In Their Own Words

Helen Ivory is a poet and artist. She has a degree from Norwich Art School and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. She has three collections with Bloodaxe Books, the most recent 'The Breakfast Machine' was published in 2010. She has taught for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and at UEA where she is Course Director for Creative Writing for Continuing Education. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is an editor for The Poetry Archive.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Otto Orban, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Agnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears' critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. His recent books include Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004), From a Cliff (Arc, 2002) and of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley). Andy Brown studied Ecology, a discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism, which appears in The Salt Companion to the Works of Lee Harwood (Salt, 2006). He was previously a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation's creative writing courses, and has been a recording musician.

Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. This is her first book.

Ian Duhig was born into an immigrant family and worked with homeless people for fifteen years throughout England and Ireland before becoming a writer and poet. This is reflected in attitudes to home and landscape in his work, as suggested by the epigraph for his first book from Hugh of St Victor: 'The man who loves his homeland is a beginner; he to whom every soil is as his own is strong; but he is perfect for whom the entire world is a foreign country.' Duhig has written five books of poetry, most recently The Speed of Dark (Picador, 2007) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Costa Poetry Prizes. More recently, a short story appeared in The New Uncanny (Comma, 2008) and the cowritten God Comes Home about the legacy of David Oluwale was performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in February 2009.

Helen Ivory is a poet and artist. She has a degree from Norwich Art School and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. She has three collections with Bloodaxe Books, the most recent 'The Breakfast Machine' was published in 2010. She has taught for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and at UEA where she is Course Director for Creative Writing for Continuing Education. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is an editor for The Poetry Archive.

Mark Granier's first collection, Airborne, was published in 2001. He won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004 and was awarded Arts Council Bursaries in 2002 and 2008. His second collection, The Sky Road, was published in 2007.

Philip Gross is a writer of many parts - from prize-winning poetry to teenage novels of high suspense and unsettling depths. Son of a wartime refugee from Estonia and a Cornish schoolmaster's daughter, his work explores borderlines - between childhood and adult life, between fantasy and reality. He has two grown-up children and a grandson, and lives in Penarth with his wife Zelie. He has led writing workshops in schools for twenty years, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University.

Luke Kennard is the author of four volumes of poetry and two pamphlets. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.

John McCullough was born in Watford in 1978. His poetry has appeared in publications including Poetry London, The Rialto, The Guardian, Magma and London Magazine. He teaches literature and creative writing at the Open University and the University of Sussex and has a Ph.d from Sussex on rhetoric and friendship in English Renaissance writing. He lives in Brighton.

John Mole (b. 1941) taught for many years in this country and the USA before becoming a freelance writer and occasional jazz musician. As a poet for children he continues to give readings and run workshops in schools and libraries, and his work is represented in many anthologies. Reviewing his work in the Times Educational Supplement, Gillian Clarke wrote: 'He's one of the best, and already has many fans.'

HELEN MORT was born in Sheffield and grew up in Chesterfield. She has published two poetry collections, Division Street (2013), and No Map Could Show Them (2016), and one novel, Black Car Burning (2019). Her short story collection, Exire, was published by Wrecking Ball and she co-edited One For the Road: Pubs and Poetry (Smith-Doorstop) with Stuart Maconie. She teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Pascale Petit has published four poetry collections including The Huntress and The Zoo Father, which were both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. Her latest collection is The Treekeeper's Tale (Seren, 2008) and, forthcoming from Seren in 2010, What the Water Gave Me - Poems after Frida Kahlo. The Poetry Book Society and Arts Council named her as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004. She is widely travelled, including to coast redwood parks in California, the Venezuelan Amazon, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Nepal and China, where in 2007-8 she took part in the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival on Huangshan in Anhui Province. She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University 2007- 9 and tutors for The Poetry School and Tate Modern. Website: www.pascalepetit.co.uk.

Matthew Sweeney was born in Donegal, Ireland in 1952. He moved to London in 1973 and studied at the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Freiburg. His poetry collections include Blue Shoes (1989), Cacti (1992), The Bridal Suite (1997), A Smell of Fish (2000), Selected Poems (2002), Sanctuary (2004) and Black Moon (2007). He won a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1999. He died in 2018.