Caitríona Ní Chléirchín won first prize in the 2010 Oireachtas competition for new writers for her first collection of poetry Crithloinnir, published in July 2010. She writes reviews, academic and journalistic articles and has published poetry in Poetry Ireland Review, Comhar, Feasta, Blaiseadh Pinn, Cyphers, an t-Ultach and An Guth. She is an Irish-language lecturer at University College, Dublin, and is completing a doctorate on the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson. She spent a year in Lyon, France, studying a masters in French literature. She is originally from Emyvale in Co. Monaghan.

Greg Delanty is one of the most important lyric poets of Southern Ireland. Although the themes of his work – family and exile, politics and marriage – may seem predictable in the Irish context, his voice is unique and highly developed. Born in Cork city in 1958, Delanty was the son of a master-printer. He was an athletic youth and won many swimming awards, later becoming a summer lifeguard on the dangerous Atlantic beaches of West Kerry. After attending University College, Cork (then a haven for new poets), where he obtained his degree and post-graduate teaching diploma, he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for his first collection, Cast in the Fire.

Katie Donovan, born 1962, grew up on a farm in County Wexford and is now based in a suburb of Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin and at UC Berkeley, and spent a year in Hungary teaching English before returning to Ireland to work as a journalist with The Irish Times. She has published four poetry collections, all with the British publisher Bloodaxe, most recently Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010). Currently she works as an Amatsu practitioner and as a creative writing teacher at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. She has two children.

Michael O’Loughlin was born in Dublin in 1958 and studied at Trinity College Dublin. In the late 1970s he was involved with Dermot Bolger in setting up Raven Arts Press. In 1980 he moved to Barcelona for some years. After this, he lived in Amsterdam until 2002, where he worked mainly as a translator. He has translated over a hundred books from the Dutch, including Hidden Weddings: Selected Poems of Gerrit Achterberg. In the 1990s he concentrated on screenwriting and had a number of feature films produced.