Robert Sheppard started out as a novelist but turned to poetry. His books include Daylight Robbery (1990), The Flashlight Sonata (1993), Empty Diaries (1998) and The Lores (2003). Forthcoming books include Tin Pan Arcadia and Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes. Robert is Professor of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry in 1968. He is the author of two volumes of poetry: The History of Rain won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1993 and was short listed for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection the following year; Seatown was published in 1999. He has received two bursaries in literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and a Rooney Prize Special Award, and was writer-in-residence at University College Dublin in 1999-2000. He has also written Red Mist : Roy Keane & the World Cup Civil War - A Fan's Story.

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Ian McGuire has taught American Literature at the University of Manchester, but now is co-director of the Centre for New Writing. Incredible Bodies is a contemporary campus novel published by Bloomsbury in March 2006. He has published short stories and is working on a new novel.

M. J. Hyland spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne, and worked as a lawyer for several years. Her first novel, How the Light Gets In (2004), was short listed for various prizes and was joint winner of the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Award. Carry Me Down (2006), her second novel, was winner of both the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize in 2007. It was also short listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. M. J. Hyland teaches in the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University.

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Jon Glover is the Managing Editor of Stand, one of the most important magazines publishing new poetry and fiction. His latest book of poems published by Carcanet is Magnetic Resonance Imaging. His last was To the Niagara Frontier. He is a Professor at the University of Bolton and leads their MA in Creative Writing. Some of his recent poems come from the experience of being diagnosed with MS.

Jeffrey Wainwright is a Professor in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and has published several books as well as his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) and Out of the Air (1999). A new collection of his poetry, Clarity or Death! should be in print by the time of the reading.

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Stuart Calton is a musician, poet and member of the Socialist Workers' Party (UK). As a musician he goes under the name T.H.F. Drenching and runs a small mail-order record label called Fenland Hi-Brow Recordings. His first book, Sheep Walk Cut was published by Barque Press in 2003. It is a sequence of 15 poems which attempts to plot its way through the 100 years of Highland clearance which began in the mid-18th century. He is currently finishing his second volume The Bench Graft.

Ira Lightman is a conceptual poet who has expanded his range of forms to include visual poems, poems like music, mathematical poems, and poems like molecules. He does public art and performance pieces, and has work online in several places.

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Paul Magrs is a novelist who has been teaching creative writing professionally since l993. He studied at Lancaster University, and lectured full-time at UEA for seven years. He writes fiction for adults and children, and recent books include Something Borrowed (2007), Exchange (2006), Never the Bride (2006), To the Devil: A Diva! (2004), Aisles (2003), and Hands Up! (2003).

Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India. She moved to England when she was 12 years old, and later studied music at Trinity College of Music. She published her first book in 1979, and has since written many short story collections, teenage novels and books for children aged six to sixteen years. In 1992 her novel for teenage readers, The Wheel of Surya, was published, and was followed by two other books in the series: The Eye of the Horse (1994); and The Track of the Wind (1997). The trilogy reflects her background in India up to and after Independence. All three books were short listed or runners up in the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. Many of her recent books have been dramatized.

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