Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'The Malarkey' won the 2010 National Poetry Competition. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012). She has published eleven novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lives in Bristol.

Douglas Dunn is a major Scottish poet, editor and critic, whose Elegies (1985), a moving account of his first wife’s death, became a critical and popular success. Author of over ten collections of poetry, he has also edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2000). He was Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews from 1991, and was awarded an OBE in 2003.

Jacques Dupin was born in 1927 in Privas in the Ardèche. Images of the harsh mineral nakedness of his native countryside run through the whole of his work and figure a fundamental existential nakedness. Dupin is an ascetic who likes the bare and the simple. His poetry is sad, wise and relentlessly honest. He speaks in our ear, as if at once close and far off, to tell us what we knew: ‘Neither passion nor possession’.

G.F., G.J., G.J.F. or Geoffrey Dutton (1924-2010) was born in on the Welsh borders of Anglo-Scots parentage and brought up in the Scottish diaspora. Apart from much global travelling, he lived thereafter lived with wife and family in Scotland, the passionate austerities of which compel his poetry – helped by many other lifetime environments, including mountain, sea, forest, industrial tenement, hillside shack, various arts and the intercontinental circuses of biomolecular research.

Major publications fed by what he calls ‘this metaphorical imperative’ cover solo longdistance wildwater snorkel swimming (Swimming Free, Heinemann & St Martins Press, 1972); mountaineering – his ‘classics of wit and humour’ The Ridiculous Mountains (Diadem) and Nothing So Simple as Climbing (Hodder) were combined as third edition in The Complete Doctor Stories (Bâton Wicks 1999 reprint); and his 44-year ‘ecological dialogue’ with a few rocky windblasted East Highland acres led to various articles, radio and TV features and the acclaimed pair Harvesting the Edge (prose and verse, Menard Press 1995, Scottish Arts Council [SAC] Award) and Some Branch Against the Sky (prose, David & Charles and Timber Press 1997).

He wrote much poetry on these explorations but published it rarely: his first collection pamphlet, 31 Poems (Old Fire Station Poets, Oxford, 1977) was followed by three book-length collections, Camp One (Macdonald, 1978: SAC Award), Squaring the Waves (Bloodaxe Books, 1986: SAC Award) and The Concrete Garden (Bloodaxe Books, 1991: Poetry Book Society Recommendation), and what was to be his swansong, The Bare Abundance: Selected Poems 1975-2001 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002: Poetry Book Society Recommendation).