Malcolm Carson was born in Lincolnshire. He moved to Belfast with his family before returning to Lincolnshire, becoming an auctioneer and then a farm labourer. He studied English at Nottingham University, and then taught in colleges and universities. He now lives in Carlisle with his wife and three sons. Breccia, his first full-length collection, was published by Shoestring Press in 2007, and will be followed by Rangi Changi in 2010.

Matt Clegg received an Eric Gregory Award in 1997. Officer, Nobody Sonnets, and Edgelands are available from Longbarrow Press. A first full collection, The Power-line, is also forthcoming from Longbarrow Press. 

David Cooke won an Eric Gregory Award in 1977, and was widely published in the UK and Ireland throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. He has started writing again after a silence which lasted for 20 years. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agenda, Ciphers, Coffee House Poetry, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Reader, The SHOp, Stand, Staple. Recent reviews have been accepted by Acumen, Agenda, The North, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. A new collection, In the Distance, will be published later this year.

Very little is known of the life of the Sicilian flâneur  Bruno Corsi, and these Ploems - by which his reputation will surely be established once and for all - were discovered quite by chance in a railway carriage in 1976, the very railway carriage which had been used for many of the scenes in That Obscure Object of Desire, the last film of Luis Bunuel. It has been said that Corsi once met James Joyce and Ezra Pound, fleetingly, at Sylvia Beach's bookshop in Paris, but till receipts make no references to any purchases, and his faces did not appear in the famous group portrait of Beach's favourite literati and egregious hangers-on of the 1920s, which was recently re-published in the TLS.

Paul Evans moved from the West Midlands in 1980 to study philosophy at the University of Sheffield. A decade later he studied fine art at Sheffield Hallam University. After graduation he joined up with two business partners and founded Vertebrate Graphics, which rapidly grew into a successful graphic design studio with clients including Adidas UK and his alma mater the University of Sheffield. In 2005 he left Vertebrate Graphics to pursue an independent career in Fine Art, soon gaining national recognition by winning the 2007 Eyestorm Gallery Award for painting at the Exeter Contemporary Open. Paul has worked as an associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and as a freelance tutor for Museums Sheffield. He has twice received Arts Council funding, most recently for his web based project celebrating the life of Charles Darwin: www.origin09.org. He is currently the Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence at Cardiff University.

Barry Fantoni was born in the East End of London in 1940. His father was a painter, the son of an Italian immigrant from Tuscany, who made ice cream. His gifted mother was a close relative of Samuel Gompers, the cigar worker who created the American trade union movement. Le Flaneur studied art at Camberwell in the 1950s. He began playing jazz and writing seriously at the same time. His first published novel was Mike Dime. It was followed by Stickman. During the 1980s he published five books on Chinese Horoscopes. He also feels that he could have spent that particular decade more fruitfully. Barry Fantoni writes plays and poetry as well as contributing to Private Eye, which he has done since 1963. Silvie Krin, E J Thribb and Fantin Le Flâneur are three of his many noms de plumes.  

Dorothea Grünzweig, co-translator of the poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, was born in Korntal in 1952, and studied German and English in Tübingen and Bangor, Wales. She did research work on Gerard Manley Hopkins in Oxford. After a period of employment at the Scottish University of Dundee, she worked as a teacher in Germany and Helsinki, Finland, to where she moved  permanently in 1989. Since 1998 she has been living and working as a free-lance writer and translator in the south of Finland. She has been awarded a large number of scholarships and prizes, including the Christian Wagner-Prize for Poetry in 2004. Her four poetry volumes are all published by Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen: Midsummer Cut (1997); From the Icefield (2000), Glass Voices Lasinäänet (2004) and The Clearing (2008). As co-translator of poetry into German: Poems from Finland (Urs Engeler, 2001); The Darling Child of Speech:  The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Edition Rugerup, 2009).

Rob Hindle was a winner of the Templar Poetry Competition in 2006 with 'Some Histories of the Sheffield Flood'.  His first collection is Neurosurgery in Iraq (Templar, 2008).  A second pamphlet, The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman, was published by Longbarrow Press in 2009.

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet who was forced to leave his home in Tashkent in 1992 because of his writing. He moved to London and joined the BBC, where he is now Head of the Central Asian Service. His books have been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish and other languages - but his work is still banned in Uzbekistan. His novel The Railway was translated into English in 2006 and praised as 'a work of rare beauty'. He has translated English and Russian classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian. He has just been appointed the BBC World Service writer in residence.

Hilary Kassman is the founder of Black Sandal and creator and editor of ORIEL in which these translations of Bachmann first appeared.

Tom Lowenstein's recent publications include: Conversation with Murasaki (Shearsman Books, 2009) and Ultimate Americans (University of Alaska Press, 2009). He is currently working on a long prose poem from which the piece published here has been extracted.

Mark Roper's collections include The Hen Ark (Peterloo/Salmon 1990), which won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection; Catching The Light (Peterloo/Lagan 1997); a chapbook, The Home Fire (Abbey Press 1998), and Whereabouts (Peterloo/Abbey Press 2005). He was editor of Poetry Ireland in 1999. Even So: New & Selected Poems was published by  Dedalus Press in Autumn 2008.

Paul Rossiter was born in Cornwall and has lived in Tokyo since 1981. He has published three books of poetry with small presses in Japan: In Daylight (Printed Matter, 1995), Monumenta Nipponica (Saru, 1995), and The Painting Stick (Pine Wave, 2005).

Robert Saxton is the author of three published poetry collections: The Promise Clinic (Enitharmon); and Manganese and Local Honey (both Carcanet/OxfordPoets). Hesiod's Calendar, a version of Hesiod's Theogony and Works & Days in eighty sonnets, will appear from Carcanet/Oxford in August 2010. He lives in North London, and is the editorial director of an illustrated book publishing company. His poetry website can be found at www.robertsaxton.co.uk

Rosemary Shepperd is currently studying for an MPhil (Poetry) at Glamorgan University. Her poems have appeared/are due to appear in Rialto, Poetry Ireland Review, The shoP, Poetry Wales, Interpreter's House, Smiths Knoll and Magma. She was one of six finalists in the 2008 MMU Poetry Prize, and last year won the Ted Walters/Liverpool University Poetry Prize.