Tatiania Shcherbina was born in Moscow in 1954.

Clare Shaw was born in 1972 in Burnley, the youngest of six children, and moved to Liverpool at the age of 18 to study politics. Her years in the city were marked by frequent admissions to psychiatric wards, which motivated her to become involved in working to improve mental health services. In her work, postgraduate study, publications and activism, she has become a recognised voice on women's mental health issues. She lives in West Yorkshire, and works in a self-harm awareness training partnership with her sister. Described by Carol Ann Duffy as 'one of the best new young readers on the circuit', Clare is a popular and engaging reader of her own work. She has two collections from Bloodaxe, Straight Ahead (2006), which was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award for Poetry, and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012).

Thomas Sharp was a key figure in town planning in the mid-twentieth century. The concepts he developed in his writings and plans have been of enduring significance and influence on thinking about planning and design for both practitioners and academics in the UK and beyond. He was a major influence on the development of ideas of townscape and the significance of his thinking on historic cities stands comparison with, for example, Camillo Sitte.

The mid-twentieth century was a period when public and professional interest in planning was at an all-time high. Sharp was a key figure in defining thinking about the forms that town and countryside should take; in reconciling existing and valued character with modernity, and; in making these arguments accessible. His book Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940) is the most widely-read ever on the subject and followed earlier influential polemical works. The plans he produced in the 1940s, primarily for historic cities such as Oxford, Exeter and Durham, were also hugely influential and are significant aesthetic artefacts in the history of plan-making, all the more remarkable for being produced in a period of austerity.

Interest in Sharp and his ideas has grown markedly in recent years with, for example, the rise of 'New Urbanism' in the USA and of the significance of design issues in UK planning. Furthermore, there is a new-wave of scholarly interest in the post-war reconstruction planning and architecture of the mid-twentieth century as a distinctive period in planning and design, particularly focused around reconstruction plans and their partial implementation.

Jo Shapcott is one of Britain’s leading poets. She has twice won the National Poetry Competition, and won the Forward Prize in 1999. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1998-2000, and is Visiting Professor of Poetry at Newcastle University and at the University of the Arts, London; she also teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College. She is president of the Poetry Society. Her poetry books include Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), Phrase Book (OUP, 1992), My Life Asleep (OUP, 1998), Her Book (Faber, 1999) and Tender Taxes, including her versions from Rilke’s French poems (Faber, 2001). She co-edited the anthology Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (Faber, 1996) with Matthew Sweeney and Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe / Newcastle University, 2002) with Linda Anderson.