Paata Shamugia

Paata Shamugia is a contemporary Georgian poet born in 1983 in Georgia. Since 2018, he is a president of the Georgian Pen Center. In 2015, he became the first Georgian poet to get the most prestigious SABA literary prize twice.

Margot Hélène Dijkgraaf

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.

Sheila O’Reilly

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.

Iris Meijer

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.

Thorgeir Tryggvason

Thorgeir Tryggvason is a critic, playwright, musician and theatre director. He has a degree in philosophy from the University from Iceland, and has been a theatre critic for Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s leading newspaper, since 2000. Thorgeir is a regular contributor to the literary magazine TMM and the cultural website Starafugl. Since 2013 he has been a literary critic for Kiljan, a TV programme dedicated to books and literature.