Elizabeth Garrett was born in London, and grew up in Channel Islands. Her first book of poems, The Rule of Three (Bloodaxe, 1991), was selected for the New Generation Poets promotion in 1994. She works for the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford.

Roger Garfitt was born in 1944 and has been a freelance writer ever since winning the Gregory Award in 1974. He was married to the late Frances Horovitz, whose Collected Poems he edited in 1985. From 1985 to 1992 he spent much of his time in Colombia, where he reported for Granta and the London Review of Books. He is now remarried and living in Shropshire. His autobiography, The Horseman's Word (Cape), was published in April 2011. Carcanet have published three previous collections of his poetry, most recently Given Ground (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1989).

Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She studied at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she completed a PhD in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2010. Her pamphlet, This Man's Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first book-length collection, The Squirrels Are Dead, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010 and won her a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. She lives in Edinburgh, and works as a subtitler for the hard of hearing.