Tony Harrison is Britain's leading film and theatre poet. He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.

He became the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-68), a post he held again in 1976-77, and was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-78). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.

His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. Bloodaxe published his Dramatic Verse 1973-1985 in hardback in 1985, with a paperback following from Penguin under the title Theatre Works 1973-1985.

He published several poetry titles with Bloodaxe, including A Kumquat for John Keats (1981), U.S. Martial (1981), v. (1985/1989), The Fire-Gap (1985), A Cold Coming (1991), The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) and Permanently Bard: Selected Poetry (1995). The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Neil Astley's critical anthology Tony Harrison (1991) included several essays and texts collected or published there for the first time.

Harrison's adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays have been staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.

His films using verse narrative include v., broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text, The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (Faber, 1995), won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998. In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war.

His most recent poetry collection, Under the Clock (Penguin, 2005), was followed by Collected Poems (Viking, 2007) and Collected Film Poetry (Faber, 2007). His latest book is Fram (Faber, 2008), a work for theatre premièred at the National Theatre in 2007.

Tony Harrison lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

J.S. Harry was born in 1939 in South Australia, and has lived in Sydney for most of her life. She has worked as an editor for Radio National and has held a residency at Australian National University. She has published eight collections of poetry, including the deer under the skin (1971), Hold, for a little while, and turn gently (1979), A Dandelion for Van Gogh (1985), The Life on Water and the Life Beneath (1995), Selected Poems (1995), winner of the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry, Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow (2000), If…And the Movable Ground (2004), and her complete collection of Peter Henry Lepus rabbit poems, Not Finding Wittgenstein (Giramondo, Australia, 2007; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2012).

Kevin Hart was born in 1954 in the village of Ockenden near London, and grew up in London and Brisbane. He has published several books of poetry in Britain, Australia and America, including Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2002) and his latest collection, Young Rain (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). His award-winning poetry has been translated into several languages, including Chinese. He is also the author of several volumes of literary criticism and theology. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Robert Hass was born in 1941 in San Francisco. He served as US Poet Laureate in 1995-97. His many awards include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Time and Materials (2007), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sun Under Wood (1996). His first collection Field Guide was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1973. His latest book of poetry is The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems (Ecco, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011). Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen books of Milosz’s poetry, including Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) and Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns (2007). He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Geoff Hattersley was born in South Yorkshire in 1956. His many collections of poetry include Port of Entry (Littlewood 1989), Don’t Worry (Bloodaxe 1994), Harmonica (Wrecking Ball 2003), and Back of Beyond (Smith Doorstop 2006).

His poems have been broadcast on local and national radio and have been used as part of syllabuses in schools, universities, and with The Open University. He is an experienced reader of his poetry and has performed and recorded musical arrangements of his poems.

He edited The Wide Skirt Press from 1986 until 1998, publishing 30 issues of the magazine and 24 books and pamphlets. He is an experienced creative writing tutor and was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Huddersfield University.

A new collection, Outside the Blue Hebium, was published by Smith Doorstop Books in July 2012.