David Scott was born in 1947 in Cambridge. He was educated at Solihull School, and studied Theology at Durham and then at Cuddesdon College near Oxford. He spent two years as a curate in Harlow, and then became School Chaplain at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, Elstree, where he taught religious education. He was vicar of Torpenhow and Allhallows in Cumbria for eleven years, and from 1991 until his recent retirement he was Rector of St Lawrence with St Swithun in Winchester, Warden of the Diocesan School of Spirituality and an Honorary Canon of Winchester Cathedral. He now lives in Kendal.

In 1978 David Scott won the Sunday Times/BBC national poetry competition with his poem ‘Kirkwall Auction Mart’. A Quiet Gathering, his first book of poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1984, and won him the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1986. His second collection, Playing for England (Bloodaxe Books, 1989) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Both books were illustrated by Graham Arnold of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The poems from the two collections were republished with new work in David Scott’s Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1998), and followed by Piecing Together in 2005. His latest book, Beyond the Drift (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), draws on his four previous Bloodaxe titles, with the addition of a whole collection of new poems.

David Scott’s collection of poems for children, How Does It Feel? was published by Blackie in 1989. He has also written several plays for the National Youth Music Theatre with Jeremy James Taylor. These include Captain Stirrick, which was staged at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1981; and Bendigo Boswell, which was commissioned by the BBC and screened in 1983. Jack Spratt VC was performed in the 1986 London International Opera Festival, and Les Petits Rats was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival and Sadlers Wells in 1988. He has written four religious books, Moments of Prayer (SPCK, 1997), Building Common Faith (Canterbury Press, 1997), Sacred Tongues (SPCK, 2001) and The Private Prayers of Lancelot Andrewes (SPCK, 2002).

Dorothy Schwarz writes short fiction. She also teaches creative writing in her home town of Colchester, and is co-author of two books on ecology ( Breaking Through and Living Lightly) with her husband— former Guardian journalist Walter Schwarz.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. Her retrospective Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001) includes her four collections, Portraits and Elegies (1982), The Lamplit Answer (1985), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1995), and The Throne of Labdacus (2000), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her latest collection is Heavenly Questions, winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize, published in hardback in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010 and in paperback by Bloodaxe in the UK in 2011.

She has won many literary awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rome Prize for Literature, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy for Arts and Letters. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. She divides her time between Tacoma and Boston, Massachusetts.