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.
Radoslav Passia is an author, editor, literary scholar and essayist.
Marju Kirsipuu is development manager for the Apollo bookstore in Estonia.
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.
Rūta Elijošaitytė-Kaikarė is a literary manager and managing director of the Lithuanian Publishers Association. Since 2005, she has been participating in various literary and literary management activities. She coordinates the Creative Europe project VERSOPOLIS in Lithuania. She is also a member of various literary work groups: Vilnius Book Fair organizational committee, Literature Council, Vilnius - World Capital of Books.
Margot Dijkgraaf is a literary critic (NRC Handelsblad, Dutch national newspaper), author, interviewer and curator of (inter-) national literary events. She was the Director of the Centre Français du Livre at the French Cultural Institute in Amsterdam, as well as of the Academic-Cultural Centre SPUI25. Ten years ago she initiated the European Literature Prize in The Netherlands, which is now an important prize for European literature translated into Dutch.
