Sally Read was born in Suffolk in 1971. She trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse in London while completing a BA with the Open University, and went on to earn her MA at the University of South Dakota, USA. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her three poetry collections with Bloodaxe are The Point of Splitting (2005), which was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, Broken Sleep (2009) and The Day Hospital (2012). The Poetry Archive released her audio CD Sally Read reading from her poems in 2010.

Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Roddy Lumsden’s Identity Parade (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), The Picador Book of Love Poems (2011), and Poems of the Decade (Forward Publishing, 2011). A selected poems in Italian, translated by Andrea Sirotti and Loredana Magazzeni, is nearing completion. She is a member of La Compagnia delle Poete, a theatrical Italian co-operative of poets.

Sally Read is based in Santa Marinella, Rome, and in Bungay, Suffolk. She is currently poet in residence of the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs.

Marina Razumovsky was born in Czechoslovakia. She was educated in Troppau and Vienna and left Czechoslovakia in 1946. From then until 1986, she was a librarian in the National Library of Austria in Vienna specialising in Russian literature. She is a member of Vereinigung Osterreichischer Bibliothekare, and was for many years the Austrian representative in different commissions of the International Federation of Library Associations. She has published many articles in library journals and Festchriften. Her translations from Russian include Voslensky's Nomenklatura, and E.N. Sayn-Waittgenstein's Diary 1914-18, her mother's first-hand account of life before and during the Russian Revolution. She lives in Vienna. Countess Razumovsky's family comes from Russia and was rather influential there during the 18th Century. Her great-great-grandfather was Hetman of Ukraine uner the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II. Two of his sons settled in Austria: one, Count, later Price Andre Razumovsky, was Russian Ambassador to the court of Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars and a Friend and protector of Beethoven (who dedicated his Razumovsky Quartets to him); the other, her great-grandfather Count Gergoire Razumovsky, was a distinguished geologist.

Irina Borisovna Ratushinskaya, (born March 4, 1954) is a prominent Russian dissident, poet and writer.On September 17, 1982, Irina was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation. In April 1983, she was convicted of "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime", sentenced to seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of internal exile. She was released on October 9, 1986

Brian Randell was born in Cardiff (16 April 1936) and educated at Imperial College London. From 1957 until 1964 he was employed in the Atomic Power Division of the English Electric Company Ltd, Whetstone, Leicester, including working on compilers for the ALGOL 60 language (see BR/1). From 1964 to 1969 he worked for IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, and later in California, specialising in computer architectures, operating systems and system design methodology (see BR/2). In 1969 he was appointed Professor of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (later Newcastle University) (see BR/3), becoming Emeritus Professor following his retirement.

His main research interests are in the field of system dependability and fault-tolerant computing. Professor Randell also carried out research into the history of computing and computers (see BR/3/20 and BR/3/21), including pioneering research into the work carried out at Bletchley Park during World War two (see BR/3/20/3).

Professor Randell was involved in commercial exploitation of the software and techniques developed at the University, being instrumental in the founding of the Microelectronics Applications Research Institute (MARI), of which he was a director (see BR/14) and the Northern Informatics Applications Agency (see BR/18).

In addition to his employment, Professor Randell served on a number of UK, French and European bodies, including panels of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) (see BR/5), the Health and Safety Commission Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (ACSNI) (see BR/6), the Council of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) (see BR/10) and the Scientific Committees of the CNRS Institutes at the universities of Toulouse and Rennes (see BR/11 and BR/12). He was also an active member of many organisations concerned with Computer Science, notably the British Computer Society (BCS) (see BR/21) and the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) (see BR/20); he was a founder member of IFIP's Working Groups on Programming Methodology and Dependability and Fault Tolerance.

Deborah Randall's first collection, The Sin Eater (Bloodaxe, 1989) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and wona Scottish Arts Council Book Award. In 1987 she won first prize in the Bloodaxe and Bridport poetry competitions. Born in 1957 in Hampshire, she now lvies in Ullapool in Scotland.