Raymond Antrobus is a British poet with Jamaican heritage and is the author of The Perseverance. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Ted Hughes Award and won the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. He was also the first poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize.

Bernardine Evaristo is a novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She won the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin). Her writing explores the African diaspora and ranges from The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a verse novel set in Roman London to Mr Loverman (2013) a novel about a gay septuagenarian Caribbean London man. Her writing spans all genres and she has received many honours including an MBE in 2009.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He is the author of Nil Nil (1993), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; God's Gift to Women (1997) - winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Rain, his most recent collection, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2009, the same year that he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy opened in Dublin in March 2018. Max lives in Bath with his family.