Ethel Williams was born in Cromer, Norfolk, in 1863 and was educated at Norwich High School and at Newnham College Cambridge, 1882-85, though she did not take a degree. She attended the London School of Medicine for Women where she took an MB in 1891 and an MD in 1895 before returning to Cambridge to study for a diploma in public health in 1899. After working as a medical officer at Clapham Maternity Hospital and at the Dispensary for Women and Children at Blackfriars, she went to Newcastle as the city’s first woman doctor, and in 1906 became the first woman to found a general medical practice in the city.

Having signed the Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage in 1889, Williams served as secretary of the Newcastle Women’s Liberal Association and became president of the Newcastle and District Women’s Suffrage Society (NUWSS), and took part in the “Mud March” of February 1907. By 1915 she was chairman of the North-Eastern Federation of the NUWSS. During the war Ethel Williams joined the Union of Democratic Control, was secretary of the Newcastle Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, and was a founding member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, of which she was a secretary of the Newcastle branch in 1934. In 1917, Williams co-founded the Northern Women’s Hospital, before retiring in 1924. She died in 1948.

John Hartley Williams teaches at the Free University of Berlin. His second book, Bright River Yonder (Bloodaxe, 1987), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, is a baroque Wild West poetry adventure. Its centrepiece, the lnog poem Ephraim Destiny's Perfectly Utter Darkness, won first prize in the Arvon poetry compeetition.

C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France, and Princteon, USA. He has published a dozen books in Britain with Bloodaxe, including New & Selected Poems (1995), The Vigil (1997), Repair (1999) and The Singing (2003) – all four of these were Poetry Book Society Recommendations – followed by Collected Poems (2006), Wait (2010) and Writers Writing Dying (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 2012; Bloodaxe Books, 2013), another Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987, Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and The Singing won the National Book Award for 2003. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He published a memoir, Misgivings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. He has published two books of essays, Poetry and Consciousness (University of Michigan Press, 1998), and In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and his book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi Williamson has lived in Stirling, Brussels and Salisbury. She now lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. In 2008-09 she was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, and she is currently poet-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich. In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her work has been used to inspire poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at festivals.