Pauline Stainer is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she now lives at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Her Bloodaxe titles include The Lady & the Hare: New & Selected Poems (2003), which draws on five previous books, as well as a new collection, A Litany of High Waters, and two later collections, Crossing the Snowline (2008) and Tiger Facing the Mist (2013). Along with The Lady & the Hare, her collections The Honeycomb, Sighting the Slave Ship and The Ice-Pilot Speaks were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her fourth collection The Wound-dresser’s Dream was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1996. Pauline Stainer received a 2009 Cholmondeley award for her poetry.

Leopold Staff (14 November 1878 – 31 May 1957) was a Polish poet; one of the greatest artists of European modernism twice granted the Degree of Doctor honoris causa by universities in Warsaw and in Kraków. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Polish PEN Club.

St. Pancras (London, England).

Co-educational private school in the English public school tradition, located in the West Cumbrian village of St Bees, England. It was founded in 1583 by Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as a boys' free grammar school.