Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia in 1893. By the age of 15 he had moved to Moscow and joined the Bolshevik faction. Arrested in 1908, Mayakovsky spend his 11-month prison sentence reading Shakespeare, Byron and Tolstoy. The violence and turbulence of Mayakovsky’s life found its parallel in the Russian Revolution. During these revolutionary years, Mayakovsky produced what linguist and fellow futurist Roman Jakobson described as a poetry ‘qualitatively different’ to anything which had preceded it, not least because Mayakovsky’s verse was so concerned with eradicating any obstacles to the future. He died in 1930.

Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. His latest book of verse, Later Unearthed (Puncher and Wattmann, 2025), includes a number of translations from Russian, and also from Latin. Stone Postcard (John Leonard Press, 2014) was named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press, 2006), was shortlisted in the Innovation category of the 2008 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Other works include Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), which is based on Australian Research Council funded investigations into the nature of poetic composition. Paul is Professor of Poetry and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra.