Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in northwest England, near Liverpool. During the 1930s he lived in London, New York, Mexico, and Los Angeles before moving to British Columbia in 1939. This move marked the start of a startlingly fertile period in Lowry's career as a 20th-century writer. His masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947), is one of the last great modernist novels.

Patrick A. McCarthy is the author or editor of 11 books and monographs, over 50 scholarly articles, and numerous reference articles and reviews. He authored several studies on Lowry, including Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry's Fiction; Malcolm Lowry's "La Mordida": A Scholarly Edition; and "Under the Volcano" in The Literary Encyclopedia.

Chris Ackerley is a professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focus is modernism, and his speciality is annotation, especially of the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett.

Vik Doyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He did archival research in the Malcolm Lowry Collection at the University of British Columbia for his doctoral dissertation.

Miguel Mota is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published on numerous 20th-century and contemporary writers and filmmakers, including Malcolm Lowry, Derek Jarman, Jeanette Winterson and Mike Leigh.

Paul Tiessen is the founding editor of the Malcolm Lowry Newsletter (1977-1984) and The Malcolm Lowry Review (1984-2002). In addition to scholarly articles and book chapters on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Tiessen wrote the introduction for Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner Lowry's Notes on a Screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.