Born in Northumberland in 1900, Basil Bunting moved to Paris in the 1920s and later followed Pound to Italy. He lived thereafter in Berlin, Tenerife, America, Persia - working as a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Tehran. In 1954 he returned to Northumberland, and worked for several years as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle until his retirement in 1966. First recognized as a major modernist poet by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Bunting remains deeply influential among British and American poets to this day. He died in 1985.
Don Share is the former editor of Poetry magazine. His books include Wishbone (Black Sparrow), Union (Eyewear), and Bunting's Persia (Flood Editions). His translations of Miguel Hernandez, awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclan, were published in a revised and expanded edition by New York Review Books, and also appear in an edition from Bloodaxe Books.