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).
Grzegorz Jankowicz Ph.D. (1978) is a literary critic, translator and philosopher specialized on literature. He is the programme director of the Conrad Festival, the cultural editor of the “Tygodnik Powszechny” weekly paper, and the director of several literary programmes of the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation. He also works at the literary department office of Kraków Festival.
Born in 1967 in Helmstedt/Niedersachsen, Klaus Kowalke is a Philosopher, Historian and Bookseller. He was awarded “Best Bookshop in Germany 2018” by the Federal Government Comissioner for Culture and the Media (Federal Government).
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.
Tanja Stupar Trifunović published five volumes of poetry, one volume of short stories and two novels. Her works were awarded and translated into English, German, French, Polish, Slovenian, Danish, Swedish, Macedonian, Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Spanish language. Poetry book O čemu misle varvari dok doručkuju (“What are barbarians are thinking about while having breakfast“) was short-listed for the ProCredit Bank Literature Award for East and Southeast Europe and awarded with one-month stay in Vienna, Austria.
Carolina Schutti is a writer. She was awarded the EUPL 2015 for Austria. Her books have been translated into eleven languages. Her most recently published works include: Eulen fliegen lautlos (Novelle, 2015) and Nervenfieber (Poems, 2018). She lives in Innsbruck.
Nenad Rizvanović was born in Osijek in 1968. He completed his studies of Croatian language and literature at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb and in 2019 completed his PhD at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar with the thesis “Poststructural Analysis of the Role of Reader”. He teaches courses on publishing at Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka. He has been publishing literary criticism and prose since 1985.
Sandeep Mahal is director of Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. She is passionate about bringing books, words and ideas to the streets of Nottingham, so everyone, everywhere gets the chance to be creative with literature. Before arriving in Nottingham, Sandeep spent ten years working in public libraries and many years in the UK publishing environment, transforming cooperation between UK publishers and the UK public library network.
Velizara Dobreva has thirty years of experience in publishing. She is executive director of Story House Egmont Bulgaria, a leading publishing house of children’s books, fiction, and non-fiction in Bulgaria. She is president of the Bulgarian Book Association since 2017.
Dr. Sorcha de Brún is a lecturer at the University of Limerick, where she teaches modern Irish prose, Irish-language film, drama and poetry. She has published essays, poems, stories and reviews and is currently working on a monograph about masculinities in contemporary Irish-language writing. She is an award-winning writer: having received the Foras na Gaeilge 1st prize at Listowel Writer's Week, the Máirtín Ó Cadhain Short Story award and several Oireachtas na Gaeilge prizes.
