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Martyn Halsall grew up in Lancashire, taught in Dorset, and was a student in Chelsea before entering journalism. After working as a reporter on local and regional newspapers he joined the Guardian as a staff correspondent, later covering industry in the North of England. An award-winning poet and journalist, he studied creative writing and creative literary studies at the Universities of Lancaster and Cumbria. He now lives and writes in Northumberland.
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Judi Sutherland was born in Stoke on Trent to Geordie parents, spent some time as a child in Northern Ireland, and since then has lived all over England from Sussex to Durham, as paid employment has dictated. She trained in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham respectively then pursued a career in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, developing new medicines.
Judi obtained her MA in Creative Writing in 2012 at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was awarded the Margaret Hewson Prize. Her poetry is mainly concerned with place, identity and belonging, and she has an interest in landscape and history – creating a 4D map of the places we inhabit. ‘Following Teisa’ was written between 2014 and 2020, when she was living in Barnard Castle, County Durham.
Her poems are widely published in magazines such as Oxford Poetry, Prole, The North, New Statesman, and online. She blogs at judisutherland.com. Her first pamphlet ‘The Ship Owner’s House’ was published by Vane Women Press in 2018.
She is currently living in Malahide, North County Dublin, Ireland, with her husband and two rescue cats, where she is writing poems about her new surroundings – Fingal – the Land of the Fair Strangers.
Judi has a website at www.judisutherland.com
Judi obtained her MA in Creative Writing in 2012 at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was awarded the Margaret Hewson Prize. Her poetry is mainly concerned with place, identity and belonging, and she has an interest in landscape and history – creating a 4D map of the places we inhabit. ‘Following Teisa’ was written between 2014 and 2020, when she was living in Barnard Castle, County Durham.
Her poems are widely published in magazines such as Oxford Poetry, Prole, The North, New Statesman, and online. She blogs at judisutherland.com. Her first pamphlet ‘The Ship Owner’s House’ was published by Vane Women Press in 2018.
She is currently living in Malahide, North County Dublin, Ireland, with her husband and two rescue cats, where she is writing poems about her new surroundings – Fingal – the Land of the Fair Strangers.
Judi has a website at www.judisutherland.com
Grevel Lindop (www.grevel.co.uk) is an award-winning poet, critic, travel writer and biographer. Born in Liverpool, Grevel was educated at Oxford and taught English Literature at Manchester University, before leaving in 2001 to become a full-time writer. His books include six collections of poems, as well as The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey; Charles Williams: The Third Inkling; and A Literary Guide to the Lake District (Lakeland Book of the Year 1994). Mysterious Wisdom: The Spiritual Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Grevel Lindop is married with three children, and lives in Manchester.
Angela Locke lives in Cumbria. She broadcasts widely on television and radio, writes poetry and two feature columns for Cumbria Life. She also teaches Creative Writing and runs international Writing Retreats. Her books have been translated all over the world. Angela first saw the Tibetan Blue Poppy growing in her sister's fellside garden in Cumbria. She became fascinated by this rare and beautiful flower and began a journey of exploration which led her to the Himalayas, to research her novel, Dreams of the Blue Poppy. She fell in love with Nepal, and in 1994 founded the Juniper Trust, which now works building schools and basic facilities for the poorest communities across the world. To find out more visit her website: www.angelalocke.co.uk
Kathleen Jones was born and brought up on a hill farm in the Lake District and currently divides her time between Italy and Cumbria. Her acclaimed biographies have included studies of Katherine Mansfield, Christina Rossetti and Catherine Cookson. Kathleen’s account of the lives of the sisters, wives and daughters of the Lake Poets, A Passionate Sisterhood, won the Barclays Bank prize for non-fiction and her latest collection of poetry, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, was a Straid Award winner. She was appointed as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2007 and last year elected as a Fellow of the English Association.
Harold Slight was born into an Irish immigrant family in the city of Carlisle. He was passionate about horses and ran away from home at the age of 14 to work on a farm. He lived on a croft in the Cheviots for a while and farmed a marginal hill farm in the Lake District. But his love of history and literature eventually drew him to writing. He lived through a particularly turbulent time for farming - just after the second world war - and he began to record his life and the changing landscape around him and the lives of the people who worked on the land.
Jan Marsh is a biographer, best known for her books on the Pre-Raphaelite circle, particularly The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. But she has also written books on Edward Thomas and the Bloomsbury Women. She is a curator at the National Portrait Gallery and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She recently curated the exhibition Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800-1900.
