Sean O'Brien has published seven books of poems, including November (Picador 2011, PBS Choice) and The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007), winner of the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, followed by Collected Poems (Picador, 2012). Bloodaxe published his first two collections, The Indoor Park (1983) and The Frighteners (1987), as well as his essays, The Deregulated Muse (1998), and most recently, his Newcastle-Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Journeys to the Interior: Ideas of England in contemporary poetry (2012). His translation of the Inferno appeared in 2006, his short story collection The Silence Room in 2008, and his novel Afterlife in 2009. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

John Oldham was an English satirical poet and translator.

Douglas Oliver has published several other books of petry. His Paladin selection of petry and prose, Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), includes his much-praised satire on Modern Britain, The Infant and the Pearl. Born in Hampshire of Scottish Stock, he has spent many years working in Europe and America, and now lives in Paris.

Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio in 1935. Her first collection American Primitive (1983) won a Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by books including Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990), New and Selected Poems (1992), White Pine (1994), West Wind (1997), Winter Hours (1999), The Leaf and the Cloud (2000), What Do We Know (2002), Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), Why I Wake Early (2004), Blue Iris (2004), New and Selected Poems: volume two (2005), and a CD recording, At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver (2005). Bloodaxe published her first UK selection, Wild Geese: Selected Poems, in 2004, followed by her later collections, Thirst (2007), Red Bird (2008), Evidence (2009) and Swan (2011). Mary Oliver is America's biggest selling contemporary poet. She holds the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair at Bennington College, Vermont, and divides her time between Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Florida.