Brian Eno, musician, producer, visual artist and activist, first came to international prominence in the early seventies as a founding member of British band Roxy Music. His visionary production includes albums with Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Laurie Anderson and Coldplay, while his long list of collaborations include recordings with David Bowie, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Karl Hyde and James Blake, among many others. His visual experiments with light and video continue to parallel his musical career, with exhibitions all over the globe.

To date he has released over thirty albums of his own music and exhibited extensively, as far afield as the Venice Biennale and the sails of the Sydney Opera House. He is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation, a trustee of ClientEarth and patron of Videre est Credere. His latest album with brother Roger, Mixing Colours was released on Deutsche Grammophon earlier this year.

Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930. He lived with Antonia Fraser from 1975 and they married in 1980. In 1995 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre.

In 2002 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature. In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the same year, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry and the Franz Kafka Award (Prague).

In 2006 he was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize and, in 2007, the highest French honour, the Legion d'honneur. He died in December 2008.

Michel Faber has written nine other books. In addition to the Whitbread-shortlisted Under the Skin, he is the author of the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, and most recently The Book of Strange New Things, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award 2015. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he now lives in the UK. This is his first poetry collection.

Richard Dawkins is the former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University (1995-2008).

His many bestsellers include The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.