Poet Ferenc Juhász (1928–2015) was born in Bia, a village near Budapest. After World War II, he published his first poems and was hailed as a prodigy of Hungarian poetry.

From 1951 to 1974, Juhász served as an editor for Szépirodalmi Publishing House, which published literature in Hungary. In the 1950s, Juhász began to suffer political attacks because of his poetry.

Selections of Juhász’s works were published almost simultaneously in English in 1970 by Penguin and Oxford University Press. Juhász’s main ambition was to become a modern epic poet and to write books about the cosmos. A recurring experience who gives a sense of urgency to his writing is his fascination with and horror over the forms and processes of life on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels, the cells and the stars, which he describes with unparalleled mastery. He was awarded several Hungarian and international prizes, including the Kossuth Prize. In 1975–1976, Juhász was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.