‘’

Mandy Sutter is a writer living in West Yorkshire. Her most recent poetry collection is Old Blue Car (Kettlebell Press, 2015). She writes a monthly gardening blog about her dad’s allotment, as well as short stories and memoir pieces which have been published in magazines and anthologies.

Kelley Swain is from Rhode Island; she cut her teeth as a writer in London and Oxford for over a decade and now lives in Tasmania. She is the author of three poetry collections, two novels and a memoir. Her work emphases the history of science and medicine, and she was one of the first three poets-in-residence at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 2016. In 2019, poems from her first collection debuted as a song cycle, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Her forthcoming novel, Ophelia Swam, is set in Oxford.

Algernon Swinburne (1837 – 1909) was born in London and spent most of his childhood on the Isle of Wight. He was involved with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, after meeting Dante Gabriel Rosetti at Oxford University. A radical character, he was a poet, playwright, novelist and critic, who invented the poetic ‘roundel’ form. His books include three series of Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon (1865).

Michael Symmons Roberts is the author of several collections of poetry, including Drysalter (2013), winner of both the Costa Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Poetry. He is also a novelist and librettist who has worked extensively with composer James Macmillan on operas, song cycles and choral works. He is a Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Arthur Symons (1865 – 1945) was a British poet, translator and critic. He was born in Wales but spent most of his life in London. A two-volume collected Poems appeared in 1902, after which he wrote almost nothing due to ill health. His work explores love, loss and the passage of time. His seminal book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) introduced Symbolism to a British readership.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest and left Hungary in 1956. His first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial Prize. Since then he has published numerous collections, including Reel which won the TS Eliot Prize in 2015 and, most recently, Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe, 2016). He has also translated poetry, fiction and other work, chiefly from Hungarian. He teaches at the University of East Anglia.