Chris Mann, a South African of English, Dutch and Irish descent, was born in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. He started his working life in rural development and poverty alleviation projects, such as low-cost water-supply and sanitation, small-scale agriculture and labour-intensive public works including secondary road and pipeline construction. This multi-faceted, multi-talented writer has also taught English in a rural school, lectured in English at Rhodes University and worked in teacher development and job creation. He has volunteered for various trusts, has been a parish councillor and was a founder and song-writer of Zabalaza, a cross-culture band performing in English and Zulu.

Isabella Motadinyane was born in 1963 in Mofolo Central, Soweto. She completed classes up to Grade Five in her formal schooling. She studied piano at the so-called ‘Five Roses Bowl’ and attended dance and acting classes in Jozi. As a result of creative writing forums she wrote the poem ‘One Leg In’, which contains the phrase “die is mos botsotsos” (these are stretch denim pants). The phrase afterwards gave rise to the name of the Botsotso Jesters, the poetry performance group of which she was a founding member in 1994, and whose publishing arm, Botsotso Publishing, brought out two collections, We Jive Like This (1996) and Dirty Washing (1999). Poems by Isabella in these books were brought together in her collected works, Bella (2007).

Megan Hall was born and grew up in Cape Town, and studied English and Latin at the University of Cape Town. Since 1995, she has worked in the publishing industry and is currently the publishing manager for dictionaries and school literature in English at Oxford University Press, Southern Africa. She has edited poetry and short stories for New Contrast, a South African literary journal. Her first collection, Fourth Child, is a haunting, disturbing, deeply moving collection of thirty poems, many of which have been previously published in local literary magazines. The collection was recently awarded the prestigious 2008 Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut collection published in English in 2006 and 2007.

Petra Müller was born in 1935 in the small enclave of Botrivier, where her father was the village policeman. One of five children, the family moved to Swellendam when she was ten years old, and her father turned to farming, on the farm Eenzaamheid.

A hugely prolific and fully bilingual writer of short stories, novels, children's books and poetry, Petra Müller's book of love poems, Die Aandag Van Jou Oë (2002) was voted one of the ‘top 30 African reads’ according to an informal poll run by the Centre for the Book in collaboration with the Cape Town Book Fair in 2007.

The fifth in a family of eight children, Vonani Bila was born and grew up in poverty-stricken Shirley Village, Limpopo, where he walked 14 kilometres daily to Lemana High School in Elim. He went on to study at Tivumbeni College of Education and hoped to join Umkhonto we Sizwe until the death of his father necessitated a change of plans. Bila is the founder of the Timbila Poetry Project, which has published a series of poetry collections and the literary journal Timbila. He has been instrumental in getting the works of marginalised poets into circulation and has been a nurturing inspiration for aspiring poets, holding workshops and actively encouraging new voices.