Stewart Conn was born in Glasgow in 1936 and grew up in Ayrshire, the setting for much of his early poetry. Since 1977 he has lived in Edinburgh, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's head of radio drama. He was Edinburgh’s first Makar or Poet Laureate in 2002-05.

His poetry books include Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010) from Bloodaxe, with The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems due in 2014. His other publications include a memoir, Distances (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001), and two anthologies, 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (SPL/Luath Press, 2006), a TLS Christmas choice, and 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (Luath Press, 2008).

He has won three Scottish Arts Council book awards, travel awards from the Society of Authors and the English-Speaking Union, and the Institute of Contemporary Scotland’s first Iain Crichton Smith award for services to literature. An Ear to the Ground was a Poetry Book Society Choice, Stolen Light was shortlisted for Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and The Breakfast Room won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards Poetry Book of the Year Prize.

David Constantine has published ten books of poetry, five translations and a novel with Bloodaxe. His poetry titles include Something for the Ghosts (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Collected Poems (2004), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Nine Fathom Deep (2009); and Elder. His Bloodaxe translations include editions of Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet; his Selected Poems of Hölderlin, winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize; his version of Hölderlin’s Sophocles; and his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air, winner of the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His other books include A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures (2004) and his translation of Goethe’s Faust in Penguin Classics (2005, 2009). He won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for his collection Tea at the Midland (Comma Press), and is the first English writer to win this prestigious international award. He is a freelance writer and translator, a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013.