Seán Hewitt is a poet, memoirist and literary critic. His debut collection of poems, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape, 2022), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Award, Foyle’s Book of the Year (Non-Fiction), an Irish Book Award, and a Lambda Foundation Award. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and in 2023 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Seán’s recent publications include 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World (Penguin, 2023), and a second collection of poetry, Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape, 2024).

Stephen Sexton’s debut pamphlet, Oils, was published in 2014 by the Emma Press and won the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice. In 2017, Sexton finished his PhD program and won the UK National Poetry Competition. The following year, he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. 2019 saw the publication of Sexton’s first full-length, If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin). A highly acclaimed collection, it won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the John Pollard Poetry Prize. It was also named a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, New Statesman, and Telegraph. His latest collection, Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin, 2021)—a fantastical journey through real and imagined pasts—was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He lectures at Queen’s University Belfast.

Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist, librettist, and poetry editor at Banshee. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018) was an Irish Times book of the year. Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was a book of the year in The Irish Times and a best summer read of 2022 in The Guardian.  It was shortlisted for the Irish Independent/ Yeats Society Prize. She is 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. Other awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize, the Listowel Poetry Prize, and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. She is a Creative Fellow of UCD, and was 2023 Arts Council Writer in Residence in Galway University. She was a judge for the 2023 Forward Prizes and a poetry critic for The Irish Times.