Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Donald Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician. His work has won several awards, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2009.
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Anne Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Paul Farley FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Julia Copus FRSL is a British poet, biographer and children's writer.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Colette Bryce is a poet, freelance writer, and editor. She was a Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee from 2003 to 2005, and a North East Literary Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 2005 to 2007. She was the Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 2009 to 2013. In 2019 Bryce succeeded Eavan Boland as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.
Sean O'Brien FRSL is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only four poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems.
Michael Donaghy was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet.
Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Matthew Gerard Sweeney was an Irish poet. His work has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Latvian, Mexican Spanish, Romanian, Slovakian and German.
Robert Ian Duhig is a British-Irish poet. In 2014, he was chair of the judging panel for the T. S. Eliot Prize awards.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Maura Dooley is a British poet and writer. She has published five collections of poetry and edited several anthologies. She is the winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 1987 and the Cholmondeley Award in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize in 1997 and again in 2015. Her poetry collections Life Under Water (2008) and Kissing A Bone (1996) were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Gillian K. Ferguson is a Scottish poet and journalist, born and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the creator of Air for Sleeping Fish (Bloodaxe) and the best-seller, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. She won a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award and created a major poetry project exploring the human genome called The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life, About her project, she said, "the Genome has remained fascinating throughout; a fantastic, beautiful poem - a magnificent work of Chemistry spanning four billion years of the art of Evolution." The project was praised, including by broadcaster, Andrew Marr of the BBC, Francis Collins, Head of the US Human Genome Project and by philosopher Mary Midgley author of Science and Poetry (Routledge).
Kona Macphee is a British poet. She has published three poetry collections, Tails, Perfect Blue and What Long Miles. She is the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was named the poetry book of the month for July 2013 by The Observer.
