C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France, and Princteon, USA. He has published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) – all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations – followed by Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010) and Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013), another Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He published a memoir, Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. He has published two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and his book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi Williamson has lived in Stirling, Brussels and Salisbury. She now lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. In 2008-09 she was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, and she is currently poet-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich. In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her work has been used to inspire poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at festivals.

Edward Wilson was born in South Shields, the son of a miner.

Frank Wilson was born in Durham in 1952 and later moved to Cleveland. He has written plays and professional productions including See Red, World Services and Blood Money. Walks on Water was commissioned by Cleveland Independent Theatre Company in 1984.