Admiel Kosman was born in Haifa to an observant Orthodox Jewish family. His mother came to Israel from Iraq: his father from a German Jewish family which lived in France. Kosman was educated in schools in what is known as the national religious sector. In the army, he served in an artillery unit in a program enabling observant youth to continue religious studies concurrently, in his case at the Western Wall Yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem. After the army, Kosman studied graphic design and ceramics at the Bezalel art college, dropping out (though not from plastic arts, in which he continues to work) in favour of further religious studies. He then turned to the academic world, culminating in an Honours PhD in Talmud, the interpretation of Jewish law, ethics, customs, and history, from Bar Ilan University, where he established and directed the Faculty of Hermeneutics and taught until 2003. Located in Berlin since, Kosman is a tenured professor of Religious and Jewish Studies at Potsdam University, and academic director of the Abraham Geiger Reform Rabbinical Seminary, the first Reform rabbinical college in Germany to resume operations after the Holocaust.

The concise epithet ‘wordman’ – an invented compound word, in Hebrew, adamila – is chiselled on his gravestone and could not be more precise. Even The New York Times took note of the 1995 death of the poet (and playwright and filmmaker) David Avidan, whose liberating influence on the form and content of contemporary Israeli poetry is legend. Avidan, who stretched the Hebrew language with word-play, and glanced toward its future as well as tweaking its past, was born in Tel Aviv, a contemporary of Nathan Zach and Yehuda Amichai. His first poems appeared in the local organ of the Communist Party, of which he was a member as a youth. His first book (of about two dozen) was published when he was only 20, and when he was still in his early 30s a volume of his work was published in English translation – Megaovertones. The latter is available now from ‘antique’ booksellers who market via Internet, a mix of past and future he would probably have enjoyed. In Hebrew, Avidan’s collected works were reissued in a four -volume edition last year.

Gilad Meiri was born in Jerusalem to a father of Syrian Jewish descent and a mother from Lvov/Lemberg in what was once Poland (and is now the Ukraine). His mother, hidden as an infant by a Christian woman, was one of only 80 children from the city to survive the Holocaust. Gilad Meiri spent his childhood in Jerusalem with long stays in Minneapolis and San Francisco in the USA due to his father’s work. After army service, he received his BA and MA (with a thesis on Yona Wallach) in Hebrew literature from Hebrew University, and his PhD (on the poetry of David Avidan) from Tel Aviv University. The author of two books of poetry, one of short fiction, and editor of a new anthology of soccer poetry in Hebrew, Meiri is the director of the Poetry Place in Jerusalem, and a member of the Ketovet group that serves as the national editor for the Israeli pages of PIW. He is married and the father of three children; his entire extended family features large in his poetry, as does the earthly city of Jerusalem.