Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Edwin George Morgan was a Scottish poet and translator associated with the Scottish Renaissance. He is widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Makar or National Poet for Scotland.
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
Ursula Askham Fanthorpe CBE FRSL was an English poet, who published as U. A. Fanthorpe. Her poetry comments mainly on social issues.
Stewart Conn is a Scottish poet and playwright, born in Hillhead, Glasgow. His father was a minister at Kelvinside Church but the family moved to Kilmarnock, Ayrshire in 1941 when he was five. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked for the BBC at their offices off Queen Margaret Drive and moved to Edinburgh in 1977, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's head of radio drama. He was Edinburgh's first makar or poet laureate in 2002–05.
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Vicki Feaver is an English poet. She has published three poetry collections. Feaver's poem "Judith", from her book, Handless Maiden, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. The book was also the recipient of a Heinemann Prize and shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Feaver was also a recipient of a Cholmondeley Award.
Leontia Flynn is a poet and writer from Northern Ireland.
Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet.
Catherine Fisher is a Welsh poet and children's novelist. She has also worked as a school and university teacher.
Debjani Chatterjee MBE is an Indian-born British poet and writer. She lives in Sheffield, England.
Hugh McMillan is a Scottish poet and short story writer.
Nicola Davies, earlier known as Nick Davies, is an English zoologist and writer. She was one of the original presenters of the BBC children's wildlife programme The Really Wild Show. More recently, she has made her name as a children's author. Her books include Home, which was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award, and Poo (2004), which was illustrated by Neal Layton, and was shortlisted for a Blue Peter Book Award in 2006; in the United States, the book is published as Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable. Her children's picture book The Promise won the Green Book Award in 2015. She has also written several novels for adults under the pseudonym Stevie Morgan.
Dilys Rose is a Scottish fiction writer and poet. Born in 1954 in Glasgow, Rose studied at Edinburgh University, where she taught creative writing from 2002 until 2017. She was Director of the MSc in Creative Writing by Online Learning from 2012 to 2017. She is currently a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her third novel Unspeakable was published by Freight Books in 2017.
Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature.
Shena Mackay FRSL is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Heligoland.
John Glenday grew up in Monifieth.
Anna Adams was an English poet and artist.
