Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His most recent projects include a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos which Mammoth Screen are developing for TV). He is a screenwriter, and is also working the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on an opera for ENO. In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).

Prof John Wight Duff, (1866-1944) was a Professor of Classics at Armstrong College during the early 20th Century.

Translated by Sasha Dugdale.

A. J. Duggan was born in Liverpool in 1963. He began writing after being caught up in the 1996 Manchester Arndale bomb, which destroyed a large part of the city centre. He lives in Cheshire and works in the computer industry.

His first novel Scars Beneath the Skin was published by Flambard Press in 2009.

Ian Duhig was born in London of Irish Catholic parents, and now lives in Leeds. He won the National Poetry Competition twice, in 1987 and 2001. He has published three collections with Bloodaxe, The Bradford Count (1991), which was selected for the New Generation Poets promotion, The Mersey Goldfish (1995), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Nominies (1998), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2001.