Phil Mailer (aka Phil Meyler) was born in Dublin Ireland in 1946 and is resident in both Ireland and Portugal. He has been a teacher in Portugal, the US (New York City) and Ireland for many years. After living in London, where he was on the fringes of the King Mob group in the late 60s, and in the US, he went to Portugal in late 1973 to teach English. There, he actively participated in the events following the Revolution of April '74, become an editor of the newspaper Combate and managed a bookshop, Contra A Corrente, in Lisbon with other Portuguese revolutionaries. Married to a Portuguese woman, he maintains a residence in Lisbon but has been teaching disadvantaged youth in inner city Dublin for fifteen years, a job from which he finally retired in 2010. He has been a long-time translator from Portuguese and has translated the song-lyrics and poems of José Afonso (whose song Grandola was a signal for the 1974 revolution).

He is currently in the process of translating the work (including the detective novels) of the late Portuguese writer, Denis Machado, into English. He is the editor of Livewire Publications which has published Misfit, a Revolutionary Life, the autobiography of the enigmatic aristocrat Captain Jack White, one of the founders in 1913 of the Irish Citizen Army who went onto Spain in 1936 and became a supporter of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil war. Two other books, Science and Capital, Radical Essays on Science & Technology and a novel Kiss of the Chicken King were published by the same company in early 2011.