Sheila O’Reilly has been in bookselling and publishing for over 30 years. Under her ownership and management, Dulwich Books was awarded the accolade of best bookshop in the UK and Ireland by peers. Sheila has been a Costa judge, a judge of the Independent Bookshop Book of the Year award, a judge International Bookshop of the Year Award LBF and sat on many industry panels. She is currently a mentor for Independent Bookshops in the UK & Ireland.
“I am bookseller out of passion; it was my dream as a little girl! An only child surrounded by books, I remember the very first I was given and still have it, as well as all the following and all the ones I bought in the meantime... That's a lot of them, believe me!
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.
Tinatin Beriashvili, born in 1987, is the director of the Georgian Publishers and Booksellers Association since 2014. The Association’s main priority is to promote and develop the publishing sector and raise the level of literacy in the country. The Association carries out important projects, such as organizing the Tbilisi International Book Festival and holding Georgian National desks at various international book fairs.
Born on October 4, 1976, in Valencia, Spain, Sara Sanchez is bookseller at the El Puerto bookstore in the Port of Sagunto, Valencia (www.libreriaelpuerto.com). She is also the Vice President of Cegal, the Spanish Confederation of Book Guilds.
Peter Šulej is a poet, author and editor.
Rebekka Lotman is an Estonian literary critic, editor, journalist and translator, and since 2014 the editor-in-chief of Tallinn University Publishing House.
Rachelle Deguara has been working in the book industry for the last three years building close relations with authors, promoting their work and contributing to the National Book Festival (Malta). Her work in the literacy field started when she had the role of public relations officer in the voluntary organisation Għaqda tal-Malti Universitá which is the university association that strives to promote emerging authors and make sure that the pioneers of Maltese literature are not forgotten.
Marielle Vitureau has been living in Lithuania for twenty years. She works in radio, specifically on themes of society and culture. She's also a literary translator from Lithuanian into French.
Iris Meijer has been working as a bookseller at Linnaeus Boekhandel in Amsterdam since 2015. Apart from day-to-day sales in store, she is responsible for the selection and purchase of English titles and partially responsible for the selection and purchase of fiction and non-fiction titles. Apart from her work at Linnaeus, she co-organises the annual nationwide event De Week van het Korte Verhaal [The Week of the Short Story] and she also coordinates booksales at the Lowlands Festival.
