Surendra Jha 'Suman' (1910-2002) --- Acharya Surendra Jha 'Suman' was born in Ballipur (Samastipur). He was educated at Dharmaraj Sanskrit College, Muzaffarpur and obtained the degrees of Sahityacharya and Kavyatirtha. He was the Head of the Department of Maithili in Bihar University. He served as a Member of Bihar Legislative Assembly and, later, a Member of Parliament. He was president of All India Maithili Sahitya Parishad. He represented Maithili in the Sahitya Akademi for several years. His spheres of activity include literature, journalism, editing, translation and compilation. He is reckoned as one of the most illustrious litterateurs of Maithili. A scholar has called him 'a poet of poets', who prepared a band of devoted Maithili writers and trained them to write in various genres. It has been said that lyrical poetry was his forte and his choice of words, alliterations, metaphor and similes, use of prosody and description of seasons are unique in post-independence Maithili literature. Others have mentioned that his style and verve of poetry are loaded with words, simile, alankar and imagery of old Sanskrit poetry and hence at times are not relished by modern readers, not much acquainted with Sanskrit prosody. He has to his credit about 35 literary works. Among the works of Suman are Pratipada (1948), Archana (1961), Dattavati (1962), Gangavtaran (1967), Payasvini (1969), Lalana Lahari (1969), Bharat Vandana (1970), Antarnad (1970) and Uttara (1980).  Suman has also tried his hand on fiction writing, such as Kathamukhi (collection of short stories) and Uganak Diyadvad (novel). He edited Mithila Mihir, Swadesh (first a monthly and then a daily), Prachi (a periodical published by Sahitya Akademi, Regional Office, Kolkata) and Vaidehi (first a fortnightly and later a monthly). He compiled and edited an anthology of one-act plays, Ekanki Sangrah (1970) with Manipadma and Sudhansu Sekhar Choudhary. He received the Sahitya Akademi award (1971) for his Payaswini (Collection of Poems). In 1981, the Maithili Akademi, Patna honoured him with Vidyapati Puraskar.

Baidyanath Mishra ‘Yatri’ (1911-1998) ---  Baidyanath Mishra was born in Mithila in Satlakha, his mother’s village. His native village, Tarauni, is not far away from Satlakha. He was brought up in his native village. As per the tradition of those days, the child was admitted to a Sanskrit pathshala (school). Thereafter, he studied Sanskrit at Kashi and Calcutta and obtained the degree of ‘Sahitya Acharya’ in Sanskrit. But, Baba never took up a job. He grew to become a restless traveler, a Sanskritist, classicist scholar, poet and religious rebel. He came under the spell of the anti-colonial nationalism and joined the revolutionary peasant movement led by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. His first poem was published in Maithili in 1930 under the pen-name ‘Yatri’. His association with Rahul Sankrtyayana led him to travels to Sri Lanka and conversion to Buddhism. He became a communist at the same time and started writing in Hindi under the name 'Nagarjun'. In fact, he was called Baba Nagarjun. From 1934 to 1941, Nagarjuna toured various parts of India and even went abroad. He was very active in journalism too during this period. Meanwhile, his first poem in Hindi was published in 1935 and he started writing under the name Nagarjun.Though always a well-known and popular poet, initially he was ignored by the conservative literary and critical establishment — till the great cultural upsurge in the Hindi-speaking areas in late 1960’s and early 1970’s turned writers like Nagarjun, Muktibodh, Shamsher Bahadur Singh and others into cult figures. His works include Baba Batesarnath, Balchanma, Ratinath ki Chachi, Patrahin Nagna Gachh, Khichri Viplav Dekha Hamne, translations of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, works of Kalidasa and many other classical works of Sanskrit literature. His Pratinidhi Kavitayen (a collection of representative poems, 1984) contains Hindi poems and Maithili poems. He was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi award (1968) for his Patraheen Nagna Gaachh. He was honoured by the Sahitya Akademi, which nominated him its Fellow in 1994. In addition to that he was honoured with the Bharat Bharti award by the Uttar Pradesh Government, the Kabir Samman by the Madhya Pradesh Government and the Rajender Shikhar Award by the Bihar Government.

Udaya Narayana Singh (b. 1951) --- Udaya Narayana Singh was born in Calcutta. He earned Linguistics honours at Sanskrit College, Calcutta, and later at the University of Delhi (Ph.D., 1979). He taught at several Indian Universities, including MSU - Baroda (1979-81), SGU - Surat (1981-85), University of Delhi (1985-87), and later at the University of Hyderabad (1987-2000). Currently, he is the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore – the apex institution dealing with Indian languages. Dr Singh has been an Eshan Scholar of the University of Calcutta (1972), UGC Fellow (1994-99), a recipient of LSA fellowship at Urbana (1978), CIPL-grant for visiting Berlin (GDR) (1987), a member of the Indo-Italian Cultural Exchange Programme for Creative writers, and a member of the Official delegation of scholars to Trinidad & Tobago (2002). He has been Chief Editor of Indian Linguistics, 1988-1990, and a Visiting Professor of IIAS (1989). He writes in both Maithili (in which he has 3 collections of poems, 11 plays, and a few books in translation) with a pen-name ‘Nachiketa’ and also in Bengali (with two collections of poems, 3 books of translation, 7 edited books of essays and scores of literary essays). He has also translated from and into Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Maithili, Sanskrit and English, and has edited the first poetry journal in Maithili called Maithili Kavita for a number of years. His research publications in Linguistics and Translation Studies are over 150, and they are in varied fields.