Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, England, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. Her other beautifully illustrated Christmas poems include Another Night Before Christmas, Mrs Scrooge, Wenceslas, Bethlehem, Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday, and The Wren-Boys. She was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2009.

Her collections include The World's Wife, Love Poems, Rapture, and The Bees, which won the 2011 Costa Poetry Award. David de las Heras holds a bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, and graduated in the cycle of illustration at the Escola Massana, in Barcelona. His work as painter has been exhibited in many countries such as Germany and Portugal, as well as in galleries across his native Spain.