Malcolm Payne is a social work writer based at St Christopher's Hospice in London and Opole University in Poland; he is in Poland three or four times a year.

He has worked in most kinds of social work. Among his jobs were setting up mental health residential and community care projects, coordinating community and third-sector work in Liverpool, which included a lot of work on unemployment. He also chaired a project developing advocacy for young people in care.

For a long time he was a senior academic in the UK, but gave that up in 2002 and moved to work at St Christopher's, where he writes a regular blog at http://blogs.stchristophers.org.uk about social work and palliative care policy. He says in the blog: why do people talk about tools in social work and healthcare? It's because they want to seem like practical people, but most so-called tools are just filling out forms.

He also does evaluation projects at St Christophers, and helps people with access to their care records and with family difficulties. For several years was responsible for clinical volunteers, spiritual care, day care and psycho-social care there.

He recently wrote a book with his wife Margaret Reith on Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care; it is dedicated to their granddaughters Allison, who is American, and Eleanor, who is British.

He edits textbooks on social work with Robert Adams and Lena Dominelli: they have long meetings where they argue over everything to do with social work.

Robert Adams was born in Hampshire and has lived in Yorkshire for more than 40 years, latterly in Hull, before moving to the wooded fringe of Hessle, where he now lives and writes full time. He worked as a gardener, hotel cellarman, prison officer and as acting governor of a penal institution, before going into social work. Apart from this, he has had what he describes as a double life, writing fiction and poetry under different pseudonyms alongside studying, mostly part time, at Manchester, London, York and Leeds universities, later holding full and visiting professorships in England and Scotland, writing and editing more than 100 books about crime, protest, empowerment, social policy, social work, health and social care and complementary therapies. Some of his books are best-selling, have sold in every continent and have been translated into several languages including Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Robert was a member of the Advisory Council of Radio Humberside soon after its inception and has contributed to local radio programmes in Leeds and Humberside. He has published two volumes of poems, one or two of which have won very minor awards. He has written novels, a series of satirical books and short stories. He is a member of the Crime Writers' Association, one of their collections including his short story 'The Hull Executive'. He chaired the Books Committee of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain for several years and chaired the judges of the Writers' Guild of GB 2008 Best Book Award. His crime novel The Really Dreadful Crime Company is due to be published early in 2011 in the USA and UK and a well-known screenwriter is currently preparing the film script.