Patrick Crotty is a critic, editor and translator. He has published widely on Irish, Scottish and Welsh poetry, and is currently Professor of Irish and Scottish Literature and Head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen. His main research interests are 20th century poetry in Ireland and Scotland. He has also worked on 18th Century Irish and Scottish poetry in English, Gaelic and Scots, on American poetry and on contemporary fiction. His Penguin Book of Irish Poetry appeared in 2010. He is currently editing the first volume of the three-volume Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid.

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick but now lives in Co Sligo. His first novel, City Of Bohane, was published in April 2011, although he has already earned much acclaim for his collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, which was published in 2007 and awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Best European Fiction 2011, and many other journals and anthologies around the world. He also works on plays, screenplays, graphic stories and essays. He wrote the award-winning short film, The Ballad of Kid Kanturk, while his feature film screenplay, Memorabilia, is in development.

John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of seven novels for adults, including the international bestsellers Mutiny on the Bounty and The House of Special Purpose, as well as The Thief of Time , The Congress of Rough Riders, Crippen and Next of Kin. He has written two novels for younger readers, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which sold over 5 million copies worldwide, topped the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a Miramax feature film, and, in 2010, Noah Barleywater Runs Away. His latest novel is The Absolutist. His books are published in over 40 languages..

Fran Brearton is reader in English at Queen's University Belfast and assistant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and her  research interests are in modern British and Irish poetry, and war writing. She is author of The Great War in Irish Poetry (OUP 2000), and Reading Michael Longley (Bloodaxe 2006). She co-edited Last before America: Irish and American Writing (Blackstaff, 2001), and is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, and is writing a book about Robert Graves and twentieth-century poetry.  She was the 2004 British Academy Chatterton Lecturer on English Poetry.

Dennis Cahill is a master guitarist, as well-versed in classical, blues, jazz and rock as he is in traditional music. A native of Chicago, born to parents from County Kerry, he studied at the city's Music College before becoming an active member of the local music scene. In addition to his work with Martin Hayes, Dennis has performed with fiddlers, Liz Carroll, Eileen Ivers and Kevin Bourke. Over the past few years Dennis has produced numerous albums, including  singer Niamh Parson’s award winning CD “Heart’s Desire.”

Daragh Carville is an Armagh-born playwright and screenwriter. His  plays, which include This Other City, Language Roulette, Observatory, Dumped and Family Plot, have been widely produced in Britain, Ireland, and abroad.. He also writes for television, cinema and radio. His television drama on drugs awareness for young people, The Family, was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1998 and his radio play, Regenerations, was nominated for the Richard Imison Award. Daragh’s feature films include Middletown and Cherrybomb. He has been working on Tiger, a feature film for BBC Films, to be directed by Middletown director, Brian Kirk.

Harry Clifton was born in Dublin in 1952 but has lived in Africa and Asia as well as more recently in Europe. He has published six collections of poems including The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-1988 (Gallery Press 1992) and Secular Eden:Paris Notebooks 1994-2004( Wake Forest University Press 2007). On the Spine of Italy, his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, was published by Macmillan in 1999. For ten years he lived in France, publishing Le Canto d’Ulysse, his poems in French translation in 1996, and returning to Ireland in 2004. He lives in Dublin and is currently Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Bob Collins is Chief Commissioner of the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland to which position he was appointed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in August 2005. He spent almost thirty years with RTÉ where he had been Director of Television Programmes from 1986 to 1993, Assistant Director-General from March 1995, and Director-General (1997 – 2003).  He has been Chairman of the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) Television Committee and a member of the European Commission’s Steering Group on Equality in the Media. In 2009 he was appointed as first Chairperson of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and he is a Board member of the Ulster Orchestra. 

Padraig Coyle was born in Dublin and grew up in Armagh. A graduate of TCD, he has worked as a sports journalist and producer for Downtown Radio and BBC Northern Ireland. He is now a freelance reporter and sports writer and contributes regularly to BBC, RTE, Culture NI and a number of journals and newspapers. He is the author of three published books including Paradise Lost and Found - The Story of Belfast Celtic and Alex Moore’s Almanac. With Grimes & McKee, he co-wrote the play 'Paradise', which was premiered at the Lyric Theatre in 2004. He is the Chair of the Belfast Celtic Society.

CL Dallat was born in Ballycastle, Co.Antrim and now lives in London. He has worked in television, publishing, public utilities and information technology and he has taught systems analysts in India. He writes on Irish fiction and drama for a range of literary journals including The Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, and he has been a regular panellist on Radio 4’s Saturday Review since 1998. His poetry appears in a range of literary magazines and anthologies and his collections are Morning Star (Lagan Press, 1998) and The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff Press, 2009).

Theo Dorgan, born in Cork, is a poet, prose writer, editor, scriptwriter, translator and sailor. His poetry collections include The Ordinary House of Love (1991), Rosa Mundi (1991), Sappho’s Daughter (1998), What This  Earth Cost Us (2008) and Greek (2010).His prose  works include Sailing for Home, an account of a transatlantic voyage under sail and Time on the Ocean, A Voyage from Cape Horn to Cape Town, which was  published by New Island in October 2010.. His translations of the Slovenian poet Barbara Korun were published as Songs of Earth and Light and he translates from the Irish and from the French. His own work has appeared in Italian and Spanish editions.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965, studied painting at Chelsea School of Art, is currently Professor of Poetry at Lancaster University and is one of Britain’s leading Next Generation poets. He has been awarded the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Dearmer Award, the Whitbread Award, and Forward Poetry Prizes for his first collection, The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You (1998) and for best individual poem. Other collections include The Ice Age and Tramps in Flames. Faber & Faber published The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (2010) and he has recently co-written Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness (with Michael Symmons Roberts, Cape, 2010).

Anne-Marie Fyfe, poet, creative-writing teacher, arts-organiser & former Chair of the Poetry Society, (2006-2009), was born in Cushendall and now lives in West London. She has published four volumes of poetry, including The Ghost Twin (2005) and Understudies: New and Selected Poems, published by Seren Books in 2010.She won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition (2004) with her poem Curaçao Dusk. She has been Aldeburgh's Poetry Trust Writer-in-Residence (2003) and established Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour in 1997. Shas has hoted many poetry events and festivals and has talked on poets and on the poetry world on TV and radio. She has been co-organiser of the John Hewitt Spring Festival in the Glens of Antrim since 2003.

David Heap trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic School. He came to Ireland to play Lancey in Field Day’s world premiere of Brian Friel’s “Translations”. Favourite work in Irish theatre has included the Irish Times nominated one man show, Race of the Ark Tattoo; the original Berkoff Salomé at the Gate; Francis Hardy in Faith Healer with Tinderbox; the two Alice shows with Blue Raincoat; Titus Andronicus and Macbeth with Siren Productions; Much Ado About Nothing at the Lyric, Belfast; Gloucester in King Lear for Second Age and Beast by Elena Bolster. Recent television work has seen him in The Clinic and Fair City; as the Marquess of Ormonde in Cromwell in Ireland and Jack Taylor on TV3.

Jorie Graham was born in New York City, grew up in Rome and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000) and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her honours include a John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin.  He has published widely on Shakespeare and on Irish literature: his books include Bernard Shaw: a Critical View (Macmillan 1984), Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey (Colin Smythe 1993, co-edited with Dan H. Laurence) and The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1999). His most recent publications include Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford University Press, 2008), the New Mermaids edition of Major Barbara (A.C. Black 2008) and the edited collection J.M. Synge, Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908 (Lilliput Press, 2009).  His memoir Nothing Quite Like It: an American Irish Childhood will be published in the autumn.

Martin Hayes was born in East County Clare and now resides in the US. He grew up playing traditional music with his father, P.J. Hayes, leader of the famed Tulla Ceili Band. He has been an All-Ireland fiddle champion six times, was a recipient of a National Entertainment Award and was named Man of the Year in 1999 by the American Irish Historical Society. Martin Hayes was listed among the most influential 100 Irish people at the start of the new Millennium by the Irish Times and was also cited as one of the most important musicians to come out of Ireland in 50 years. In the last few years Martin has written the scores for a contemporary US dance company, a one-hour documentary and a short animated film as well as being a guest musician on numerous albums.

Dermot Healy was born County Westmeath, in 1947, and now lives in Co Sligo. His books include the short story collection, Banished Misfortune (1984),  and four novels -  Fighting with Shadows (1984),  A Goat's Song (1994), Sudden Times (1999) Long Time, No See (2011). His acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home, was published in 1996. The Gallery Press has published his four collections of poems, The Ballyconnell Colours (1992), What the Hammer (1998),The Reed Bed (2001) and, most recently,  A Fool’s Errand (2010). A member of Aosdána, his awards include the Encore Award (1995) and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award, 2002.

Norbert Hirschhorn who left Austria as a baby with his Jewish parents in 1939, grew up in the US, and now lives in Beirut and London He is a frequent commentator on the Middle East. He is a physician specialising in the public health of women and children in USA and Third World, and was commended in 1993 by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero.” He is also a prize-winning poet, and his poems, with a strong international flavour, have been published in over three dozen journals, seven anthologies and four pamphlets, His poetry collections include A Cracked River (1999), and Mourning in the Presence of a Corpse (2008).

Eva Hoffmann left Krakow as a child in the aftermath of the Second World War with her Holocaust-survivor parents to live in exile in Canada and has gone on to become  the foremost writer on pre-war, post-war and post-Wall life, in Central Europe, with her books, Exit into History, Lost in Translation, Shtetl and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004). She is also a novelist, with The Secret (2002), which  explores themes of memory and violence, and Illuminations (2008), a novel set in her native Poland, about ‘reparation, clashing values and the forked nature of romanticism’.

Keith Jeffery was educated in Ireland, the USA and Cambridge (St John’s College), where he won the Prince Consort Prize and Seeley Medal. He has taught at the Ulster Polytechnic and the University of Ulster for over twenty years and is now Professor of British History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is author or editor of fourteen books, including a prize-winning biography of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson for which he was awarded the Templer Medal from the Society for Army Historical Research in 2007 for the best book of the year His ground-breaking official history, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–49, was published by Bloomsbury in September 2010. In 2009 he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. Her first pamphlet, Persian Miniatures (Smith/Doorstop 1990) was a winner of the Poetry Business competition 1989 and her most recent collection, The Meanest Flower, published by Carcanet in 2007, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mimi is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its anthologies of new writing, Tying the Song (2000), Entering the Tapestry (2003) and I Am Twenty People! (2007), published by Enitharmon Press.

Jane Kirwan was born in Northampton and has lived in Nigeria but now divides her time between London and the Czech Republic. Her poems have appeared in various magazines in Britain, Ireland and the Czech Republic, and her poetry collections include Stealing the Eiffel Tower (1997) and The Man Who Sold Mirrors (Rockingham, 2003). Her poems appear in Second Exile (Rockingham, 2010) alongside the prose of Aleš Macháèek. She has read at poetry festivals throughout UK and Europe, including Ledbury, Den Poezie and the European festival of Poetry and Wine in Valtice.

Aleš Macháèek was born in Prague in 1946 and worked as an irrigation engineer but was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in 1977 for his part in underground distrIbution of books and western periodicals. He emigrated to London in 1985 where he helped the Palach Press Agency set up by Jan Kavan. From 2000 he has lived in Prague and London and in 2011 was given the Gratias Agit in recognition of his activities. His work was first published in Bytem v hruze: Dwelling in Horror - Sketches from prison Otmar Oliva (2002).

Andrea McCartney works as a freelance documentary film maker and as an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing with the Open University. In the past year she has produced and directed 'The Belfast Blitz' and 'Ice Emigrants' for BBC NI and produced 'Ruby and the Duke', a musical biography of Ruby Murray presented by Duke Special for the RTE Arts Lives strand.  One of her more recent credits was as director on the popular BBC NI series ‘Dancehall Sweethearts’. Andrea McCartney is also a writer of short fiction.

Molly McCloskey was born and grew up in USA and now lives in Ireland. Her short stories have won a number of prizes, including Ireland’s RTE/Francis MacManus Award. She is the author of two short story collections – Solomon’s Seal (Phoenix House, 1997), and The Beautiful Changes (Lilliput Press, 2002). Her first novel, Protection, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2005. While living in Ireland, she has worked as a free-lance journalist, fiction writer and creative writing teacher, and is a regular contributor to the Irish Times and the Dublin Review.. Her first full-length work of non-fiction, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, is being published by Penguin Ireland this Summer.

Susan McKay is CEO of the National Women's Council of Ireland. One of Ireland's best known journalists and commentators, her awards include an Amnesty award in 2001 for an investigation into the effects of domestic violence on children, In 2000 she won “Print Journalist of the Year” in the National media awards and in 2002 she won the “Feature Writer of the Year” award. She has been Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune and has also written for The Irish Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Irish News and the Village magazine. Her books include Bear in Mind These Dead (Faber 2008), Without Fear, a history of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (New Island 2006),  Sophia's Story and Northern Protestants - An Unsettled People (Blackstaff 2000).

Tommy McKearney, a native of Co Tyrone and now living in Monaghan was a senior member of the Provisional IRA from the early 1970s until his arrest in 1977. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he served 16 years during which time he participated in the 1980 hunger strike in the Maze. He is now project manager of the Conflicts of Interest project delivered by Expac Ltd and throughout that period has overseen the delivery of a number of innovative projects. The cross community and cross border magazine ‘The Other View’, ground breaking research into the impact of long term imprisonment and now the Conflicts of Interest project. Tommy McKearney is also an active trade unionist and a member of the national executive of the Independent Workers Union. He has written extensively on matters relating to the Northern Ireland political situation over many years.  He also has an MSc in Future Technology from the University of Ulster.

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. His dozen or so poetry collections range from New Weather (Faber, 1973) to Maggot (Faber, 2010). He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Born 1942 in Cork. Is a poet, a founder-editor of the literary magazine Cyphers, andAssociate Professor of English, Trinity College, Dublin, where she has taught since 1966 and has been Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters) from 2001 to 2005.  She has published seven collections of poetry. Born in Cork City in 1942, her collections include Acts and Monuments (1972), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), The Brazen Serpent (1994) and The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001). Her Selected Poems appeared in 2008 and she won the Griffin Poetry Prize for international poets in 2010 for her most recent collection, The Sun-fish.

Malachi O'Doherty is a Belfast-based writer, broadcaster and one of Northern Ireland's best-known journalists and cultural commentators. He specialises in political commentary and radio reportage, and is a former editor of Fortnight Magazine. He is a regular contributor to BBC Northern Ireland programmes including Talkback, Hearts and Minds and Sunday Sequence. His fifth book, a memoir, Under His Roof, was published in December 2009 by Summer Palace Press. Malachi's other books are: Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat from Religion 2008), The Trouble With Guns (1998), I Was A Teenage Catholic (2003) and The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 (2007) and  Empty Pulpits: Ireland's Retreat from Religion (2008). For the past year he has been BBC Writer in Residence at QUB.

Nessa O’Mahony was born in Dublin and works as a freelance teacher and writer. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals and has been translated into several European languages. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. She was Artist in Residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies in UCD in 2008/09. She has published three books – her first collection, Bar Talk, appeared in 1999. Her second, Trapping a Ghost, was published in 2005. A verse novel, In Sight of Home, was published by Salmon in 2009. 

Dawn Purvis was, until recently, an Independent member of the NI Assembly representing East Belfast. After an early career in the health service Dawn became involved in community development which would ultimately lead to her position in front line politics. She joined the PUP in 1994 and was part of the talks team leading up to and after the Good Friday Agreement. After the death of David Ervine in 2007 Dawn was appointed as his successor and subsequently elected as Leader and MLA in her own right in March 2007.  In the aftermath of the murder of Bobby Moffett in May 2010, Dawn resigned her position as Party Leader as well as her membership of the PUP.  

Heather Richardson's first novel, Magdeburg, an historical novel set in Germany during the Thirty Years War, was published by Lagan Press in 2010. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and Ireland. A mini-collection of her short stories, Chilled, was released as a Kindle e-book earlier this year. She works as an Associate Lecturer with the Open University, teaching Creative Writing.

Imogen Stuart, was born in Berlin in 1927, and was apprenticed to Otto Hitzberger before moving to Ireland in 1951. Her influences range from German expressionism to early Irish Christian art, and she works in wood, stone, bronze, steel, clay, plaster and terracotta. She has exhibited at the Salzburg Biennale (1962); the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin (1987); and the Solomon Gallery, Dublin (1996, 1997, 2002). Her sculptures have been displayed in public places across Ireland and especially churches, from Christ Church and Armagh Cathedrals to St. Patrick's Purgatory and the Dublin Airport church. A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the RHA in 2002. She has received honorary degrees from Trinity College (2002), UCD (2004) and NUI Maynooth (2005).

Wireless Mystery Theatre, based in Belfast, transports audiences back to the Golden Age of radio, with faithful recreations of old-time radio suspense plays, with live music, real sound effects, and commercials from the period. Selected as one of the top picks in Belfast's first Fringe Festival by the Belfast Telegraph last October, Wireless Mystery Theatre's past productions include a re-enactment of The Mercury Theatre (Orson Welles) uncut studio version of The 39 Steps. In December 2010 WMT entered into the spirit of the season with the Mercury Theatre 1940 broadcast of A Christmas Carol which was well received by audiences at The Black Box. The company have made appearances on BBC Arts Extra, This New Day with Kim Lenaghan, and The Gerry Kelly Show.