Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His previous poetry collections include Nil Nil , God's Gift to Women , Landing Light , Rain and 40 Sonnets . His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and all three Forward Prizes; he is currently the only poet to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize twice. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. He lives in Edinburgh. Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Co.

Tyrone. His debut collection, To a Fault (2005) , won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize; his second, On Purpose (2007), won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He is the author of two novels and lives between New York and London. Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collections include the selection Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-1994 (2002); The Tree House (2004), winner of both the Forward Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Award; The Overhaul (2012), which won the Costa Poetry Award; and The Bonniest Companie (2015). Her non-fiction books include the highly regarded Findings and Sightlines . She lives with her family in Fife.