Aryeh Sivan’s poetry has been said to evoke a sense of shared public experience at the same time that it expresses provocation and protest. Sivan (né Bornstein) was born in Tel Aviv in 1929. He fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence as a member of the elite Palmach unit, then studied Hebrew language and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and worked as a high-school teacher until his retirement. He has published sixteen collections of poetry and a novel and is the recipient of several important awards, including the Brenner Prize (1989), the Bialik Prize (1998) and the prestigious Israel Prize for Poetry (2010). His work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Carmi’s background was international; he absorbed French and English, as well as Hebrew literary traditions. He was born in New York City, in 1925, into a family that spoke only Hebrew at home. When he began composing poetry in his early years, he had the bilingual aptitude of one whose first language – his writing language – was Hebrew, and his second the English of city streets. Carmi was graduated from Yeshiva University and began working toward an MA at Columbia University before leaving for Paris in 1946, where many of the major surrealists, including Breton and Eluard, lived and wrote.

Tal Nitzán is an award-winning poet, editor and a major Israeli translator of Hispanic literature. Born in Jaffa, Israel, of Argentine descent, she has lived in Buenos Aires, Bogota and New York, and now lives in Tel Aviv. Nitzán has translated over 70 books into Hebrew, mainly from Spanish, including two anthologies of Latin American poetry, and adapted a Hebrew version of Don Quixote for young people (2006). Her translations include poetry works by Cervantes, Machado, García Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Borges, Vallejo, Pizarnik and Pavese, and prose by García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Onetti, Delibes, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, John Steinbeck and many others. She has won numerous awards for this work, among them the Ministry of Culture’s Translation Prize (1995, 2005) and, in 2004, an honorary medal from Chile’s president, for her translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.