Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24th, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, finding jobs in such places as a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room and on a geological expedition. During this time Brodsky taught himself English and began writing poetry. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labour camp.Considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. Joseph Brodsky died on January 28th, 1996 of a heart attack, in his Brooklyn apartment.Daniel Weissbort was born in 1935. He read History at Cambridge and did postgraduate work in the politics of literature during the post-Stalin period. He has translated many modern Russian poets, including Nikolai Zabolotsky and Yunna Morits. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, as well as holding the position of Research Fellow in the English Department at King's College London.