Douglas Dunn is a major Scottish poet, editor and critic, whose Elegies (1985), a moving account of his first wife’s death, became a critical and popular success. Author of over ten collections of poetry, he has also edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2000). He was Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews from 1991, and was awarded an OBE in 2003.

Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'The Malarkey' won the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012). She has published eleven novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in Bristol.

Ian Duhig was born in London of Irish Catholic parents, and now lives in Leeds. He won the National Poetry Competition twice, in 1987 and 2001. He has published three collections with Bloodaxe, The Bradford Count (1991), which was selected for the New Generation Poets promotion, The Mersey Goldfish (1995), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Nominies (1998), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2001.

A. J. Duggan was born in Liverpool in 1963. He began writing after being caught up in the 1996 Manchester Arndale bomb, which destroyed a large part of the city centre. He lives in Cheshire and works in the computer industry.

His first novel Scars Beneath the Skin was published by Flambard Press in 2009.

Translated by Sasha Dugdale.

Prof John Wight Duff, (1866-1944) was a Professor of Classics at Armstrong College during the early 20th Century.