are vital concerns in her poetry, some of which has been published in the bilingual volume Prayer in the National Stadium (Katabasis, London, 1992) with English translations by Dinah Livingstone and Cicely Herbert. She often gives poetry readings in England and works in London for the Refugee Council.

Amarjit Chandan was born in Nairobi in 1946 but grew up in India
where he graduated from Panjab University. He joined the Naxalite
movement and spent two years in prison in solitary confinement. He has published eight collections of poems in Punjabi, most recently Chhanna (1998) and Gurhti (2000), both published by Navyug, and two books of essays including a book of dialogues with Sohan Qadri. He has edited a number of anthologies of world poetry, including two collections of British Punjabi writings, Away From Oneself and Lost Between Two Shores, and has translated a wide range of poets into Punjabi, including Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet and Cardenal. He migrated to England in 1980 and has lived in London since then. In 1993 The Many Press published a chapbook of his poetry in English translation together with a prose
statement in which he says “My language is my real home. My last
retreat”. Amarjit Chandan gives frequent readings of his poetry
throughout Europe, India, Pakistan and North America.

Rehana Choudary is from Bangladesh and lives in Rotherham. She is a lecturer at Sheffield College and Secretary of Bengali Women’s Support Group for whom she has co-edited two bilingual anthologies: Sweet and Sour and The Snake Prince.

Mevlut Ceylan was born in 1958 in Ankara and since 1979 has been living in self-imposed exile in London. He has published three collections of his own poetry in Turkish and has translated many Turkish poets into English, publishing a series of chapbooks from Core Publications of the work of Cahit Zarifog˘lu, Arif Ay, Nuri Pakdil, Erdem Bayazit and Asaf Halet Celebi among others and editing two anthologies of Turkish poetry in translation. He founded Core: an international poetry magazine with the poet Feyyaz Fergar in London. He has also translated into Turkish selections from James Joyce’s Chamber Music, RD Laing’s Conversations with Children and also poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Kobi Nazrul Islam, among many others, in Turkish literary journals.

Poems from Hans Werner Cohn’s Mit allen fünf Sinnen, translated by his brother F G Cohn, appeared in MPT 9; the whole collection was subsequently published by the Menard Press (With All Five Senses, 1999). Poems from an earlier collection appeared in MPT’s German and French Poetry issue (No 16). The poems here were written between 1945 and the early sixties, in Oxford and London. The original of ‘Spring the Impostor’ appeared in 1950 (Fortune Press, London); ‘All trees are alike’ is previously unpublished; the other poems were published in the original by Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh (Gedichte, 1964).

Adam Czerniawski was born in 1934 in Warsaw and left Poland in 1941, spending much of his childhood in the Middle East before coming to England in 1947 where he has lived ever since. He studied literature and philosophy, has subsequently taught and practised both in a rich and complex bilingual and bicultural life, and has served as Assistant Director of The British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. He has published poems and a memoir (Scenes from a disturbed childhood) but he is chiefly known in Britain as the translator of modern Polish poets such as Tadeusz Róz.ewicz and Wislawa Szymborska and for his anthology The Burning Forest (Bloodaxe Books, 1988). A bilingual edition of his own Selected Poems was published by Harwood Academic Press in 2000, with translations by Iain Higgins, and the poems printed here in MPT are from this publication.

A small selection of Jean de Dadelsen’s work appeared in MPT 2 (First Series, 1966). He died young of brain cancer in 1957, having published very few poems. De Dadelsen spent a great deal of his life out of France working for many years with the French Service of the BBC. Camus was responsible for de Dadelsen’s first publication.

Amber Djemal was born in London in 1960. She was educated in
London schools and read English and European Literature at Essex
University. A community activist, she has been involved in the Women’s Peace Movement, Women Against Violence Against Women, and the Cypriot HIV and AIDS Network, and has worked in local government and the voluntary sector. She has published some of her work on gender and society and performed her poetry to mixed audiences and to Turkish-speaking communities. She writes in English.

Fatma Durmush was born in Larnaca, Cyprus in 1959. At the age of six she came to England with her family and went to school in London. At the age of fifteen after a short stay in Cyprus with her family she returned to London. She studied Humanities at the Open University for two years. Her work has been published in the Turkish language press and in the Big Issue and the Daily Express. Her collection of plays and short stories, I sit in the Light, was published in 2000. She won first prize for poetry in the FATAL Short Story and Poetry Competition for Turkish Speaking Women in 1998. She writes in English.

Ketaki Kushari Dyson was educated in Calcutta and Oxford and
publishes in both Bengali and English. She is an award-winning poet,
novelist, playwright, critic and translator. Her Selected Poems of
Rabindranath Tagore (Bloodaxe, 1991) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; she is now translating the poetry of Buddhadeva Bose. She was interviewed by Adam Czerniawski for MPT 5.

Ahmad Ebrahimi was born in Iran in 1954 and has been living in
London, first as a refugee and subsequently as a British citizen, since
1982. His own poetry, in Persian and in English, has been published in many journals and anthologies and he has given readings and participated in conferences in London, Germany, Sweden, California and Swansea inter alia. A book of translations of the Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu is forthcoming, together with a number of collections of his own work. He has been actively involved with the Iranian Writers Association and the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile since 1990 and with the London-based group Exile Writers Ink (1999-2000) and has worked closely with groups such as Index and Article 19 on issues of censorship and human rights.

Adriana Díaz Enciso was born in 1964 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and has lived in London since March 1998. She has published three books of poetry: Sombra Abierta, Pronunciaciòn del deseo (de cara al mar), and Hacia la luz. Her novel El amor! was a finalist in the international competition La Sonrisa Vertical (Spain, 1997), and she is the author of another novel, La sed, and a book of short stories: Cuentos de fantasmas y otras mentiras. She writes lyrics for the Mexican rock band Santa Sabina and has also written poetry in English. She is currently working on her third novel.

Moris Farhi was born in Ankara, Turkey (1935). His novels include: The Last of Days (1983); Journey through the Wilderness (1989); Children of the Rainbow (1999). His poems have appeared in many British, US and international publications and in the anthology of 20th-Century Jewish poets, Voices within the Ark (Avon). For many years, he has been an active campaigner on behalf of persecuted writers through PEN and served as Chair of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee, 1997-2000.

Saqi Farooqi, born in North India in 1936, migrated to Bangladesh in 1947 and to Pakistan in 1950. He studied English Literature in England and settled in London. One of the leading Urdu poets of his generation, he also occasionally writes poems in English. The Listening Game, with translations by Frances W Pritchett and an introduction by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, was published by Lokamaya Press (London, 1987).

Erich Fried was born in 1921 and grew up in Vienna, managing to leave in 1938 only after his father had been killed by the Gestapo. He came to London from where he tried to help other victims of the Nazi régime. After the war he worked in the German Service of the BBC. A writer of the radical left, he became popular with German youth in the 1960s and frequently travelled to Germany to give readings : books of his political and love poetry were best sellers. He was always deeply supportive of fellow exiles in London, where, however, his stature as a writer has never been fully recognised: this despite the fact that three books of his poetry have been published in English translation, in addition to a volume of short stories. He was also an important translator, and his versions of Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and many of the plays of Shakespeare are still in print in German. 100 Poems without a Country and Love Poems, translated by Stuart Hood and published by John Calder, were both reprinted in 1999. Erich Fried died in 1988.

George Gömöri was born in Budapest in 1934 and came to England after the Hungarian revolution of 1956 in which he took part. He teaches Polish and Hungarian literature at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. His critical works include Polish and Hungarian Poetry 1945 to 1956 (Oxford, 1966) and the essay collection Magnetic Poles (London, 2000). Six books of his own Hungarian poetry have been published, mostly outside Hungary, and a volume in English translation, My Manifold City (Alba Press, Cambridge, 1996). With Clive Wilmer he has translated a number of major Hungarian poets into English, including Miklós Radnóti and György Petri. With George Szirtes he co-edited The Colonnade of Teeth (Bloodaxe Books, 1996), a wide ranging anthology of twentieth-century Hungarian poetry, and his own poetry, both in Hungarian and in translation, is included in a number of anthologies.

Lydia Grigorieva has published eight books. Her poems have been
translated into many languages. She has written a number of films for
Russian TV: Tsvetaeva in London, Gumilev in London, Skriabin in London and others, and has prepared feature programmes for the BBC World Service and for pan-Russian radio. She was born in Ukraine and has lived in London for the last eight years.

Ayshe Gul was born in Nicosia, Cyprus and came to England at the age of seven. She studied English and American Literature and History at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She trained as a teacher and taught for a year in Cyprus. She then held senior positions in local authorities and race equality councils promoting equality of opportunity for women and ethnic minority communities. She currently manages a community training project. She began writing poetry at the age of sixteen but has published her work only recently. In 1996 she won first prize in the FATAL Poetry and Short Story Competition for Turkish Speaking Women. She writes in English.

Buland al-Haidari (1926-96) was born in Baghdad, Iraq. Self-educated, from 1963 to 1976 he lived in Lebanon, where he worked as a schoolteacher and journalist. In 1980 he moved to London and founded and edited the short-lived London-based magazine Arab Art! He published many collections of poetry in his lifetime, and a collection of essays on art and literature. He is included in most anthologies of modern Arab poetry in translation, and two volumes of English translations of his work have appeared: Songs of the Tired Guard (London, 1977) and Dialogue in Three
Dimensions (London, 1982). Badr Shakr al-Sayyab called him one of the founders of modern Arab poetry.

Choman Hardi was born in Sulaymania, Southern Kurdistan in 1974 and grew up there. She attended secondary school in Saqqez in Iran. In 1992 she was in Istanbul before coming to England in 1993 and completing her schooling in London. She has published two collections of poetry in Kurdish: Return with No Memory (Denmark, 1996) and Light of the Shadows (Sweden, 1998). She is also an artist and has contributed to a number of joint exhibitions in Britain and across Europe. She studied philosophy and psychology at Queen’s College, Oxford and has an MA in philosophy from University College London. Currently she is working as an interpreter with asylum seekers in Croydon. Her father Ahmad
Hardi, who also lives in London, is a very well-known and much
respected Kurdish poet.

Writer, poet, philosopher Victor (Gyozo) Hatar, was born in 1914 in Eastern Hungary. In 1938 he graduated in architecture. For his early writings he was tried for ‘high treason’. Sentenced to death, he escaped the firing squad on appeal but spent twelve years in penal servitude. In 1944 he took part in an anti-fascist uprising of convicts. His tetralogy Heliáne appeared in 1947, followed by Liturgikon in 1948, but he was imprisoned by the new Stalinist régime in Hungary and his books put on the index. Prior to fleeing the country after the 1956 revolution, Hatar worked as a translator (Sterne, Rabelais, German, Spanish and Russian classics in Hungarian). Since 1957 he has lived in London, working as a broadcaster from 1957-75; from 1962 he was the theatre critic for the BBC World Service. He has published 20 novels, 40 plays and a dozen philosophical works and essays, including Cosmic Unconcern, an outline of his life’s philosophy (1980). Hatar has received many honours and awards, including the Kossuth Prize (1990). Since 1993 he has been an
honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Although he has spent the better part of his life in the Anglo-Saxon
world, he sticks stubbornly to his mother tongue and professes himself a Hungarian writer. He is regarded as the most eminent Hungarian writer living outside Hungary.

Rashida Islam is a Bangladeshi poet from Doncaster. She co-edited the bilingual anthology, Barbed Lines, with Debjani Chatterjee. BWSG Book Project published her bilingual children’s book, Grandma’s Treasure Trove, in 2000. ‘Eternal Silence’ is an unpublished poem.

Ivan Jelinek is a Czech poet, writer and broadcaster. He worked for many years in the Czech section of the BBC External Services. He tells his story in his contribution to the Festschrift for Jonathan Griffin, Sage Eye, published by Menard Press/King’s College London in 1992.

Diego de Jesús was born in Monterrey in 1965 and has been living in London since 1989. He teaches language and translation at University College London and King’s College London. A bilingual selection of his poems, with English translations, was published by Libros De La Mancuspia in 1998. He frequently gives readings of his own poetry and has put together other reading programmes (for instance of poetry for the Mexican Day Of The Dead).

Ziba Karbaasi is one of the younger generation of contemporary Persian poets. She was born in Tabriz in 1973 and has been living in London since the late 1980s. Three of her books have been published in Farsi, including Kajhdom Dar Baalesh (A Scorpion under the Pillow), 1997, which has an introduction by Esmail Khoi; a fourth, Darya Chargh Meeshavad (The Sea is Drowning), is due in 2001.

Esmail Khoi is one of the major contemporary Iranian poets. Born in 1938 in Mashad, North-East Iran, he was educated in Iran and England, first visiting the latter in 1963. As a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran he opposed the restrictions on freedom under the monarchy but found the pressures arising out of the Revolution of 1978-81 even less tolerable. In the early 1980s he was forced to spend almost two years in hiding before fleeing his homeland in 1983. He has lived in London ever since then during which time he has emerged as one of the most lucid and articulate lyric voices of the Iranian diaspora. He has published over thirty books in Farsi and three selections have appeared in English translation, including Edges of Poetry: Selected Poems (Blue
Logos Press, USA, 1995) and Outlandia: Songs of Exile (Nik Publishers, Vancouver, 1999). His work is characterised by a rare combination of lyricism and honesty. He gives frequent readings of his poems across the whole of Europe and North America. The poems were taken from Edges of Poetry, Selected Poems of Esmail Khoi, translated from the Persian by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael C Beard, (Blue Logos Press, Santa Monica, California, 1995).

Esther Kinsky was born in Cologne, Germany and lives in London. She is a writer and translator of poetry and prose, mainly from Polish. The poems here were translated from German.

Rui Knopfli was born in Mozambique and lived for many years in
England. He died in 1997.

Gurgenc Korkmazel was born in Paphos, Cyprus in 1969. He was
forced to move with his family to Lisi, Famagusta in 1974. He was
educated and lived in Cyprus and Turkey and now lives in England. He has published three volumes of poetry in Cyprus, Yarimlik (1992), . . . Ye! (1994) and Yolyutma (2000). His poetry has also been published in Turkish-language poetry magazines in Cyprus and Turkey.

Helder Macedo was born in Portuguese colonial Africa in 1935 and studied in Lisbon. He has lived in London since 1960 and has been Camoens Professor of Portuguese at King’s College London since 1982. He returned to Portugal for two brief sojourns after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974: as Director General of the Performing Arts in 1975 and as Secretary of State for Culture in 1979-80. His first book of poems was published in Lisbon in 1957. Four other volumes of poetry have appeared in Portugal and a selection of his verse, Viagem de Inverno e outros poemas, came out in Brazil in 2000. He is also a novelist and the author of numerous works of literary criticism and cultural history. His work has been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Rumanian and Spanish. He edited the Portuguese issue of MPT 13/14 First Series (1972).

Juan Antonio Masoliver was born in Barcelona in 1939 and has a degree in philosophy and letters from the University of Barcelona. He has lived outside Spain since 1963 and has been resident in England since the mid-1960s. At present he teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Westminster. Among his most recent books of poetry is Poesia reunida (Barcelona, 2000) which gathers together four previous selections. He has translated into Spanish fiction by Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, Robert Coover and Vladimir Nabokov, and prose from the Italian of Cesare Pavese. He edited The Origins of Desire, an anthology
of modern Spanish short stories (Serpent’s Tail, London, 1993), is the main literary critic for La Vanguardia and regularly publishes critical essays in other significant literary journals and periodicals in Spain and Mexico.

Amjad Nasser was born in 1955 in al-Turra, Jordan. From 1976 he worked as a journalist in television and newspapers, then for the cultural section of Al-Hadaf journal in Beirut. Later, in Cyprus he was cultural editor of Al-Ufq magazine, and since 1987 he has been cultural editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper in London. He has published seven volumes of poetry and one travel book. Three volumes of selected poetry have also been published: in Cairo in 1995; in the House of Poetry, Palestine; and in 1998, a selection in French, translated by Adnan Mohsen.

Nazrul Islam Naz was born in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh and
came to London at the age of twelve following the 1971 war of
independence. He has been writing poetry in both Bengali and English for a number of years and has published in journals in London, New York and Bangladesh. He also translates Bengali poetry into English, most recently a translation of the New York-based Bangladeshi poet Hassan Al Abdullah (Breath of Bengal, Cross-Cultural Communications, NY 2000). He is also engaged in research into the poetics of translation and is editor of the London-based literary monthly Shikor and London contributor for the New York journal Shabdagucha.

Kubra Ocal was born in Igdir, Eastern Turkey in 1958. She worked in government departments in Turkey from 1978 to 1989, when she came to the UK. Since 1994 she has been working as a translator/interpreter in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham Health Authorities. She won second prize in the FATAL Short Story and Poetry Competition for Turkish Speaking Women in 1998. Her writing reflects the influence of Eastern cultures.

Enrico Palandri was born in Venice in 1956 and since 1980 has lived in London where he is Writer In Residence in the Italian Department at University College. He is primarily a novelist, having published six books of fiction in Italy, two of which have been translated into English: Ages Apart (Harvill, 1987) and The Way Back (Serpent’s Tail, 1993). An early novel, Boccalone, was reprinted in 1997 and his most recent fiction Angela prende il volo (Feltrinelli, 2000) was awarded both the Dessi and Mastronardi prizes last year. He divides his professional life between England and Italy, writing extensively for newspapers, and he is the author of many critical articles and essays on contemporary fiction,
cinema and current affairs.

Igor Pomeranzev was born in Saratov in 1948. Most of his “Soviet” life was spent in Ukraine. He studied at Czernovits University, emigrating in 1978, first to Germany, then to Great Britain where he worked for the BBC Russian Service. Presently he is working for Radio Free Europe/ Liberty (Prague). Since 1987 he has published widely in Russia, both poetry and prose. In English his stories were regularly broadcast by BBC Radio3 and published in Stand, Partisan Review, Literary Review and other journals. All the poems printed here come from Pochemu Strekozy? (Why the Dragon-flies?, 1999).

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov, who is also well known as an artist, was born in Moscow in 1940. He is one of the founders of the so-called Moscow Conceptualist school. He has published prolifically (since 1997, Wiener Slavistische Almanach has been publishing his complete works) and has also written a novel and several plays, as well as essays and articles. He took part in the Poetry International in London in 2000. A bi-lingual collection of his poetry, Texts of Our Life, edited and introduced by Valentina Polukhina, was published by Essays in Poetics, Keele University in 1995. Prigov divides his time between Moscow and London.

Oleg Prokofiev, poet, sculptor and painter, was born in Paris into the family of the composer Sergei Prokofiev. At the age of seven he moved to Moscow with his parents. He studied at the Moscow School of Art. Later he wrote a thesis on Indian and South-East Asian art and published two books. In 1971 he moved to England and was awarded a Gregory Fellowship in painting from the Fine Arts Department of Leeds University. In 1974 he settled in London and became a full-time artist, exhibiting in France, Germany and the United States. Prokofiev died in London in 1998.

Mohan Rana was born in Delhi in 1964. He graduated in Humanities from Delhi University and has worked as a freelance journalist and writer for Hindi newspapers and magazines in India. He has published two poetry collections, Jagah (1994) and Jaise Janam Koii Darwaza (1997), and edited a small anthology of poetry by young poets, Idhar Ki Kavita (1991). His poems are regularly published in Hindi papers and magazines and his new collection of poems, Subah ki Dak, will be published this year in India. He lives in Bath.

Roberto Rivera-Reyes was born in 1953 in Chile and fled that country after the military coup that overthrew Allende in 1973. He has lived in London since 1974 where he now runs the School of Latin American Spanish. A bilingual edition, Dawn Hunter and Other Poems, with English translations by Dinah Livingstone and others was published by Latin American Writers Publications (London) in 1989, and he edited An Anthology of Latin American Poets in London, published bilingually in 1988 with work by ten poets, mainly from Chile and Mexico.

WG Sebald was born in Germany in 1944, and studied German literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1966 he became an assistant lecturer in the University of Manchester, and settled in England in 1970. He is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has produced three novels, all unclassifiable, published in English as The Emigrants (1966), The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Vertigo (1990). Sebald’s new book, Austerlitz, is forthcoming from Penguin in September 2001. A section of Sebald‘s poem After Nature appeared in MPT 16.

Pedro Serrano, born in Montreal, 1957, studied Spanish Literature at theUniversity of Mexico and English Literature at the University of London. He is a poet, critic and translator. He has published three books of poems, El miedo (Fear, Mexico, 1986), Ignorancia (Ignorance, Mexico, 1994) and Tres poemas (Three poems, Caracas, 2000). La generación del cordero. Antología de la poesía actual en las Islas Británicas, co-edited and translated by him and Carlos López Beltrán, was published by Trilce (2000). He is working on a translation of Shakespeare’s King John.

Ifigenia Simonovic, born in Slovenia, lives in London. She is a poet and playwright, and also a potter who shows her work in Covent Garden market. Several books of her poems have been published in Slovenia. Other translations of her work by Anthony Rudolf appeared in MPT 8.

Olga Tabachnikova was born in Ukraine, in 1967. She graduated in mathematics in 1990, came to England a year later, and completed a doctorate in algebra at the University of Bath in 1995. She is currently researching Franco-Russian literature and philosophy, chiefly Russian irrationalism, its literary roots and reception in the West. She teaches mathematics part-time and regularly translates articles for the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Veno Taufer, poet, playwright, essayist and translator, was born in 1933 in Slovenia. He was literary editor of the magazine Revija 57 (banned in 1959) and manager of the experimental theatre group Oder 57. Taufer has been active in the Slovene Writers’ Association and in the annual Vilenica literary festival of Central European writers. He has published many volumes of poetry and over 40 collections of translations, mainly from English, French, Croatian and Macedonian. Taufer lived in London for a number of years, working for the BBC World Service. He and Michael Scammell co-edited MPT 8 (First Series), dedicated to Slovene poetry.

Henri Thomas was born in 1912 into a peasant family in the Vosges. After the war he lived for ten years in London where he was employed by the French Section of the BBC. He later spent two years teaching at Brandeis University in the United States. He published several novels, volumes of poetry and other books with Gallimard, as well as translations from German, Russian and English.

Mazhar Tirmazi was born in 1950 in Chichawatani, West Punjab, and in 1975 came to London where he still lives. His collected poems, Kaya Kagad, were published by Uddam Publishers in Lahore in 1998; two earlier books appeared in 1982 and 1994 and a further collection will be published in 2001. He has been closely involved in journalism, first with the Urdu-English newspaper Awaz International (a bilingual daily published in London) and more recently with Akhbar Wattan (an Urdu daily also from London), and has written many essays and articles. He is particularly concerned with Punjabi language and literature and has both organised and attended conferences in Britain and Australia. His poetry features in courses of Punjabi poetry written outside the Punjab taught at Chandigarh University (as also does that of Amarjit Chandan) and one of his lyrics from 1975 remains very popular with both classical and bhangra audiences and performers. At present he is working on a play on the life of the Sufi poet Shah Hussain.

Shadab Vajdi was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1937 and has been living in London since 1971. She completed her PhD thesis on ‘The
Transformational Approach to the Noun Phrase in Persian’ in 1976 and currently teaches Persian language and literature at the School Of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. She has
published six volumes of poetry in Farsi and in 1990 Forest Books
published a selection of her poems, Closed Circuit, translated by Lotfali Khonji. She has also translated two books into Persian, Inside the Third World by Paul Harrison and Return to China by Judy Shapiro and Liang Heng, and her own poetry has been translated into Swedish and German.

Usha Verma is an Indian poet and short story writer based in York. She is a founder-member of Bharatiya Bhasha Sammelan.

Alexei Vernitski lived in Russia until the age of twenty-five, when he moved to Britain, completed a doctorate in algebra and became a
university lecturer. He remains deeply rooted in Russian culture.
Vernitski created one of the first Internet sites dedicated to contemporary Russian poetry and fiction. Works first published there have won several prizes in Russian on-line literary contests. He is now hosting a web site in Russian dedicated to Zen Buddhism.

Vladimir Vishniak was born in Moscow in 1921. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 and for a while was a Russian newscaster and translator in the BBC. For thirteen years he taught Russian Language and Poetry at Manchester University, retiring in 1988. Besides his many translations he has also written on the subject.

Yang Lian, the son of a diplomat, was born in Switzerland and grew up in Beijing. His work was banned in China in 1983, and he has lived in exile since 1989, finally settling in London. He has five books in English translation, the most recent of which is Where the Sea Stands Still (Bloodaxe, 1999). The translation of a major long poem is due from Green Integer Books in Los Angeles in 2001.