Born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1975, Nick Laird was educated at Cookstown High School and Cambridge University. He worked as a lawyer for several years before leaving law to write full-time. The recipient of many prizes for his poetry and fiction, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, the Betty Trask Prize, a Somerset Maugham award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, he has lived in London, Warsaw, and Rome. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York and Professor at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is a poet from the Himalayan town of Palampur, India who studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla and Trinity College, Dublin. Her poems have been translated into Italian, German, Arabic; and have recently appeared and are forthcoming in Madras Courier, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Lonely Crowd, Ambit, Poetry Jukebox, and elsewhere. Supriya was one of the twelve poets selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series in 2018. She has contributed to the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project in Antwerp, Belgium. She is currently studying for an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast.