KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in the west of Scotland in 1962, and educated in Edinburgh where she studied philosophy. Her poetry collections include The Queen of Sheba (1994), and Jizzen (1999), both of which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial award. Her Selected Poems, Mr & Mrs Scotland are Dead (2002), was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and in 2002 she was awarded a Creative Scotland Award. As well as poetry, Kathleen Jamie writes non-fiction. She holds a part-time post as Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. Andrews University and lives in Fife.
SHEENAGH PUGH was born in 1950 and lives in Cardiff where she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Id's Hospit (1997), Stonelight (1999), which won the 2000 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year, and The Beautiful Lie (2002), shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award. Her Selected Poems was published in 1990 and was followed, in 2003, by a 'mini-selected', What If This Road: and other poems. Sheenagh Pugh also translates poems, mainly from the German but also from French and Ancient Greek, and is, in addition,the author of two novels: Kirstie's Witnesses (1998) and Folk Music (1999). Her most recent collection of poems, The Movement of Bodies, appeared earlier this year. www.geocities.com/sheenaghpugh
CAROL RUMENS was born in 1944 in South London. Based in Belfast for some years, where she was Poet in Residence at Queen's University, she has also held residencies in Cork, Canterbury and Stockholm and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Bangor. "Carol Rumens is one of the few women poets writing today whose seriousness is absolute but not closed; whose political beliefs are so enmeshed with her intelligence and sympathetic passions that it is impossible to consider the state of contemporary poetry in Britain without taking her work into account..."-Poetry Review. Her most recent book is Poems 1968-2004, which draws on some 11 previous titles as well as on pamphlets and uncollected poems.