Michael Bavidge
Michael Bavidge was a lecturer in philosophy at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, Newcastle University. He has written on psychopathy and the law, pain and suffering, and animal minds. He recently published a collection of philosophical essays, Philosophy in the Borders. He is the President of the Philosophical Society of England which brings together academic and non-academic philosophers who believe in the importance of exploring philosophical ideas and their relevance to our social and personal lives.
Gillian Allnutt
From 1968-1971 Gillian Allnutt studied Philosophy and English at Cambridge. She then ignored philosophy for nearly five decades but was sufficiently encouraged, through meeting Mary Midgley in 2013 and reading her recent books, to come back to it with renewed interest.
Meanwhile she has published nine collections of poetry, seven of them with Bloodaxe Books. The latest, wake, was published in 2018. How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007) includes work from Nantucket and the Angel (1997) and Lintel (2001), both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
She has taught creative writing in universities and schools and a variety of other settings. She has held residencies in community projects – working, for example, with Orthodox Jewish women in Gateshead and, with Freedom From Torture in 2009-10, with asylum-seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. She has also worked as a freelance journalist and, from 1983-88, as Poetry Editor of City Limits magazine in London.
She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and in 2016 was presented with The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
