Donald Lamont Jack was born in Radcliffe, England,on December 6, 1924. He attended Bury Grammar School in Lancashire, and later Marr College, Troon (from which he was briefly evicted after writing an injudicious letter to the editor).

From 1943 to 1947 he served in the Royal Air Force as an AC, or aircraftsman, working in radio communications. During his military service Jack was stationed in a variety of locales, though he concentrated on places beginning with the letter ‘B’: Belgium, Berlin, and Bahrain. After de-mobbing, he participated in amateur dramatics with The Ellis Players, and worked for several years in Britain, but he had by then grown weary of ‘B’-countries and decided to move on to the ‘C’s. Thus, in 1951, Jack emigrated to Canada.

In 1962 he published his first novel, Three Cheers for Me, about fictional Canadian First World War air-ace Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy. Three Cheers for Me won the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1963, but additional volumes did not appear until a decade later when a revised version of the book was published, along with a second volume, That’s Me in the Middle, which won Jack a second Leacock Medal in 1974. He received a third award in 1980 for Me Bandy, You Cissie.

Jack returned to live in England in 1986, where he continued to work on additional volumes in the Bandy series. He died on June 2, 2003. His final novel, Stalin vs. Me, was first published posthumously in 2005.

Heron Carvic (1913-1980) was an actor and writer, most recognisable today for his voice portrayal of the character Gandalf in the first BBC Radio broadcast version of The Hobbit. He started writing the Miss Seeton novels in the 1960s, after using her in a short story. He later recalled that “Miss Seeton upped and demanded a book”.

Isabel Rogers writes poetry and fiction, but never on the same day. She won the 2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition, was Hampshire Poet Laureate 2016, and her debut collection, Don’t Ask, came out in 2017 (Eyewear). Life, Death and Cellos is her first novel to be published.

She had a proper City job before a decade in the Scottish Highlands, writing and working in the NHS. She now lives in Hampshire, laughs a lot, and neglects her cello. She is on Twitter @Isabelwriter.

More info on her website: isabelrogers.org.

Jane Lovering was, presumably, born, although everyone concerned denies all knowledge. However there is evidence that her early years were spent in Devon (she can still talk like a pirate under the right conditions) and of her subsequent removal to Yorkshire under a sack and sedation.

She now lives in North Yorkshire, where she writes romantic comedies, one or two of which have won awards. Owing to a terrible outbreak of insanity she is now the minder of three cats and two terriers, one of which is a Patterdale and therefore as insane as Jane. Though smaller, and cuter, obviously.

Jane’s likes include marshmallows, the smell of cucumbers and the understairs cupboard, words beginning with B, and Doctor Who. She writes with her laptop balanced on her knees whilst lying on her bed, and her children were brought up to believe that real food has a high carbon content. And a kind of amorphous shape. Not unlike Jane herself, come to think of it.

She had some hobbies once, but she can’t remember what they were. Ask her to show you how many marshmallows she can fit in her mouth at once, though, that might give you a clue.

You can find Jane on Twitter at @janelovering, and visit her website at www.janelovering.co.uk.

Peter Maughan’s early ambition to be a landscape painter ran into a lack of talent – or enough of it to paint to his satisfaction what he saw. He worked on building sites, in wholesale markets, on fairground rides and in a circus. And travelled the West Country, roaming with the freedom of youth, picking fruit, and whatever other work he could get, sleeping wherever he could, before moving on to wherever the next road took him. A journeying out of which came his non-fiction work Under the Apple Boughs, when he came to see that he had met on his wanderings the last of a village England. After travelling to Jersey in the Channel Islands to pick potatoes, he found work afterwards in a film studio in its capital, walk-ons and bit parts in the pilot films that were made there, and as a contributing script writer. He studied at the Actor’s Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland (in the heyday of Ardmore Studios). He founded and ran a fringe theatre in Barnes, London, and living on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, wrote pilot film scripts as a freelance deep in the green shades of rural Kent. An idyllic, heedless time in that other world of the river, which later, when he had collected enough rejection letters learning his craft as a novelist, he transported to a river valley in the Welsh Marches, and turned into the Batch Magna novels.

He is married and lives currently in Wales. Visit Peter’s website at http://www.batchmagna.com.