Lawrence Sail's Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Following The Quick (2015) and Guises (2020), this year sees the publication of a new collection, Double Takes (also from Bloodaxe Books). He has written a memoir of childhood (Sift, Impress Books, 2010) and two books of essays, Cross-currents and The Key to Clover, as well as editing a number of anthologies, including First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, and (co-edited with Kevin Crossley-Holland) The New Exeter Book of Riddles and Light Unlocked: Poems for Christmas.
Lawrence was chairman of the Arvon Foundation and has directed the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. He has been a judge for the Whitbread Prize and the Eric Gregory Awards and, from 1994 to 1996, was the British member on the jury of the European Literature Prize. In 2004 he received a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry. From 2020 to 2022 he held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of Exeter. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Julia Copus is a poet, biographer and children's writer and has published ten books, including four collections of poetry. Girlhood (Faber 2019) was winner of America's inaugural Derek Walcott Prize for best collection by a non-US citizen. Other awards include the Forward Prize for 'Best Single Poem', First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Her most recent book, This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew, was described by John Carey in The Sunday Times as 'a triumph of precise scholarship and imaginative sympathy' and was chosen by Sir Andrew Motion as a book of the year in The Spectator. Julia teaches poetry for the Faber Academy and was 2023-24 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Julia Copus and Lawrence Sail, both writers with strong West Country connections, will read and discuss their work.