Scott McKendry is a poet-critic from Belfast. He’s currently a Lecturer of Practice at Queen’s University Belfast, where he’s writing a monograph on lesser-known northern poetry – both recently-published work and that of critically neglected twentieth-century figures – exploring aesthetic discourse, literary networking and factionalism, canon-building, and the politics of cultural exclusivity. McKendry’s chapter on language and memory in the Ulster ballad tradition was included in The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Peter Hollywood was twenty-one when his first short story ‘The Accident’ was accepted by the famed editor David Marcus for his New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press. The story was short-listed for that year’s Hennessy literary prize. Marcus went on to include another story, ‘The Dog’, in the anthology State of the Art: Short Stories by New Irish Writers (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) which included stories by such acclaimed writers as Anne Enright, Maeve Binchy and John Banville.