Claire Malcolm is the founder and chief executive of New Writing North, where she leads the Gordon Burn Prize, the Northern Writers’ Awards, the David Cohen Literature Award, Durham Book Festival and editorially directs the Mayfly book imprint.
Faruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihac. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, Šehić studied Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb. However, at 22 he voluntarily joined the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men as a lieutenant. After the war he studied literature and, since 1998, has created his own literary works. He is regarded as one of the most gifted young writers in the former Yugoslavia, a shining light of the so-called “knocked-over generation”.
Eva Klíčová (born 1977) is a literary critic, journalist and editor. She has been a member of the editorial team of Host, a Czech literary magazine, since 2012. Apart from working as an editor, she frequently collaborates with numerous media outlets and literary institutions in the Czech Republic as well as abroad. Eva Klíčová studied Czech Literature and History of Art at Masaryk University in Brno.
Liana Sakelliou is a poet and professor of English and Creative Writing at the NKUA. She is the author of 18 books, and her poems have been widely anthologised and translated into several languages. She was the president of the EUPL committee for 2018.
Fernando Valls is an accredited professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). He is the author of several books, editions of texts and articles on the current Spanish narrative. He has directed the literary magazine Quimera and two collections by the publisher Menoscuarto dedicated to the short narrative and the literary essay. He has obtained the Comillas Prize from the Tusquets publishing house, along with Juan Luis Panero. He curates current literary criticism in the literary supplement Los diablos azul, from the newspaper infoLibre.
Stephen Bonanno is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta Junior College. He lectures on Maltese Literature in general, while his research focuses mainly on the narrative genre. In 2016 he coordinated a conference on the subject in Maltese Contemporary Narrative. He contributed several papers on the Maltese novel and short stories to numerous scholarly journals.
Ludvig Berggren is a German-Swedish translator and freelance writer. He translates mainly from Geman poets such as Lutz Seiler and Peter Huchel, among others. He also works as a literary advisor at the Goethe-Institut Schweden in Stockholm. He is a member of the Swedish Writer’s Union and resides in Stockholm.
Author of several books, including a thesis on love in the Arab-Islamic tradition, Raja Ben Slama is a professor at the University of Manouba and a psychoanalyst. She is director-general of the National Library of Tunisia since 2015. Her latest book, in French, is Gender Orders / Disorders : Cross-Readings on Violence and Love (Tunis, 2020).
Jeanne E. Glesener (1976) is associate professor for Luxembourgish Literature at the University of Luxembourg and Jury President of the prestigious annual literary award, the Prix Servais.
Her research and publications cover Luxembourgish literary and cultural history, small literatures in Europe and migration literature in Europe.
Vladimír Opatrný (born 1978) is a bookseller. He completed his studies at the Institute of Information Science and Librarianship in Prague in 2006. For several years he worked in university libraries as a specialist in electronic information resources. He started his business with an e-commerce focused on professional literature and opened a shop in the center of Jablonec nad Nisou in 2012. He organizes meetings in the bookstore focused not only on literature and he considers the store as a place in the city center where people meet, not only for buying books.
