Fleur Adcock writes about men and women, childhood, identity, roots and rootlessness, memory and loss, animals and dreams, as well as our interactions with nature and place. Her poised, ironic poems are remarkable for their wry wit, conversational tone and psychological insight, unmasking the deceptions of love or unravelling family lives.

Born in New Zealand in 1934, she spent the war years in England, returning with her family to New Zealand in 1947. She emigrated to Britain in 1963, working as a librarian in London until 1979. In 1977-78 she was writer-in-residence at Charlotte Mason College of Education, Ambleside. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 1979-81, living in Newcastle, becoming a freelance writer after her return to London. She received an OBE in 1996, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe, 2000).

Fleur Adcock published three pamphlets with Bloodaxe: Below Loughrigg (1979), Hotspur (1986) and Meeting the Comet (1988), as well as her translations of medieval Latin lyrics, The Virgin & the Nightingale (1983). All her collections were then published by Oxford University Press until they shut down their poetry list in 1999, after which Bloodaxe published her collected poems Poems 1960-2000 (2000), followed by Dragon Talk (2010) and Glass Wings (2013). Poems 1960-2000 is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and Glass Wings is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Robert Adamson was born in Sydney in 1943 and grew up in Neutral Bay and on the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales. From 1970 to 1985 he edited Australia’s New Poetry magazine, and in 1988, with Juno Gemes, he established Paper Bark Press, one of Australia’s leading poetry publishers. He is the inaugural CAL chair of poetry at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney). In 2011 he was awarded the Patrick White Prize and the Blake Prize for Poetry. His many award-winning publications include an autobiography, Inside Out (2004), two books of autobiographical fiction, and nearly 20 books of poetry, including Reading the River: Selected Poems (2004) and The Kingfisher’s Soul (2009) from Bloodaxe. His latest Australian publication is The Golden Bird: New & Selected Poems (Black Inc, 2008).