Joan Metelerkamp was born in 1956, and grew up with her three brothers in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, where her father farmed. She did a BA at the University of Natal, followed by a post-graduate diploma in acting at the University of Cape Town. She then worked for three years in educational drama and another three years teaching in university English departments. In 1990, married with two children, she completed her MA on the poetry of Ruth Miller while teaching at the University of Natal. In 1998 she moved with her family to the Knysna area of the Southern Cape, where she still lives. From 2000 to 2004 (and for one edition in 2008), she edited the poetry journal New Coin.

In 1951, Kelwyn Sole was born into a lower-middle-class Johannesburg family. In a 1994 interview with Robert Berold in New Coin, he said, “I certainly wasn’t brought up in a liberal or leftwing household, although I was instilled with a very strong sense of justice and the uniqueness – let’s call it the vulnerable uniqueness – of all living things.” This early influence appears to have played a significant part in developing a meticulous awareness that pervades his aesthetic and political sensibilities. Although he identifies growing up in South Africa as the cause of a “fractured personality”, his writing is underpinned by an articulate consciousness that strives, unafraid and conscientious, for an honest and integrated portrayal of his world.

Loftus Marais was born in 1982 in Paarl, a small town just a forty-minute drive from Cape Town. Nestling at the foot of the second-largest granite outcrop in the world, Paarl is considered the birthplace of Afrikaans. It is a town with a quiet, suburban character, and Marais’s poetry often takes an ironic, satiric look at the complacency of the environment in which he grew up.