Peter Benson is the author of twelve novels, and winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Encore Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has also published short stories, screenplays and poetry, and his work has been adapted for television and radio, and translated into several languages. His previous novel,The Stromness Dinner was published in 2020. His website is www.peterbenson.net. His latest novel, Kindap Fury of the Smoking Lovers, was published in June earlier this year.

SL Grange is a poet and theatre-maker. Their work engages with queer community, marginalised voices and unruly ghosts. Recent work includes: Wou d'Uelzecht created with composer Catherine Kontz; A Note to Mary Frith, commissioned by Shakespeare's Globe and Bodies and Other Haunted Houses, winner of the Poetry Wales pamphlet competition 2021.

Hilary Llewellyn-Williams has been a Seren poet since 1987. Her first collection The Tree Calendar won a WAC Young Writers Award the following year. Three further collections followed: Book of Shadows (1990); Animaculture (1997); and Greenland (2003). A reprint of her first three books in one volume, Hummadruz, appeared in 2000.  During these years she was active in the poetry scene, performing her work widely in the UK and abroad, reviewing, giving writing workshops and teaching in schools and universities. She was a regular tutor at Ty Newydd Writers Centre in North Wales, as well as for the Arvon Foundation. She taught and read alongside Wales’ finest poets, and her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies. For several years she was joint poetry editor of the journal Scintilla, with Anne Cluysenaar and Graham Hartill. In 2003 she embarked on a change of career, training as a psychotherapist while continuing creative writing tutoring with the Open University.  She now has a thriving private counselling practice in Abergavenny. Her New and Selected Poems, The Little Hours, has just been published by Seren in June 2022, reintroducing her poetry to a new and wider audience.

John Downing (1940-2020) was an award-winning photojournalist whose career spanned over five decades. As Chief Photographer on the Daily Express, he not only witnessed natural and man-made disasters, but also war zones and famine; he covered royal tours, political events, the famous and the infamous, the needy and the poor.

He won numerous awards, including the British Press Photographer of the Year an unprecedented seven times, the United Nations Gold Medal in 1990 and the International Photographer of the Year in 1994 (La Nation, Argentina). 

In 1992 he was honoured with an MBE for ‘Services to Journalism’; in 2001 he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK Picture Editors Guild and in 2011 he received an Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society.  His biography Aperture: Life Through a Fleet Street Lens was published by Seren in early June 2022 and features contributions from Wendy Holden and Jeremy Bowen.