Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, and wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s film A Prairie Home Companion in which he also appears. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the author of Lake Wobegon Days (1985), The Book of Guys (1993), Love Me (2003), and and a trilogy of Lake Wobegon novels, Pontoon, Liberty and Pilgrims. Born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942, he graduated from the University of Minnesota, and lives in St Paul and New York.

77 Love Sonnets (Common Good Books, USA, 2009; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011) is his first collection of his own poetry; he reads all the poems on two CDs issued separately from the book by Highbridge in the US but included with Bloodaxe's UK edition.

H. R. F. Keating worked as a journalist on The Daily Telegraph, and was the crime books reviewer for The Times for fifteen years. He was also chairman of the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) (1970–71), chairman of the Society of Authors (1983–84) and president of the Detection Club (1985–2000). He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 1995, he received the George N. Dove Award, and in 1996 the CWA awarded him the Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature.

He wrote screenplays, was a reviewer and wrote a biography of Dame Agatha Christie.

In Kensington Gardens once... is a short story collection published in 1997, with illustrations by Gwen Mandley. Jack, The Lady Killer is a novel in verse published in 1999.

Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005). Her epic poem The Lamplighter, adapted for both radio and stage, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, was followed by Fiere from Picador in 2011.

Jackie Kay's fiction and non-fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998), two collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006), and her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses. She lives in Manchester, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.

She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and co-edited the anthology Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2012) with James Procter and Gemma Robinson.

Kapka Kassabova was born in 1973 and grew up in Bulgaria until she was 16. Her family emigrated first to Britain, then to New Zealand where she lived until 2004. She now lives in the Scottish Highlands as a cultural mongrel working on a simplified version of her East European-Kiwi-Scots accent. She has published two poetry collections with Bloodaxe in the UK, Someone else’s life (2003), including work from two collections published in New Zealand as well as new poems, and Geography for the lost (2007). She has also published three novels, Reconnaissance (Penguin NZ, 1999), winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Asia-Pacific, Love in the Land of Midas (Penguin NZ, 2001) and Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2010), and two memoirs, Street Without a Name (Portobello, 2008), a coming of age story at the end of Communism, and Twelve Minutes of Love: a tango story (Portobello, 2011).

Jaan Kaplinski is one of Estonia's best-known writers and cultural figures. He was born in Tartu in 1941, shortly after the Soviet annexation of Estonia.

Sylvia Kantaris was born in 1936 in Derbyshire Peak District. She studied French at Bristol University, taught in Bristol and London, and then spent ten years in Australia, where she taught French at Queensland University, had two children, and wrote her M.A. and Ph.D. theses on French surrealism. Her articles on surrealism and poems were published widely in Australia and England in major periodicals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse. She was the joint winner of the Poetry Magazine Award in 1969.

In 1974 she settled in Helston, Cornwall, and from 1976 to 1984 tutored Twentieth Century Poetry for the Open University. In 1986 she was appointed Cornwall’s first Writer in the Community, and in 1989 received an honorary D.Litt. from Exeter University.

Her first two books of poems, Time & Motion (Prism/Poetry Society of Australia, 1975) and the Tenth Muse (Peterloo Poets, 1983), were both reissued by Menhir Press in 1986. Her third collection, The Sea at the Door (Secker & Warburg, 1985), is no longer available.

She has published two joint collections with other poets, News from the Front with D.M. Thomas (Arc, 1983), and The Air Mines of Mistila with Philip Gross (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), a poetry Book Society Choice.

Her latest titles are Dirty Washing: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1989), including work from all her previous books except The Air Mines of Mistila, and a new collection, Lad's Love (Bloodaxe Books, 1993).