John McAuliffe was born in 1973, grew up in Listowel, County Kerry and studied at universities in Galway, Southern Illinois and Dublin. Director of the annual Dun Laoghaire
Poetry Now Festival, he lives with his family in Manchester where he teaches at the University. He won the RTE Poet of the Future Award in 2000 and the Sean Dunne National Poetry Award in 2002. His collection,
A Better Life (Gallery), was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize.
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Geoff Hattersley was born in 1956 in South Yorkshire where he still lives. From 1986 to 1998 he was editor of The Wide Skirt Press, publishing 31 issues of the poetry magazine plus 24 books and pamphlets. The most recent of his thirteen collections is
Back Of Beyond: New and Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop 2006). He is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University.
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Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany and came to England in 1961. He read English at Cambridge and since 1983 has worked as a freelance editor, a regular reviewer for the TLS and London Review of Books, and translator of over forty works from the German including Durs Grünbein’s Ashes for Breakfast. He has published four prize-winning collections of poems, most recently Approximately Nowhere (Faber 1999), and teaches one semester a year at the University of Florida. read a poem
Jenny Joseph was born in Birmingham in 1932 and studied at Oxford, before becoming a journalist. She now lives in Gloucestershire. She has published children’s books and non-fiction, and worked with photographers, painters, musicians and actors. The author of ‘Warning’, voted the nation’s favourite poem in a BBC poll, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. This year sees the publication of her tenth collection, Extreme of Things (Bloodaxe). read a poem
Nick Laird was born in 1975 in County Tyrone and studied English at Cambridge. After periods spent in Warsaw and Boston, where he was a visiting fellow at Harvard University, he now lives in London. His first novel, Utterly Monkey (2005), received this year’s Betty Trask Award and his To A Fault (Faber 2005) won both the Rooney Prize in Ireland and last year’s Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. read a poem
Michael Morpurgo was born in St Albans in 1943 and studied at London University. In 1976 after ten years of teaching, he and his wife set up Farms for City Children, a charity with farms in Devon, Gloucestershire and Wales providing inner city youngsters with an experience of country life. Children’s Laureate 2003–5, he has written over a hundred books and edited poetry anthologies, including Because a Fire Was In My Head: 101 Poems to Remember (2002) and Cock Crow (Egmont 2004) with Jane Feaver.
Joan Margarit was born in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War in Sanauja, La Segarra region, in Catalonia. One of Spain’s best known architects, from 1968 until retirement he was Professor of Structural Calculations at Barcelona’s School of Architecture. He originally wrote in Spanish, but in 1978 he switched languages and is now recognised as a major Catalan poet. His Tugs in the Fog (Bloodaxe), a selection of work from eight collections, is his first English book and will be launched at the Festival. read a poem
Philip Levine was born in Detroit in 1928 and studied at night school at Wayne State University while doing a succession of heavy labouring jobs. He now teaches at New York City University. His sixteen collections include What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award, The Simple Truth (1994), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and a new Selected, Stranger to Nothing (Bloodaxe 2006). He recently received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. read a poem
Choman Hardi was born in Kurdistan in 1974. Forced to leave Iraq when she was fourteen by chemical weapon attacks on the Kurds, she studied at Oxford and University College, London. Although she has published three collections in Kurdish, she now writes in English and her first UK collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe), was published in 2004. She recently completed doctoral research on the mental health of Kurdish women refugees. read a poem
