Tracey Herd was born in 1968 in East Kilbride but has lived on the east coast of Scotland for most of her life. She studied at Dundee University, where she was Creative Writing Fellow in 1998-2001. In 1993 she won an Eric Gregory Award, and in 1995 a Scottish Arts Council Bursary. In 2002 she collaborated on a short opera, Descent, with the composer Gordon McPherson for Paragon Ensemble which was performed at the Traverse Theatre in Glasgow. In 2004 she received a second Scottish Arts Council bursary. She is a freelance writer who worked for some years as a bookseller, and has latterly been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her first collection, No Hiding Place (Bloodaxe Books, 1996) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Dead Redhead (2001), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third collection is due from Bloodaxe in 2014.

Born in 1910, Miguel Hernández was a self-educated goatherd from the tiny Spanish town of Orihuela who tried hard to be accepted among his older contemporaries. Lorca wrote to the young poet in 1933, telling him to stop struggling to get along in a 'circle of literary pigs'. Both Lorca and Hernández would soon be caught up in the storm that was the Spanish Civil War. Hernández volunteered and served the Republican Army at the front, later defending Madrid itself. When Madrid finally fell to Franco in 1939, Hernández tried to cross into Portugal and soon after he was turned back, he was imprisoned. Hernandez wrote his last poems in jail while fatally ill with tuberculosis. He died three years later, his tuberculosis untreated, still in prison on March 28, 1942: he was only 31.

Heversham Grammar School existed for more than 370 years from 1613 until 1984, when it amalgamated with the comprehensive school in Milnthorpe to become the boarding house and 6th form college of Dallam School.