Lawrence Sail was born in London and brought up in Exeter. He studied French and German at Oxford University, then taught for some years in Kenya, before returning to teach in the UK. He is now a freelance writer and lives in Exeter.

His retrospective Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, covers work written over four decades, drawing on poems from ten collections, from Opposite Views (1974) to the New Poems (2010) first collected in this volume. It includes poems from four books previously published by Bloodaxe, Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (1992), Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002), and Eye-Baby (2006).

His other books include Cross-currents: essays (Enitharmon, 2005), a memoir of childhood, Sift (Impress Books, 2010), and Songs of the Darkness, a selection of his Christmas poems with illustrations by his daughter, Erica Sail (Enitharmon, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (1999) and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (2005), both co-edited with Kevin Crossley-Holland for Enitharmon, and First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber & Faber, 1988). He also edited South-West Review from 1980 to 1985.

He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and a judge for the Whitbread Book of the Year awards. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1992, and an Arts Council Writer’s Bursary the following year.

In August 1993 he undertook a month-long tour of India for the British Council, for whom he has since worked as visiting writer and lecturer in various countries, including Bosnia, Colombia, Egypt, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine. From 1994 to 1996 he was the British representative on the jury of the European Literature Prize, and from 2004 to 2007 a judge of the Eric Gregory Awards. In October 1999 he was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature. In 2004 he received a Cholmondeley Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Gig Ryan was born in 1956 and grew up in Melbourne. She has published six collections of poetry in Australia: The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001).

Ryan is also a freelance reviewer and a songwriter, performing and releasing three albums with Disband (1998) and Driving Past (1999, 2006). She lives in Melbourne, and has been poetry editor of the Melbourne Age since 1998.

Her first UK publication, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), was published in Australia in 2011 by Giramondo under the title New and Selected Poems.

Tracy Ryan was born in Western Australia, where she grew up. After reading English at Curtin University, she studied European languages at the University of Western Australia, and has translated many French writers, including Helene Cixous, Maryline Desboilles and Francoise Han. She now lives in Cambridge, where she has worked as a bookseller, tutor, editor and writer. She was Judith E. Wilson Junior Visiting Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge in 1998 and now teaches Australian Literature and Film at the University of East Anglia. Her books include two collections, Killing Delilah (1994) and Bluebeard in Drag (1996) and a novel, Vamp (1997), all published in Australia by Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Sibyl Ruth grew up in Manchester and later moved to the West Midlands. She started writing poetry when a long viral illness, ME, made it impossible for her to do much else. She has worked as a cook in a vegetarian restaurant, a gardener in a graveyard and has worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau.