text: CHRIS AGEE is a poet, essayist, photographer and editor. He was born in San Francisco on a US Navy hospital ship and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, he attended Harvard University and since graduation has lived in Ireland. His third collection of poems, Next to Nothing, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and its sequel, Blue Sandbar Moon (The Irish Pages Press), appeared in 2018. Of the latter, the novelist David Park has written: “I think it is a monumental work ranging across both the European landscape and the deepest inner worlds.” His fifth poetic work, Trump Rant (The Irish Pages Press, 2021), has just been published. He is the Editor of Irish Pages, and edited Balkan Essays (The Irish Pages Press, 2016), the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays, published simultaneously in Croatian by the leading Zagreb publishing house Fraktura. He lives in Belfast, and divides his time between Ireland, Scotland and Croatia.
  chrisagee.net
  saltpublishing.com
  www.poetrysociety.org.uk
  KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in the West of Scotland in 1962. She is the author of ten collections of poems, most recently The Tree House (Picador, 2004: winner of the Forward Prize and Scottish Book of the Year), Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-94 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002: shortlisted for the 2003 International Griffin Prize), The Overhaul (Picador, 2012: shortlisted for the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize, winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award), and The Bonniest Companie (Picador, 2015). Her non-fiction work includes Among Muslims (Sort of Books, 2002), Findings (Sort of Books, 2007) Sightlines (Sort of Books, 2012: joint winner with Robert McFarlane of the 2013 Dolman Travel Award, winner of 2014 John Burroughs Award and the 2014 Orion Book Award) and Surfacing (Sort of Books, 2019). In 2017, she received the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society for “outstanding creative writing at the confluence of travel, nature and culture.” She is the Scottish Editor of Irish Pages, and lives with her family in Fife.
  www.kathleenjamie.com
  CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH was born and grew up on a hill farm in Mín a’ Leá, Gort an Choirce, an Irish-speaking glen and Gaeltacht community in the northwest of County Donegal. The author of 18 volumes of poetry, three plays and four works of prose, he is a leading figure in the remarkable renaissance of Irish-language writing in our time. A major selection of his poetry from all of his previous collections, Crann na Teanga/The Language Tree, was published by The Irish Pages Press in 2018. Colm Tóibín has written of his poetry: “There is a section of landscape in Donegal in the North of Ireland near Falcarragh, overlooking Tory Island, which has been utterly transformed over the past decades by the poems written in Irish by Cathal Ó Searcaigh.” He is a member of Aosdána, and continues to live on the home ground of his parents.
  www.cic.ie
  Meg Bateman was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and learned Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen and in South Uist. She completed a PhD in Classical Gaelic religious poetry and taught at Aberdeen University between 1991 and 1998. Then she moved to Skye with her young son to teach at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, now part of the University of Highlands and Islands.
  Her first collection of poems, Òrain Ghaoil/Amhráin Grádha, (Love Songs) was published by Coiscéim in 1990 with Irish translations by Alec Osborne. Her next three collections, Aotromachd agus Dàin Eile/Lightness and Other Poems (1997), Soirbheas /Fair Wind) (2007) and Transparencies (2013) were all published by Polygon, the last including both Scottish Gaelic and English poems. She has co-edited and translated five anthologies of historical Gaelic verse and with John Purser, she has just completed the e-book, Window to the West: Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd (2020). She is the Scottish Gaelic Editor of Irish Pages.