James Harpur has had six books of poetry published, including his latest, The White Silhouette (Carcanet 2018), which includes his poem, ‘Letter to Charles Harpur’, drafted during his stay in Australia in 2016. Other books include Angels and Harvesters (2012), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize; and The Dark Age (2007), which won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize. Other prizes and bursaries include the 1995 British National Poetry Competition, two Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries, a Society of Authors Bursary, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poems have been published in national newspapers and broadcast on national radio. He has been included in many anthologies, such as The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber 2001), Staying Alive (Bloodaxe 2008), and The Best of Irish Poetry (Southword Editions 2009).

James is currently poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review, and former poetry editor of Southword, Ireland’s premier poetry e-zine. He has conducted workshops at the Arvon Foundation, Lancaster University, Galway University, and at many other venues and locations in Ireland and the UK. He has held writing residencies at the Princess Grace Kelly Irish Library, Monaco, the Munster Literature Centre in Cork and at Exeter Cathedral in the UK. In 2016 he was the Vincent Buckley Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He lives in West Cork, Ireland, and is a member of Aosdána.

Kevin Brophy is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. He has had nine books of poetry published, the latest being Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018). He is also a fiction writer and essayist. He has been runner-up for the Vogel and Christina Stead fiction awards, recipient of the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry, and in 2015 he was poet in residence at the BR Whiting Library in Rome. He was founding co-editor of Going Down Swinging from 1980 to 1994, and was a co-editor of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses from 2008 to 2018. He lives in Melbourne.