Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868-1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's works include: The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913-1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905).

Stephen Mulrine (1937-2020) was a Glasgow-born poet and playwright who wrote extensively for radio and television, and published many translations, including English translations of plays in Russian by Chekhov, Gogol and Gorky, as well as translations of plays by Ibsen, Molière, Pirandello, Strindberg and others.