Linton Kwesi Johnson was born on 24 August 1952 in Chapelton, Clarendon in rural Jamaica. He came to London in 1963, went to Tulse Hill Secondary School and studied Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. Whilst at school he joined the Black Panthers, helped to organise a poetry workshop within the movement and developed his work with Rasta Love, a group of poets and drummers. In 1977 he was awarded a C Day Lewis Fellowship, becoming the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of black theatre and art.

In 1974 Race Today published his first poetry collection, Voices of the Living and the Dead. Dread Beat An’ Blood was published in 1975 by Bogle-L’Ouverture and was also the title of his first LP released by Virgin (1978). That year also saw the release of the film Dread Beat An’ Blood, a documentary on Johnson’s work. In 1980 Race Today published Inglan Is A Bitch and there were four more albums with Island: Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980), LKJ in Dub (1981) and Making History (1983).

Jason Salkey is an English actor who began his career at the age of nine. Salkey is most well known for playing the educated rifleman, Harris, in the Sharpe series alongside Sean Bean. He is Andrew Salkey's son.

Gwen Strauss' poems, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The New Republic, London Sunday Times, New England Review, and Kenyon Review and she has published a collection of poetry, Trail of Stones. Her most recent book The Nine follows the true story of nine female resistance fighters who escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII.

Strauss lives in Southern France, where she is the Director of the artist's residency program at the Dora Maar House and Hôtel de Tingry.

Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements, To Sweeten Bitter, The Perseverance, and All The Names Given.

In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. His poems have been published in POETRY, Poetry Review, Lit Hub, the New Statesman, The Deaf Poets Society, among others.

Raymond was a founding member of 'Chill Pill' and 'Keats House Poets Forum', he is an Ambassador for 'The Poetry School' and a board member for ‘English PEN’ (an organisation that promotes freedom of expression and literature across frontiers). He is also an advocate for several D/deaf charities including ‘Deaf Kidz International’ and ‘National Deaf Children’s Society’.

Eric Huntley, activist, publisher and author, was born in 1929 in British Guiana and emigrated to Britain in the late 1950s. Together with his wife, Jessica, the Huntleys not only participated in, but also led many significant grassroots campaigns, including becoming founder members of the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association, the Black Parents Movement, the organisers of the 1981 Black People’s Day of Action march and the Supplementary School Movement. They founded Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications (BLP) in 1969, one of the first black-owned independent publishing companies in the UK. Eric and Jessica started their first bookshop in their front room in the late 1960s, before founding the Bogle-L'Ouverture Bookshop in West Ealing in 1974. After Walter Rodney’s assassination, the Bogle-L’Ouverture bookshop was later renamed as the ‘Walter Rodney Bookshop’ and was already a place of importance for Britain’s Black community, described as an ‘oasis in the desert of West London’.