Caroline Bird's selected poems, Rookie (2022), draws on two decades of work from one of the UK's most popular poets. She won the Forward Prize for her collection The Air Year (2020), and has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

Rachel Long is a writer and founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour at the Southbank Centre in London. Her debut poetry collection, My Darling from the Lions, was published by Picador in 2020 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.