Born in 1986, Ahren Warner grew up in Lincolnshire before moving to London. His first collection, Confer (Bloodaxe, 2011), was both a PBS Recommendation and shortlisted in the Forward Prizes. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012. Ahren's second collection of poems, Pretty, is published in June 2013 and is a PBS Recommendation. He is poetry editor of Poetry London. Roddy Lumsden (born 1966) is a Scottish poet, who was born in St Andrews. He has published five collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade. He lives in London where he teaches for The Poetry School. He died in January 2020. Emily Berry's debut poetry collection Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury, 2013), a compendium of breakfasts. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. James Brookes was born in 1986 and grew up in rural Sussex, a few minutes' walk from Shelley's boyhood home of Field Place. He received a major Eric Gregory Award in 2009 and a Hawthornden International Writer's Fellowship in 2011. He has published a pamphlet, The English Sweats, with Pighog Press and is currently the Williams Librarian at Cranleigh School in Surrey, where also he teaches. Sins of the Leopard is his first full collection. John Burnside was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Melanie Challenger's first collection of poems, Galatea (Salt Publishing: 2006), received the Society of Authors' Eric Gregory Award and nomination for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She is Creative Fellow at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London, and Associate Artist at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy. She lives in the Scottish highlands. Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987 and came to the UK in 1993. His poems have been published in a range of magazines and anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2011 and The Salt Book Of Younger Poets. He also travels regularly across the UK, and internationally, to give readings. His work has been described as 'full of contrast, deftly managed with a buoyant and musical hand' (Poetry International Web) John Clegg grew up in Cambridge and currently lives in Durham, where he is completing a PhD on the Eastern European influence in contemporary poetry. A selection of his poetry was included in The Salt Book of Younger Poets (2010). David Constantine, born 1944 in Salford, has published several volumes of poetry, a novel and four collections of short stories - Back at the Spike (1994), Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009) and Tea at the Midland (2012). He is an editor and translator of Hoelderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. He was the winner of the 2010 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2013 Frank O'Connor Award. 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. Edward Mackay studied History and English at Oxford University, lives in east London where he also runs a mediation charity. His poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize (2011), commended in the Emerge Escalator competition (2010) and shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award (2009). He has been widely published in magazines and anthologies - this is his first solo publication. David Marriott was born in Nottingham 1963 of Jamaican parentage and was educated at the University of Sussex. He has taught there and currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written many articles on poetics and is the author of On Black Men published 2000 by the University Presses of Edinburgh, and Columbia, New York; and Letters to Langston published 2006 by the University Press of Rutgers, New Jersey. Incognegro is his first book of poetry. Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry and Zeppelins. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as a Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School. 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. 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. Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, formerly Chair of the Poetry Society and currently Resident Poet at Christ's College, Cambridge. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Darwin: A Life in Poems. Her non-fiction includes a nature/travel book on wild tigers, much acclaimed for its description of Asian forest landscapes from Bhutan to Sumatra. The first section of The Poem and the Journey, her most recent book on reading contemporary poetry, turns on the landscape in which we find our first identity, and is prefaced by Viola's question in Twelfth Night, 'What country, friends, is this?' Website: www.ruthpadel.com. 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. Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books - poetry, philosophy of language and books on writing process - of which the most recent are Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (Macmillan, 2005). Her awards include the Newdigate Prize; 'Trumpeldor Beach' was short-listed for the 2006 Forward Prize; and she has been widely translated, with eight books in translation, including Travel Diary, awarded the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia). She contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times and other publications; and is the editor of Poetry Review. Camellia Stafford was born in Warwickshire. She read English Literature and Language at King's College London and has an MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her debut pamphlet another pretty colour, another break for air is published by tall lighthouse. Camellia divides her time between Warwickshire and London. 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. Mark Waldron's first book, The Brand New Dark was published by Salt Publishing in 2008. His work appears in Identity Parade, New British and Irish Poets published by Bloodaxe in 2010. He lives in east London with his wife and son.
