Michael Symmons Roberts is a British poet, born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. His books of poetry have won many awards including the Forward Prize (2013) and the Costa Poetry Award for Drysalter (2013) and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for Corpus (2004). His Selected Poems was published by Cape in 2016. As a librettist, his work with composers has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. The Sacrifice (for Welsh National Opera) with composer James MacMillan, won an RPS Award for opera, and their Royal Opera House / Scottish Opera commission – Clemency – was nominated for an Olivier Award.  Elliptics (for BBC Philharmonic) and The Anvil(for Manchester International Festival) with composer Emily Howard, were both nominated for Ivor Novello Awards. Non-fiction book Edgelands(with Paul Farley, 2011) won the Foyles Book of Ideas Award and the Jerwood Prize. He is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest book – Quartet for the End of Time – was published by Cape in 2025, and his ninth collection of poems – Dog Star – will be published in early 2026.

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she graduated from Trinity University and continues to live.  On faculty at Texas State University, she has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine, and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world. Her books include Grace Notes (Poems About Families), Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, & The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan have both been part of the Little Read program, North Carolina. She has received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Texas Writer Award 2024, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle. Her forthcoming collection of poems is called Sidekick.

Chitra Ramaswamy is a writer, journalist, and critic. Homelands (Canongate), a book about her friendship with a German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga, won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued in spring 2024. She has contributed essays to a number of collections and judged literary prizes including the Baillie Gifford prize for Non-Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the Desmond Elliot. 

Her latest book, a collection of micro-essays called Rich Things for the Alasdair Gray Archive, was published in spring 2026. She is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, for which she has won Food and Drink Writer of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards for four consecutive years and been shortlisted twice for Restaurant Writer of the Year at the Guild of Food Writers. She is also an occasional restaurant critic for The Observer, a TV critic and writer for The Guardian, and a regular contributor to Writers Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund.

John Glenday is the author of four collections. The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Grain (Picador, 2010) was shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent collection, The Golden Mean(Picador 2015) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2016 Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published by Picador in 2020.  John is a highly experienced tutor and has facilitated numerous creative writing workshops and residentials including for Moniack Mhor Writers’ Centre, the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School and the Banff Centre, Canada. He has worked for many years as a poetry mentor. He currently runs a walking and writing workshop for a mental health charity in Dundee.

Carl Phillips’s latest book of poems is SIR (Carcanet, 2027). His Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, and Scattered Snows, to the North was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. Other honours include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). He lives in Massachusetts.

Kim Moore’s third poetry collection The House of Broken Things was published by Corsair in May 2026. Her second collection All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2026 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Deputy Programme Leader of the MA and MFA in Creative Writing.