John Gallas

[5] He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic[3] and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher.

Gallas is the editor of books of translations, including 52 Euros, The Song Atlas and Rhapsodies 1931, also published by Carcanet, and the librettist for David Knotts' Toads on a Tapestry, and for Alasdair Nicolson's opera The Iris Murders.

In a series of love poems set against the patterns of the English landscape, [Gallas] applies a modern-day directness to lyrical expressions of intimacy.

Over the years he has worked with his brother Kurt Gänzl on translations of Baudelaire,[8] Verhaeren,[9] Materlinck, Yourcenar, Anna de Noailles, Nerval, Florian and Borel, among others.

[9][10] Gallas is a Fellow of the English Association, won the International Welsh Poetry Competition in 2009, was the Joint Winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize in 2016 and was the St Magnus Festival poet in Orkney in the same year.