David Harsent won the 2005 Forward Prize for Legion, which was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the TS Eliot Award; he has also been the recipient of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, an Eric Gregory Award, two Arts Council bursaries and a Society of Authors Fellowship.

David Harsent’s work is both varied, and like that of all important writers, instantly recognisable. He is also conspicuous among British poets through his rich version of poetic practice. Not only a lyric poet of great distinction, he is also a librettist: most notably for Sir Harrison Birtwistle, with whom he has written Gawain (1991), The Woman and The Hare, The Ring Dance of the Nazarene and The Minotaur, which premiered in London’s Royal Opera House on 15th April 2008. His collaborations with Birtwistle and other composers have also been performed at Carnegie Hall, the South Bank Centre, the Proms, the Megaron (Athens), Wiener Staatsoper, and on BBC2 and Channel 4 television.

Pauline Stainer has always worked outside the metropolitan poetry community. Yet she won first prize in the Stroud Festival poetry competition in 1984, and has won major awards in several other competitions, including the TLS and the King’'s Lynn, Cheltenham, Leek, Hastings and York festival competitions. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1987, and came to wider notice with her quietly beautiful first volume, The Honeycomb (1989). Like her next books, Sighting the Slave Ship (1992) and The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994), it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 1994 she was selected for the seminal New Generation Poets promotion. Her fourth collection, The Wound-Dresser's Dream (1996), was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Peter Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1929. He moved to London in 1951, and became associated with ‘The Group’ of poets including Martin Bell and Phillip Hobsbaum. Porter worked in bookselling and advertising before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in 1968, working for The Observer as poetry critic. In 1999, OUP published two volumes of Porter’s poetry covering the years 1961-1981 (volume 1), and 1984 -1999 (volume 2).

In 2001, 50 years after leaving Australia, he returned to Melbourne for the premiere of The voice of Love, a song cycle combining the words of Peter Porter, and the music of the British composer Nicholas Maw. In the same year, he was Poet-in-Residence for the Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.