Born into a seafaring family, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch grew up in New Quay, Ceredigion. After reading Classics at Cambridge University, she took an MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She lived in Oxford, Paris and the Isles of Scilly before returning to New Quay.

A pamphlet, Stranded in Ithaca, published by the Redbeck Press in 1998 was followed by an acclaimed first full collection from Seren, Rockclimbing in Silk, in 2001, which confirmed her as an idiosyncratic poet with a startling imagination and a true facility for sensuous and arresting imagery. The recipient of a Hawthorden Fellowship in 2005 to complete her second collection, Not In These Shoes, she is the first Welsh poet to join the prestigious Picador list.

Tiffany Atkinson was born in 1972 in Berlin to an army family and has lived in Wales since 1993, when she moved to Cardiff to take an MA and PhD in Critical Theory, researching Contemporary Writing and Theories of the Body. She is now a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Atkinson has toured widely in Eastern Europe for the British Council, leading both writers’ workshops and academic seminars.

Tim Liardet was born in London in 1959 and was educated at the University of York. He has worked variously in the fields of cabinet-making, information technology and marketing, and lived for several years working solely as a freelance writer and critic. During this period he taught at the second-largest young offenders’ prison in Europe, drawing on this experience to write his prize-winning collection, The Blood Choir.