Public Health Awards were established as an annual award by Sir Liam in 2009 to identify and acknowledge those who had made a strong impact in the field of public health.

J.H. Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968). An expanded and updated version was published by Bloodaxe Books with Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1999 as Poems, with a second, expanded edition in 2005. He has since published three limited editions, To Pollen (2006), STREAK---WILLING---ENTOURAGE ARTESIAN (2009) and SUB SONGS (2010).

Prynne has published a wide range of critical and academic prose, including works on Saussure, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. His essay on New Songs from a Jade Terrace, an anthology of early Chinese love poetry, was included in the second edition of the book from Penguin 1982. He has written poetry in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en.

Prynne is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2005 he retired from his posts teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and as Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; he retired as Librarian of the College in 2006.

Tom Pow was born in Edinburgh in 1950. Primarily a poet, several of his collections have won awards and three of his poetry collections have been short-listed for Scottish Book of the Year. Most recently, Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (Salt Publishing) won the poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust’s Scottish Book Awards in 2009. He has also written young adult novels, picture books, radio plays and a travel book about Peru. In The Becoming, Selected and New Poems (Polygon) has recently been published (June 2009).

He has held various writing posts, including that of Scottish/Canadian Writing Fellow, based at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and Virtual Writer in Residence (Scotland’s first) for the Scottish Library Association’s Scottish Writers Project. He was the first ever Writer in Residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival from 2001 to 2003.

From 2000 to 2009, he worked for the University of Glasgow in Dumfries, latterly as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Storytelling.

He is currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University Dumfries and a part-time lecturer on Lancaster University’s distance learning Masters in Creative Writing.

Kate Potts was born in 1978 and grew up in London. She worked in music publishing before studying at Goldsmiths’ College, London, and has taught English and Creative Writing at colleges in London for several years. Her pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her work was featured in the Bloodaxe new poets anthology Voice Recognition in 2009. Pure Hustle (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) is her first book-length collection.