Kona Macphee was born in London and grew up in Australia, where she worked as a waitress, shop assistant and apprentice motorbike mechanic. She studied musical composition at the Sydney Conservatorium, violin at the University of Sydney, and computer science and robotics at Monash University, later taking an M.Sc. at Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar. She received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and has published three collections with Bloodaxe, Tails (2004); Perfect Blue (2010), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2011; and What Long Miles (2013). She is a freelance writer and software developer, and lives in Crieff, Perthshire.

Barry MacSweeney was born in 1948 in Newcastle. After leaving school at 16, he worked as a journalist, mainly in Newcastle, Kent, Bradford and South Shields. He published numerous collections, including an earlier Selected Poems in The Tempers of Hazard, published and destroyed by Paladin in 1993.The Book of Demons (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He won a Paul Hamlyn Award in 1997. He died in 2000. Two posthumous books appeared after his death, both in 2003, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 from Bloodaxe Books, and Horses in Boiling Blood: MacSweeney, Apollinaire: a collaboration, a celebration, from Equipage.