Neil Curry, a graduate of the University of Bristol, has lived for many years in the Lake District. His first translations were of plays by Euripides. Successfully performed on BBC TV and at the Edinburgh Festival, they were published by Cambridge University Press. Later, The Bending of the Bow, his re-telling of the closing books of The Odyssey was illustrated by the American artist Jim Dine. Among his poetry collections, published by the Enitharmon Press, are Ships in Bottles, a Poetry Book Society choice, Walking to Santiago, in which he recounted his five hundred mile walk along the medieval pilgrim route, The Road to the Gunpowder House, and his New and Selected Poems Other Rooms. As a literary critic he has published studies of Christopher Smart, Alexander Pope and George Herbert, and most recently Six Eighteenth-Century Poets.

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterised as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment. Moniza Alvi writes: 'I have been making versions of Supervielle's poems for several years, strongly drawn to his style of writing, while also finding coincidental parallels with my own life, such as his birth "elsewhere" on another continent. My aim has been to retain the spirit of the French poems, and as many of their implications as I can, while making a poem that has a life in English. I thought he was an enchanting, inspiring poet who deserved to be so much better known in this country.'