Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He published numerous works of poetry and prose, with volumes and essays in French as well as English. His work has also been translated into several languages. He was the recipient of many awards and honours, in Europe and Scotland, including the Grand Prix du Rayonnement Français by the Académie française for his work as a whole (1985), the Édouard Glissant prize from the University of Paris VIII for his 'openness to the cultures of the world' (2004) and Prix de poésie Alain Bosquet for Les Archives du Littoral, a bilingual poetry collection (2011). White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University and was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to promote further research into the cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade. It has since produced six Cahiers de Géopoétique (journals) in French, publishing a range of work on geopoetics from throughout the world. Geopoetics Centres have since been set up in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, Quebec, New Caledonia and France. His publications in English include, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath (Aberdeen, 2013), The Wanderer and his Charts (Polygon, 2004), Open World: The Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Birlinn, 2003), House of Tides (Polygon, 2000). He lived on the north coast of Brittany.

Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen and previously Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was the general editor of the four volume History of Scottish Literature published in 1987 by Aberdeen University Press. He has written extensively on modern poetry, on the history of Scottish culture and on the novel in Scotland. His monographs include Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1981), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), Intending Scotland (2009), The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (2018) and Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death (2018). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy.