Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E.M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for a decade from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She w as made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her poetry.

Yelena Bryksenkova was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, grew up in Cleveland, and studied Illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (BFA, 2010) and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czech Republic. She lives in Montréal, Canada, where she works as a freelance illustrator and fine artist.