Bernard Briggs and Margaret Preston read from their recent collections. Bernard's A Hatching of Ghosts (Cauliay) and Margaret's Lovelorn (Matador) were both published in 2011.

There will be an opportunity to buy both books on the night, and there will be the usual open floor opportunities.

Bernard Briggs writes: "I was born in 1957 in a small village in Sussex, on the south coast of England. From eleven years of age I was educated at a Church of England secondary school and had no real ambition beyond leaving school and getting a job. It was a fairly sheltered environment; quiet and rural where life revolved around the church and the changing seasons. I started writing poetry at that school, but apart from some encouragement from an enthusiastic English teacher, didn't really think there was much future in writing poetry. However I did continue to write slowly and steadily for the next twenty odd years, until I received some positive feedback on my poetry from fellow writers at a writers group I was attending. From that point onwards I became more prolific; entering competitions; submitting work to publications and so on, without success, until one day I met Michael Molden of Cauliay Publishing at a poetry reading in Ellon, a small town just north of Aberdeen where my family and I had moved some three years before. Michael invited me to submit poems for an anthology he was planning and subsequently asked me to put together a collection of my own."

Margaret Preston studied flute with Richard Chester (RSNO). She has made a few CD recordings: My Delyt, Music of Castle Fraser, and Beltane. As a flautist she has free-lanced with RSNO, Concerto Caledonia, Aberdeen Sinfonietta, and has played internationally.

Margaret enjoys writing music and poetry, contributing to 4th dimensions at Limousin Bull and also to NEOS in 2007. In 2008 she was co-founder and chairman of See, Salt and Sound. As well as her professional music commitments she is presently working on her first novel.