Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. She has taught at several universities, and is now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’.

Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), drew on her experiences in El Salvador during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (due out in 2014).

Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published by W.W. Norton in 1993, and her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).

Tua Forsström was born in 1947 in Borgå and divides her time between Ekenas and Helsinki. A much acclaimed Finland-Swedish poet, she has won major literary honours in Sweden as well as Finland. She published her first book in 1972, En dikt om kärleck och annat (A Poem About Love and Other Things), followed by Där anteckningarna slutar (Where the Notes End, 1974), Egentligen är vi mycket lyckliga (Actually We Are Very Happy, 1976), Tallört (Yellow Bird’s-nest, 1979), and September (September, 1983). Tua Forsström achieved wider recognition with her sixth collection, Snöleopard (Snow Leopard, 1987), notably in Sweden and in Britain, where David McDuff’s translation (Bloodaxe Books, 1990) received a Poetry Book Society Translation Award. Marianergraven (The Marianer Trench, 1990) was followed by Parkerna (The Parks, 1992), which won the Swedish Academy’s Finland Prize and was nominated for both the major Swedish literary award, the August Prize (rare for a Finland-Swedish writer) and for Finland’s major literary award, the Finland Prize (now given only for prose). Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (After Spending a Night Among Horses) appeared in 1998. In 2003 she published her trilogy, Jag studerade en gång vid en underbar fakultat (I studied once at a wonderful faculty), whose English translation by David McDuff and Stina Katchadourian was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2006. This combines her three collections Snow Leopard, The Parks and After Spending a Night Among Horses with a new sequence, Minerals. Other awards given to Tua Forsström include the Edith Södergran Prize (1991), Pro-Finlandia Medal (1991), Göteborgs-Postens poetry prize (1992), Gerald Bonnier poetry prize (1993), Tollanderska Prize (1998) and Nordic Council Literature Prize (1998). Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, Dutch, French, Spanish and English. Her breakthrough into the English-speaking world came in 1987 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard (Snöleopard), which was translated into the English by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe Books. In 1990 the book won a Poetry Book Society Translation Award in the United Kingdom.

Andrew Forster is a poet and literature development worker. Originally from South Yorkshire he lived in Scotland for 20 years before moving to Cumbria in 2008. He worked in social care for 14 years, latterly managing housing projects for adults with learning disabilities,before making literature the focus of his career from 1998.

Flambard Press published Andrew Forster's poetry collections Fear of Thunder , in 2007, and Territory , in 2010.