Lionel Fogarty was born in 1958 at Barambah, now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland. Since the 1970s he has been active in many of the political struggles of the Aboriginal people, from the Land Rights movement, to setting up Aboriginal health and legal services, to the issue of black deaths in custody. His first collection of poetry, Kargun, was published in 1980, and he has gone on to publish eight further collections, as well as a children’s book, Booyooburra, a traditional Wakka Wakka story. Fogarty has also travelled widely in the United States and Europe, reading from his work and participating in conferences of Indigenous peoples. An unabashedly political poet, Fogarty’s poetry employs Aboriginal English in innovative ways, challenging readers to reconfigure cultural assumptions.

Avishek Rath is presently a PhD research scholar at the University of Calcutta. He is an employee of Sahitya Akademi. He has presented papers in several national/international seminars / conventions and participated in national / international translation workshops. A student of CENTIL, Jadavpur University, and SOLC, Rabindra Bharati University, he has some publications, mainly of translations, to his credit.