Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, and is co-founder of The Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart. His most recent publications are New and Selected Poems 1977-2022, The Penguin Book of Elegy (co-edited with Stephen Regan) and Waders. He is Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Baltimore.

Declan Ryan is a poet and critic in London. His first collection, Crisis Actor, is published in the UK by Faber & Faber (July 2023) and is in the US from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 2024). His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books and New Statesman.