Ruth Padel was Judge for 2016 International Man Booker Prize, and Chair of Judges for the 2016 TS Eliot Prize. She is Reader in Poetry at King’s College London. Her latest collection Tidings is a book-length narrative poem about homelessness, sunrise and Christmas:’Magical – a literary and emotional feat, (Observer).

Ruth Wiggins lives in London; her poem is an exercise in Martianism. Her work has been recently published in Poetry Review, POETRY, Blackbox Manifold and Perverse. Her pamphlet Myrtle is published by the Emma Press, and her collection a handful of string is due from Paekakariki Press in May.

S.J. Ryan was born in England and has lived in South Africa, Ireland and the Caribbean. A lawyer by profession, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She has been published in The Stony Thursday Book and is currently working on several short stories and an historical novel.

Saba Sams is currently studying an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her short stories have been published online at Litro, The Forge, The Manchester Review, and elsewhere. She is a fiction editor at The Stockholm Review of Literature.

Saint James Harris Wood currently resides in a California high desert penal colony thanks to a heroin smoking habit he picked up in Thailand while on the road with his gothic blues band.

Sally Read has had poems published in a number of magazines including Poetry Wales and Tabla, and was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award this year. She lives in North London where she teaches English and nurses psychiatric patients on a freelance basis.

Sally Rooney was born in County Mayo. Her writing has appeared in Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, Granta and Winter Pages. Her first novel, ‘Conversations With Friends’, is published by Faber.

Salvatore Quasimodo was born in Sicily in 1901 and died in Naples in 1968. A poet, critic, and translator, his collections include Poesie (1938), Giorno dopa giorno (1948) and Il falso e vero verde (1956). He was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1959.

Sam Coll’s debut novel, The Abode of Fancy, will be published by The Lilliput Press in spring 2016. His work has previously appeared in Granta and Dubliners 100. He lives in Dublin.

Sandra Herman is a Canadian artist and writer of dark short stories and flash fiction. She studied fine arts at York University and has gone on to exhibit photographs in Toronto, Ottawa, and Berlin. Her writing has appeared in the NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology.

Rita Ann Higgins has published ten books of poetry, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005), Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) and Tongulish (2016) from Bloodaxe, and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010) from Salmon. Throw in the Vowels was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems. Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2008), The Empty Frame (2008) and The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors (2014). Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989 and several Arts Council bursaries, and she is a member of Aosdána.

Rob Buchanan is an aspiring poet, novelist and drinker with a writing problem. He writes a column for the Irish LGBT magazine, The Outmost, and his poems here are the first he has published.

Rob Doyle is the author of ‘Here Are The Young Men’ and ‘This Is the Ritual’. His next book, ‘Threshold’, will be published in January by Bloomsbury.

Robert Bolton was born in Australia of Irish parentage and lives in France. His poems have appeared in major Australian journals. A small collection, Three Laws of Succession, was published by Picaro Press in 2005.

Robert Fisher is the songwriter behind Willard Grant Conspiracy and hopes to someday become a better human. www.willardgrantconspiracy.com

Robert Gibb’s books include After, which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017. Other awards include a National Poetry Series title (The Origins of Evening), two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize.

Robert Hopkins is a Dublin-based writer. He worked as a climber in the arboricultural industry in the UK and USA for ten years before returning to Ireland to study History and English Literature at Trinity college. He was longlisted for the 2009 Davy Byrnes Award, has been published in The Stinging Fly and was a regular contributor to the someblindalleys website.

Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels and six volumes of short stories, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel is Perfume River about war and families and memory.

Robin Fuller is from Dublin. He has a PhD on the semiotics of typography from Trinity College Dublin, and has previously published non-fiction on semiotics, typography and design. This is his first fiction publication.

Roderick Ford has won several poetry prizes and is currently working on his third collection. A new play, The Threshold of Yellow, should be ready shortly.

Róisín Bryce was born in Derry in 1967. She has only begun to write in the last few years and has published her work in several local magazines. She is working on her first book of short stories.

Róisín Kelly was born in west Belfast, raised in Leitrim, and currently lives in Cork. Her publications include Rapture (Southword Editions, 2016) and Mercy (forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books, March 2020). She won the Fish Poetry Prize in 2017.

Róisín McDermott was born in County Down, in the shadow of the dark Mournes. She now lives in Kildare, via Eglantine Avenue, South Ken and Earls Court. She recently completed an MA in English at NUI
Maynooth. ‘Desire’ is her first published story. Further short fiction will be included in an autumn anthology of new writing from the Irish Writers’ Centre.

Roisín O’Donnell has family roots in Derry city and now lives in County Meath. Her collection of stories Wild Quiet was published by New Island Books; it was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award, longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and chosen as one of the Irish Times ‘Books of the Year.’ Her short fiction has won the An Post Irish Book Award for Story of the Year, and her stories can be found in major anthologies of Irish women’s writing The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore. Most recently one of her stories was adapted for stage by Big Telly Theatre Company, as part of the Belfast International Festival. roisinodonnell.com

Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast who now lives in London. She has written essays for ‘The Guardian’, ‘The New York Times Magazine’, ‘The Baffler’ and others.

Rachel Gippetti was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Five years ago she moved to the south West of England where she now lives with her husband in a tiny flat. Poems have recently appeared in Shearsman Magazine and The Apple Valley Review.

Rachel J Fenton won Plymouth University’s Short Fiction Prize, the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, and was runner-up in the Ambit Summer Competition. She is published widely in anthologies and journals and lives in Auckland.

Rachel Mulholland is from Dundalk, County Louth. Her work has been published in magazines such as The Bohemyth and The Pickled Body.

Rachel Plummer has had poems published in magazines including Mslexia and
Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for poetry.
Find her at www.rachelplummer.co.uk

Rachel Sneyd is a Dublin-based YA writer. She has worked in politics, education
and the non-profit sector. She reviews children’s books for Inis and Gobblefunked.com.