Oliver Bernard, born in 1925, worked as an advisory teacher of drama, and was a director of the Speak a Poem Competition since its inception. He was a fine reader and in 2012 produced a second CD of his readings, Rimbaud, Whitman Etc. This also included  his own sequence ‘Moons and Tides’ and his stage-performance version of A Season in Hell.

Oliver Bernard lived in Norfolk for over forty years. A volume of autobiography, Getting Over It, was published by Peter Owen in 1992. Anvil published his translations of Apollinaire and Rimbaud (both of which started life as Penguins) and his collection of poems Verse etc. He died aged 87 on 1 June 2013.