Iryna Slavinska is a journalist, radio and TV presenter, translator and literary critic. In 2010, she won a grant for the investigation of stealing and frauds in the Ukrainian art-market. In 2010 and 2011, she was a jury member on BBC's Book of the Year Awards.

Born in 1975, Natasha Lomouri was schooled in Georgia and in the US and started her university studies at the faculty of International Law and International Relations in Tbilisi State University, but continued at the University of Bologna, Faculty of Political Science. She was awarded with a PhD in 2004 after defending her dissertation entitled Arab-Israeli Conflict: Peace Process at the end of XXCentury at the Tbilisi State University.

Daniel Cristea-Enache is a professor, author, essayist and literary critic.

Since starting her career in the book business in 2012, Kristīne Pīkenena has been actively promoting Latvian and international literature. Currently she works as manager of the Jānis Roze Bookstore in Riga, at Kr.Barona street. She has taken part in three ICYB (International Congress of Young Booksellers), that used to gather young at heart booksellers from all around the globe. For more than six years she has been bringing together likeminded readers in the book club “Total Cover” (Totāls vāks), with monthly literary meetings on diverse subjects. 

Petrit Ymeri is the executive director of the Dituria publishing house, founded in May 1991. For several years, he was a literature teacher in high school and later a lecturer in foreign literature at the University of Tirana. Until 1991, he was a cultural journalist for the Albanian Radiotelevision and later the head of the editorial sector of the 8 November publishing house. From 2003 to 2014, Petrit Ymeri was a member of the Board of Directors of the Albanian Radiotelevision.

Aleksandar Bečanović, born in 1971, is a Montenegrin writer, film critic and screenwriter. He is the author of five poetry books, Ulysses’ Distance (1994), Being (1996), The Pantry (1998), Places in the Letter (2001) and Preludes and Fugues (2007); two short story collections, I am Waiting, What Will Happen Next (2005) and Obsession (2009); and three novels, Arcueil (2015), Disorder (2017) and Vlatka (2018). He has also published two books of film criticism, Genre in the Contemporary Cinema (2005) and the 900-page long Lexicon of Film Directors (2015).

Boris Perić is a writer, literary translator and journalist. 

David Szolláth, Ph. D. (1975) is a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Center for the Humanities in Budapest. He is a managing editor of Literatura, the theoretical journal of the Institute of Literary Studies, HAS, and author of "A kommunista aszketizmus esztétikája" [Aesthetics of Communist Ascetism] (2011). He was an editor at the literary review Kalligram (2006-2008) and Jelenkor (2008-2018).

In 2001, Shakeh established Artbridge, the first bookstore café and restaurant in Yerevan, Armenia. During the past 20 years, she managed to change the culture of bookselling in the country, by promoting Armenian books, exporting them to libraries and customers around the world, and participating in international book fairs with the same vision of promoting Armenian issues and literature. She has initiated the project “Exhibition and Sales” for rural area in Armenia with collaboration with publishers to promote new publications.

Andriy Kurkov is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He is the author of 13 novels and 5 children books. More than 20 feature films and documentaries have been based on his scripts. He is the president of PEN Ukraine.