Fiona Benson is the author of four poetry collections: Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, Ephemeron and Midden Witch (forthcoming). All three of her published collections have been shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize, and her books have won the Forward Prize, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Currently, Infamous Offspring, a collaboration with the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, is in production across Europe with the company Ultima Vez. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She lives in mid-Devon with her husband and their two daughters.
Fran Brearton is Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, specialising in Irish & British poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her books include The Great War in Irish Poetry (OUP), Reading Michael Longley (Bloodaxe) and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (OUP), Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (CUP), and Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Carcanet). She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2018.
Dawn Watson is the author of We Play Here (Granta Poetry), a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Pollard International Poetry Prize for outstanding debut and the inaugural PEN Heaney prize. Her pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher is published by The Emma Press. Dawn writes essays and short stories for BBC Radio 4, and her poetry and prose appear in leading journals such as Granta and The Poetry Review. She is a lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University.
