Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, and after working for some years in Yorkshire now lives in London. She is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths’ College. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Life Under Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is her first new collection since Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002), which drew on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Life Under Water has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2008.

Katie Donovan was born in 1962 and grew up on a farm in Co. Wexford, but for most of her life she has lived in Dun Laoghaire, a suburb of Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of California at Berkeley. She lived in Hungary for a year before returning to Ireland where she was a journalist with the Irish Times for 13 years. She qualified as an Amatsu practitioner (a form of Japanese osteopathy) and combines this work with teaching Creative Writing at IADT, the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. She has two children, Phoebe and Felix.

Her latest book of poetry, Rootling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), draws on three previous collections, Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997) and Day of the Dead (2002), together with a whole collection of new work. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (Raven Arts Press, 1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dublines (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe Books in 1996, and Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly), published by Kyle Cathie (Britain) and Gill and Macmillan (Ireland) in 1994.