Kurt Gänzl has been an opera singer, wandering minstrel, theatrical agent, West End casting director, broadcaster, theatre and opera critic, and sometime amateur harness-racehorse driver. He launched his writing career in in 1986 with an award-winning two-volume history of The British Musical Theatre. He has also worked with his brother, John Gallas, on translations of Baudelaire, Verhaeren, Materlinck, Yourcenar, Anna de Noailles, Nerval, Florian et al. Petrus Borel (26 June 1809 - 14 July 1859) was a French writer of the Romantic movement. Born Joseph-Pierre Borel d'Hauterive at Lyon, the 12th of 14 children of an ironmonger, he studied architecture in Paris but abandoned it for literature. Nicknamed le Lycanthrope ("wolfman") and the center of the circle of Bohemians in Paris, he was noted for extravagant and eccentric writing, foreshadowing Surrealism. He was not commercially successful though, and eventually was found a minor civil service post by his friends, including Théophile Gautier. He died at Mostaganem in Algeria. John Gallas was born in New Zealand in 1950. He came to England in the 1970s to study Old Icelandic at Oxford and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool, Upholland, Little Ness, Rothwell, Bursa, Leicester, Diyarbakir, Coalville, and Markfield, as a bottlewasher, archaeologist, and teacher. He is the editor of two books of translations-- 52 Euros and The Song Atlas--and ten previous collections of his own poetry, all published by Carcanet. His latest collection The Extasie was published in 2021. He is a Fellow of the English Association and was 2016 Orkney St Magnus Festival poet.
