Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer, most famous for a series of suspense novels featuring Dr. Tony Hill. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Sunderland, is co-founder of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Stranded is a short story collection published in 2005. It includes a foreward by Ian Rankin.

Peter McDonald was born and grew up in Belfast.

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 in Belfast where she lives with her family. Her previous books were published by Oxford University Press: The Flower Master (1982), Venus and the Rain (1984) and On Ballycastle Beach (1988). She won first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 1979, and her poems have since been published in all the major anthologies of British and Irish poetry.

Tom McGuiness was an artist who attended the Spennymoor Settlement alongside Sid Chaplin.