Vicki Feaver:  lives in Dunsyre, South Lanarkshire. Her most recent collection, The Book of Blood (Cape 2006) was shortlisted for the Forward and Costa Prizes. The Handless Maiden (Cape 1994, reissued 2007), was awarded a Heineman Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. Her poem ‘Judith’ won The Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem.

Douglas Dunn:  was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, in 1942. After working as a librarian in Scotland and Akron, Ohio, he studied English at Hull University, graduating in 1969. He then worked for eighteen months in the university library after which, in 1971, he became a freelance writer. In 1991 he was appointed Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. As well as ten collections of poetry, including Elegies, The Year’s Afternoon and The Donkey’s Ears, he has written several radio and television plays, including “Ploughman’s Share” and “Scotsman by Moonlight.” He has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has twice been awarded prizes by the Scottish Arts Council. In 1981 he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.

Anna Crowe:  was co–founder and former Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival. Her work has been translated into several languages and includes two Peterloo collections and three Mariscat chapbooks. Awards include Peterloo Poetry Prize, Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors, Callum Macdonald Memorial Award, and two PBS Choices. Translations include Six Catalan Poets (Arc), Peatlands, by Mexican poet Pedro Serrano, Lunarium, by Mallorcan poet Josep Lluís Aguiló, Love is a Place,a third Bloodaxe book of translations of poems by Catalan poet Joan Margarit.

Stewart Conn:  was Edinburgh’s inaugural Makar (Poet Laureate) from 2002 to 2005. Latest collections: The Breakfast Room (2011 SMIT Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe), and Against the Light (Mariscat). In 2006 he received the Institute of Contemporary Scotland’s Iain Crichton Smith Award for services to literature. He reads from his work on http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/stewart–conn