Sándor Rákos was born in 1921, the son of a village school teacher in northeastern Hungary. He studied economics in Budapest, but took no degree; worked in various administrative, journalistic, and editorial jobs; and in 1952 began to devote himself to writing. Today he heads the Translators' Section of the Hungarian Writers Union. He has published four books of poetry and one of essays as well as translations of Gilgamesh and other pieces of Mesopotamian poetry, and a volume of folk poems from the South Sea Islands.