Michael Hofmann was born in Germany in 1957, and grew up in England, Scotland and the US. Since 1983, he has published five books of poems, Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony, Corona, Corona, Approximately Nowhere and One Lark, One Horse, and three books of prose, Behind the Lines, Where Have You Been? and Messing About in Boats. He has edited the Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems, and made personal selections from the writings of Malcolm Lowry, and the poetry of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and W.S. Graham. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books and has translated the better part of 100 titles from German, including work by Fallada, Doblin, Kafka, Koeppen and Roth.

Jane Hirshfield is one of American poetry's central spokespersons for concerns of the biosphere. She is described as writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today,” according to The New York Times and as “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and two collections of essays, including most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020). The Asking: New & Selected Poems will appear in 2023 (Knopf, US) and in 2024 (Bloodaxe Books, UK).

Watch Jane Hirshfield in conversation with Nick Laird on the QFT Player. 

Kathleen's poetry collections include The Overhaul, which won the Costa Poetry Prize, and The Tree House, which won the Forward prize. Her non-fiction includes the highly regarded books Findings and Sightlines, both regarded as important contributions to the 'new nature writing'. Her most recent poetry collection, The Bonniest Companie appeared in 2015, and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

Mark Doty is best known for his powerful work written in response to the AIDS epidemic and his nine books of poems include My Alexandria, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and became the first book by an American poet to win the T. S. Eliot Prize in the UK in 1995. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he currently lives in New York City.