Leonard Barras wrote a weekly Through My Hat column for the Newcastle-based Sunday Sun. He also wrote for the BBC including the radio programme Wot Cheor, Geordie, the Northern Drift radio programmes and the television comedy series Mother Nature's Bloomers, starring Roy Kinnear. IROn Press published poems from this series in Hailstones on Your Father in 1979.

Barras wrote plays for Tyne Wear Theatre Company and for Live Theatre, Newcastle, as well as a novel entitled The Chocolate Cream Society which was published in 1997.

Bluebottles on my Marmaladeis a collection of short stories which were broadcast on Radio 4.

Up the Tyne in a Flummoxis a collection of short stories which were broadcast on Radio 4 between 1982 and 1986.

Through my Hatis a collection of selected columns from the 1950s Sunday Sun weekly newspaper.

Elizabeth Bartlett (1924-2008) was born in Deal, in the mining region of Kent. She left school at 15 shortly before the start of the Second World War, to start work in a factory making hypodermic needles. Married during the War, she helped support her family with various jobs, working for 16 years as a medical secretary, and later in the home help service and as a tutor. She lived in Burgess Hill, West Sussex.

Despite early success at the age of 19, in Tambimuttu’s Poetry London, she did not publish again until her mid-50s. Her first retrospective volume, A Lifetime of Dying: Poems 1942-1979 (Peterloo Poets, 1979), covered mainly work written in the latter two decades. She went on to publish four collections in the 1980s and early 90s: Strange Territory (Peterloo Poets, 1983), The Czar Is Dead (Rivelin Grapheme, 1986), Instead of a Mass (Headland, 1991) and Look, No Face (Redbeck Press, 1991). In 1995 Bloodaxe published Two Women Dancing: New & Selected Poems, edited by Carol Rumens, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This was followed by two later collections of poems written in her late 70s, Appetites of Love (2001) and Mrs Perkins and Oedipus (2004), both from Bloodaxe. In 2005 the Poetry Archive issued her CD, Elizabeth Bartlett Reading from her poems. Elizabeth Bartlett died in 2008, age 84.

David Bateman is a Pre-Futurist poet who performs at pubs, clubs, schools, colleges, theatres and festivals throughout Britain.

Suzanne Batty was born in Plymouth, 20 minutes after her twin sister, and upside down. Her family moved to suburban Manchester when she was two. She worked with young homeless people in London before studying English at Sussex University; she then worked variously as a gardener, a youth worker, a welfare rights advisor and suffered for several years as a civil servant. Although she has always written, Suzanne did not start writing poetry seriously until her 30s. She was one of the winners of the Poetry Business pamphlet competition in 1997 with Shrink (Smith/Doorstop), and received a writer’s bursary from North West Arts in 1999. She is a founder member of urban poetry project The A6 Poets, and lives in Manchester, where she writes, teaches writing, performs her work, edits the poetry magazine Rain Dog and digs her allotment. She is also studying for an MA at Sheffield Hallam University. Her first collection, The Barking Thing was published by Bloodaxe in 2007.