Ak Welsapar was born in 1956 in the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. After six years of membership, he was excluded from the Soviet Writers’ Association following his publication of investigative articles about major ecological problems in Turkmenistan. He left his home country in 1993 and now lives in Sweden, where he is a member of the Swedish Writers’ Association. He has also been an honorary member of the International PEN-Club since 1993. He has published 19 books and received many national and international awards. He writes in Russian, Turkmen and Swedish. His works have been published in a number of languages including Turkmen, Russian, Ukrainian, English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Turkish, Mongolian and a few languages from the former USSR.

He was invited to represent Turkmenistan in the Poetry Parnassus event held at the South Bank in London this summer as part of the Cultural Olympiad and the poem we reproduce is the one he read on that occasion. It was translated into English by Hamid Ismnailov.

Jenni Daiches has published poetry in many magazines and anthologies as well as the volume Mediterranean and the pamphlet Smoke. Her novel Letters from the Great Wall was published in 2006. She publishes non-fiction as Jenni Calder and her newest book Lost in the Backwoods. Scots and the North American Wilderness is due out from Edinburgh University Press in 2013. She is a former president of Scottish PEN.

Mei-Ling McNamara in an American writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker, working on issues in human rights, current affairs and the environment. Some of her writing work has appeared in such publications as: Travelers’ Tales (Best Women’s Travel Writing), Earth Island Journal, Travel Channel, Lantern Books, The Huffington Post and Al-Jazeera English. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of California, Davis, an M.A. in American Poetry and Prose from the University of Essex and an M.A. in Journalism from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Documentary Film at the University of Edinburgh.

In May this year the International Women's Group at Sighthill worked with PEN member Moira McPartlin, with additional help from fellow PEN members Mary McCabe, Maggie Rabatski and A C Clarke, on stories for a booklet for Refugee Week with contributions from refugee and community groups in North Glasgow. The booklet was launched in Refugee Week and three stories from it were chosen by New Writing editorial board for inclusion in the PENning Spirit issue once Refugee Week was over. The stories are by Fakhriya from Somalia, Umaima, from Sudan and Lamees Tayyem, the leader of the IWG, who is Iyad Hayatleh's wife and is a Palestinian brought up in a refugee camp in Syria.

Jim Aitken, a member of Scottish PEN, was for many years an English teacher. His last year of teaching was documented in The Last Calendar of Events, published by The Scottish Federation of Socialist Teachers in 2012. Publications include Neptune's Staff and other Formations (2007), published by SCND, Being Beneath the Moon (2008), published by Magdalene Press and Around the Time of Michael (2010), published by SCND. His poem in this issue of New Writing, 'The Exceptional Journey of Artistic Being', was published in Being Beneath the Moon.

Samina Chaudhry was born in Manchester. Her parents emigrated to Pakistan in the early 1980's. She did her Masters in English Literature from Punjab University Lahore and was a lecturer in English at Bahria College Karachi. After getting married she came to Glasgow in 1996. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Forward Press, U.K. She is currently doing a course in writing fiction at Glasgow university and is working on her debut novel. She is interested in exploring the immigrant experience as well as stories that navigate from home to an unfamiliar landscape.

Izabela Ilowska is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She has been living in Scotland for almost two years now. She comes from Poland and is working on a novel about a Polish immigrant living in the UK.

Tessa Ransford (www.wisdomfield.com) is an established poet, translator, literary editor and cultural activist on many fronts over the last forty years, having also worked as founder and director of the Scottish Poetry Library.

Tessa initiated the annual Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for publishers of pamphlet poetry in Scotland, now in its twelfth year, with the attendant fairs and website: www.scottish-pamphlet-poetry.com. She has had Royal Literary Fund fellowships at the Centre for Human Ecology and Queen Margaret University. She was president of Scottish PEN from 2003-6.

Tessa’s Not Just Moonshine, New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 by Luath Press, Edinburgh, and her poem in this issue of New Writing, 'The Rebel', appears in this collection. A new book of poems is due from Luath Press: don’t mention this to anyone, as well as a two-way translation book with Palestinian poet Iyad Hayatleh, who lives in Glasgow, of poems based on the five pillars of Islam entitled A rug of a thousand colours. A poem by Iyad from this collection is also included in this issue of New Writing.

Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Communist Bulgaria and emigrated to New Zealand with her family as a teenager in the early 1990s. She graduated from Sofia’s French College and two New Zealand universities, and in 2005 she moved to Scotland. Kapka is the author of the childhood memoir Street Without a Name (Portobello 2008) and the poetry collections Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost (Bloodaxe). She was twice the recipient of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year award in New Zealand for travel journalism, and has penned the odd travel guide. Her novel Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2011) is set in South America, and her new travel memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello, 2011) is about the Argentine tango as a way of life. She lives between Edinburgh and the Highlands, teaches at Strathclyde University, and writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Scottish Review of Books, and Vogue.

Julian Colton, a member of Scottish PEN, lives in Selkirk. He has had three collections of poetry published including Everyman Street (Smokestack Publishing, 2009). In 2008 he was CREATE Writer-in-residence for Dumfries and Galloway. He continues to teach poetry and creative writing in schools, most recently as part of the Natural Identity project for the Tolbooth Gallery in Stirling. He co-edits The Eildon Tree the creative writing magazine for the Borders and Beyond.