Physician, poet, and translator, Nicholas Catanoy was born in Romania in 1925 and emigrated to Canada in 1962. In 1969 he published Hic and Nunc, a book of poetry written in English, French, Spanish and Romanian. This was followed by Flux Alb in 1970 and Circumstances in 1972. He continued to publish in the 1980s and 1990s producing Notes on a prison wall, a memoir written in poetry, in 1994.

Dr. Catanoy worked as a radiologist in Fredericton from 1968-1970 and it was during this time that he joined The Flat Earth Society of Canada and became associated with Alden Nowlan and Leo C. Ferrari, both founding-members of the society. Throughout the 1970s, Catanoy was involved with Nowlan in the production of Modern Romanian poetry, an anthology of almost 100 Romanian poems (published in 1977 by Mosaic Press). Alden Nowlan acted as a liaison with 22 of Canada's leading writers who re-worked the literal translations into poetic form. The fiddlehead republic (1979), Catanoy's book of poems about NB, was dedicated to Alden Nowlan.