Ann Sansom is a poet, playwright and tutor. She has published six collections of poetry, including two with Bloodaxe Books, Romance (1994) and In Praise of Men and other people (2003). She has had work published in several Forward/Faber anthologies, Russian Vogue and a range of other publications and has written and directed plays for stage and radio. She is currently working with The British Film Institute on a series of commissioned film-related poems and is writing a screenplay for a further series of short films.

Ann is a regular tutor for WEA, Poetry Society and Arvon Foundation and has taught at Oxford, Leeds and Sheffield Hallam universities. She regularly works in schools and tutors at school writing residentials, teaching children of all ages and abilities, and has run a weekly writers' workshop at Doncaster YWCA for twenty years. She is also a director of The Poetry Business, which publishes 'The North' magazine and Smith/Doorstop books. She lives in Sheffield.

Carole Satyamurti is a poet and sociologist, who lives and works in London. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves, whether in formal autobiography or in social encounters. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (2003). She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Countdown (2011) is her first new collection since Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), which drew on five collections: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990), Striking Distance (1994), Love and Variations (2000), and Stitching the Dark (2005), two of these Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her translation from the Mahabharata is forthcoming from Norton.