Christmas Day

Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His first book, Endsville (1967), has been followed by more than twenty others, including The Berlin Wall Café (a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1985), Daddy, Daddy (winner of the Whitbread Award for Poetry in 1990), Crazy About Women (1991), A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (1993), Give Me Your Hand (1994), Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), The Art of Life (2004), The Laughter of Mothers (2007), Life is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems 1967–2007 (2009), Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have My Being (2012), and The Days of Surprise (2015). In 2001 Paul Durcan received a Cholmondeley Award. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2007. He was conferred with a DLitt by Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and by University College Dublin in 2011. In 2014 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Irish Book Award. He is a member of Aosdána.

Peter Robb is an Australian author. He was born in the Toorak, Melbourne in 1946 and has lived in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Brazil. His first book, Midnight in Sicily, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for non-fiction in 1997.
His second book, M, a biography of the Italian artist Caravaggio, provoked controversy on its publication in Britain in 2000. A Death in Brazil, his fourth novel, was named The Age's non-fiction book of the year for 2004. He has taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland and the Instituto Universitario Orientale in Naples.