James Clarence Mangan (c.1803-1849) lived in Dublin all his life and was a prolific poet. Employed from a young age as a scrivener and later as a legal copyist, Mangan spent three years working with the Ordnance Survey and was afterwards employed at the library at Trinity College. His work was published in a wide variety of periodicals, and included many poems translated, or inspired by, German poems. He wrote many poems on Ireland and wrote for nationalist newspapers such as The Nation and The United Irishman, and he translated many poems from Irish. Suffering all his life from ill-health, physical and mental, in later years Mangan also suffered from alcoholism. He died in hospital after a bout of cholera when he also became extremely malnourished.

Rudi Holzapfel (1938-2005), originally from Paris, attended school in California and moved to Dublin in 1956 to study at Trinity College, Dublin. He completed an M. Litt. at Trinity, where his work was on Irish literary magazines, and he went on to Leeds University in 1966 to work on a Ph. D. on James Clarence Mangan. Working as teacher, poet and bookseller, he also published a number of collections of his poetry and some in collaboration with Brendan Kennelly. His work on Mangan continued throughout his life.