Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was born in the town of Kolhapur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra and attended the JJ School of Art in Bombay, the city in which he was to pursue a long and successful career as an art director in advertising. Jejuri, published by a small press in 1976, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Kolatkar was also the author of four volumes of poetry in Marathi. Two long-awaited further collections in English, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra, appeared shortly before his death.

Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India's Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician.