Gareth Writer-Davies is from Pencelli, Wales

He was Longlisted for the National Poetry Competition last year and has been Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize three times.

He was Prole Laureate for 2017 and Winner of the Wirral Festival Poetry Competition in 2023. He was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2019.

He has five previous poetry publications and will be reading from his most recent, Memento Mori.

Natasha Gauthier is a Canadian poet and journalist living in Cardiff. She placed first out of thousands of entries in the 2025 Poetry Wales Award and also won the 2025 New Welsh Review/Borzello Trust Prize for poetry.

She has been nominated for the Forward Prize and the Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been published in Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, Scintilla (journal of the Henry Vaughan Association), Ink Sweat and Tears, Winged Moon, and Acropolis, amongst others.

Her debut collection Seasonal Clothing will be published by Parthian Books later this year. Natasha was a member of the 2024-25 cohort of Representing Wales, the flagship development programme run by Literature Wales, where her mentor was Damian Walford Davies.

In 2023 Natasha founded Tiger Bay Poetry, Cardiff’s leading series of literary readings and events. She grew up fluently bilingual in English and French in Montreal, Quebec, and is of mixed Goan and French-Canadian heritage. Duality, family history and identity are recurring themes in her poems.