Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Communist Bulgaria and emigrated to New Zealand with her family as a teenager in the early 1990s. She graduated from Sofia’s French College and two New Zealand universities, and in 2005 she moved to Scotland. Kapka is the author of the childhood memoir Street Without a Name (Portobello 2008) and the poetry collections Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost (Bloodaxe). She was twice the recipient of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year award in New Zealand for travel journalism, and has penned the odd travel guide. Her novel Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2011) is set in South America, and her new travel memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello, 2011) is about the Argentine tango as a way of life. She lives between Edinburgh and the Highlands, teaches at Strathclyde University, and writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Scottish Review of Books, and Vogue.

Julian Colton, a member of Scottish PEN, lives in Selkirk. He has had three collections of poetry published including Everyman Street (Smokestack Publishing, 2009). In 2008 he was CREATE Writer-in-residence for Dumfries and Galloway. He continues to teach poetry and creative writing in schools, most recently as part of the Natural Identity project for the Tolbooth Gallery in Stirling. He co-edits The Eildon Tree the creative writing magazine for the Borders and Beyond.

Kusay Hussein is from Baghdad, Iraq, and graduated as a Civil Engineer in 1985. On military service he refused rank and served in two Gulf wars. During the 1980s, his work was published in a variety of Iraqi magazines, but he gave up writing rather than be a horn of the dictatorial regime. He escaped to the UK in 2006 because of the bad security situation and currently lives in Scotland. One of his stories was read at the Scottish Parliament in 2008. He has been published in America and elsewhere. His work in English is in collaboration with Sue Reid Sexton.
Sue Reid Sexton, a Scottish PEN member is the facilitator for Swapping Stories, the creative writing class for the Scotstoun Framework for Dialogue group, whose stories she worked on with the interpreters and submitted to the magazine. Sue Reid Sexton lives and works in Glasgow. She worked as a counsellor specialising in trauma for over a decade and spent another decade working with homelessness. She has been published in a variety of forms, and her first novel, Mavis's Shoe was published by Waverley earlier this year. She has been working with Kusay Hussein on his stories in English for the past two years.

Helena Nelson is the editor/originator of HappenStance Press, which specialises in poetry pamphlets. Her most recent poetry collection is Plot and Counter-Plot, Shoestring Press, 2010.

Tessa Ransford (www.wisdomfield.com) is an established poet, translator, literary editor and cultural activist on many fronts over the last forty years, having also worked as founder and director of the Scottish Poetry Library. Tessa initiated the annual Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for publishers of pamphlet poetry in Scotland, now in its twelfth year, with the attendant fairs and website: www.scottish-pamphlet-poetry.com. She has had Royal Literary Fund fellowships in recent years at the Centre for Human Ecology and Queen Margaret University. Tessa's Not Just Moonshine, New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 by Luath Press, Edinburgh and two further books are due in 2012. One of them is poems and translations inspired by the Five Pillars of Islam with Iyad Hayatleh entitled A rug of a thousand colours.

Adnan Al-Sayegh was born in al-Kufa, Iraq in 1955. In the 1980s he was conscripted in the Iran-Iraq war and in 1993 his uncompromising criticism of oppression and injustice led to exile in Jordan and the Lebanon. In 1996 he published Uruk's Anthem - a book-length poem, one of the longest in Arabic literature - in which he articulated deep despair at the Iraqi experience. On its publication he was sentenced to death in Iraq and took refuge in Sweden. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London.

Ten collections of his poetry in Arabic, among them Formations, Uruk's Anthem and Carrying his Exile under his Arm have been published and a further one is in press. He has said that in poetry he 'found a motherland, a refuge, a friend and a journey-companion' as well as a form of resistance.

Adnan has received several international awards, including the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005).

This year he read at the StAnza poetry festival alongside his English translator, Stephen Watts. We are most grateful to him and to Stephen for permission to publish the poems on-line.

The poems which follow are all taken from Pages From The Biography Of An Exile translated by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo and published in Long Poem Magazine Issue 5, 2010/2011. We also include a poem from his recent pamphlet in English, The Deleted Part (Exiled Writers Ink 2009) in the PENning Courage magazine along with biographies of his translators.
You can find more information about Adnan and more of his poems at http://www.exiledwriters.co.uk/writers.shtml#Sayegh

Jim Aitken lives and works in Edinburgh, where he has been an English teacher for many years. His last collection of poems, Around the Time of Michael', published by SCND, came out at the end of 2010. This year he has had 3 poems featured in A Rose Loupt oot, an anthology of songs and poems on the famous UCS work-in of 40 years ago. He has also had a play performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. Jim has been a member of Scottish PEN for a number of years.

Rizwan Akhtar divides his time between Aberdeen and Essex. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Essex. His poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry NZ, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text, decanto, Poesia, PAK, Orbis, The Other Poetry, South Asian Review, tinfoildresses, and Poetry Forward Press, UK.

Kusay Hussain is from Baghdad, Iraq, and graduated as a Civil Engineer in 1985. On military service he refused rank and served in two Gulf wars. During the 1980s, his work was published in a variety of Iraqi magazines, but he gave up writing rather than be a horn of the dictatorial regime. He escaped to the UK in 2006 because of the bad security situation and currently lives in Scotland. One of his stories was read at the Scottish Parliament in 2008. He has been published in America and elsewhere. His work in English is in collaboration with Sue Reid Sexton.

Mary McCabe has published short stories and poems and feature articles in
Scots, English and Gaelic. Longer work includes a novel, Everwinding Times,
and an illustrated book on culture Streets Schemes and Stages. In
German translation she has published a children's book Die zauberhafte
Reise, and her radio plays have gone out in Germany and Switzerland.

Through the Scottish Book Trust Writers in Schools scheme she gives talks
and readings. She is a member of Scottish PEN.