Will Burns is a poet and novelist. He first came to prominence in 2014 as a Faber New Poet and has since authored poetry collections ‘Country Music’ (Offord Road Books, 2020) which won the 2021 Laurel Prize for best first collection, & ‘Germ Songs’ (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He released the album Chalk Hill Blue in 2019, a collaboration with composer Hannah Peel whose music was set to his poems. (Hannah Peel, 2019.) His debut novel, The Paper Lantern (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021) saw Burns named among The Observer’s Top 10 Debut Novelists of 2021. He is Poet-In-Residence at Caught By The River.

Momtaza Mehri is a Somali-British poet and essayist. She grew up in the Middle East, and is currently based in London. She began writing poetry for publication in 2014. Her work has appeared in the likes of Granta, Artforum, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, and The Poetry Review. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London and columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space, as well as a Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University. In 2018 she was the co-winner of the Brunel International African Poetry prize, and in 2019 she won the Manchester Writing Prize. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published by Goldsmiths Press.