Rob Chapman was the singer with the Bristol-based band the Glaxo Babies and with the British alternative rock band The Transmitters. He was a music journalist for Mojo. In 2007, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Music Journalism at the University of Huddersfield.

Dusk Music is a novel published in 2008.

René Char (1907-88) is one of the most important modern French poets. Admired by Heidegger for the profundity of his poetic philosophy, he was also a hero of the French Resistance and in the 1960s a militant anti-nuclear protester. Associated with the Surrealist movement for several years and a close friend of many painters - notably Braque, Giacometti and Picasso - he wrote poetry which miraculously, often challengingly, confronts the major 20th century moral, political and artistic concerns with a simplicity of vision and expression that owes much to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.

Cheryl Follon was born in Ayrshire, where she grew up. She studied Law and then English and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University before taking an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, and now teaches at a college of further education in Glasgow. She has received two writer’s bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council, and has published two collections with Bloodaxe, All Your Talk (2004) and Dirty Looks (2010). Her essay on the Mojave desert was shortlisted for the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing in 2012.

Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in English. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, poetry editor of the Paris Review, and has published a critical study, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, with the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

His Bloodaxe selection Natural History and other poems (2006) drew on two collections published in the US, The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). His latest collection is Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, US / Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010).

He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and teaches at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.