Glyn Maxwell was born in 1962 in Welwyn Garden City, where he grew up. He studied English at Oxford and poetry at Boston University. As well as his four poetry books, he has published a novel, Blue Burneau (Chatto, 1994), shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, and three verse plays in Gnyss the Magnificent (Chatto, 1993). He currently teaches poetry at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Gerda Kamilla Mayer is an English poet born to a Jewish family in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia. She escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organized by Trevor Chadwick. Having composed her first poem, in German, at the age of four, she continued her education in Dorset and Surrey and began writing poetry in English. She has published several volumes of verse and her poems have appeared in many anthologies.