Lynette Roberts was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh stock in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995. She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears. She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych Rhys, and came to know some of the prominent writers and artists of her day. T.S. Eliot was her publisher and advocate. Roberts helped Robert Graves with his work on The White Goddess, and Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding. She was a friend of Wyndham Lewis (who painted her), Edith Sitwell (to whom she dedicated Gods with Stainless Ears) and Alun Lewis (for whom she wrote Poem from Llanybri), and published in a variety of magazines in Britain and America.
Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries II, edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first collection, The Canals of Mars, appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet, McGuinness has translated For Anatoles Tomb by Stephane Mallarme from the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Annes College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to French culture. His second Carcanet collection, Jilted City, was published in 2010. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. His academic books include Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford UP, 2000), Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siecle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the Penguin Classics edition of Against Nature by J-K Huysmans and T.E. Hulmes Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la Poesie symboliste et decadente is published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2001).
Charles Mundye is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield Hallam University. His interests include literary modernism, poetry and poetics and Welsh writing in English. He edited Keidrych Rhys, The Van Pool: Collected Poems and Robert Graves: War Poems and has written on Pound, Lynette Roberts, Laura Riding and Robert Graves. Charles is a member of the editorial board of Gravesiana, a journal devoted to Robert Graves and his contemporaries. He is currently President of the Robert Graves Society, and a Fellow of the English Association.