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Caroline Hawkridge lives in Cheshire. She wrote women’s health books (Little Brown, Penguin) before turning to her love of poetry. Her poems have been published by small press magazines such as The Dark Horse, The Interpreter’s House and Magma, and Highly Commended by the national Magma, York and Torbay competitions. Her prize-winning poems about bog plants are engraved in the Moorland Discovery Centre. She works freelance as a project manager, agent and researcher for well-established writers.

Mark Haworth-Booth was born in Yorkshire and grew up in Sussex. He is a poet who was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) from 1970-2004. He is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. His debut poetry collection is The Thermobaric Playground (Dempsey and Windle, 2022).

Robert Hayden was a twentieth-century American poet who became the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His poetry collections span nearly forty years, beginning with Heart-Shape in the Dust in 1940 and ending with American Journal in 1978, published two years before he died. One of his abiding preoccupations was black history and experience and the importance of his work has been widely recognised. He received a number of awards including the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

Martin Hayes was born in Paddington, London, in 1966 and has lived in and around the area all his life.  His collection Letting Loose the Hounds was runner-up in the Redbeck Press Poetry Competition and was published by Redbeck Press in 2001, to critical acclaim.

Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013) was born in County Derry, the eldest of nine children. Widely acknowledged as a leading contemporary poet of his day, his ground-breaking and distinctive poetry was published from the early 1960s and won many major poetry awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

John Heath-Stubbs (1918 – 2006) was a prolific critic, anthologist, translator and poet who was awarded an OBE in 1988. His poetry often reflected his interest in classical mythology and history, and he was noted for his determination to remain true to his own tastes rather than following literary fashion. Although he had completely lost his sight by 1978, he continued to write until the end of his life.