Biographical note

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Stafford, England. She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time. The World's Wife received the E. M. Forster Award in America, while Rapture won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her most recent volumes are New and Collected Poems for Children (2009) and The Bees (2011), which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her Collected Poems was published in 2015. She is Poet Laureate.

Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff, Wales. National Poet of Wales 2008-2016, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (2010) and the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award (2012), she is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today, as well as one of the most popular poets on the school curriculum. Poet, playwright, editor, translator, she is President of Ty Newydd writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Her collections include Making Beds for the Dead (2004) and A Recipe for Water (2009); her Selected Poems appeared in 2016.