Raja Ben Slama

Author of several books, including a thesis on love in the Arab-Islamic tradition, Raja Ben Slama is a professor at the University of Manouba and a psychoanalyst. She is director-general of the National Library of Tunisia since 2015. Her latest book, in French, is Gender Orders / Disorders : Cross-Readings on Violence and Love (Tunis, 2020).

Vladimír Opatrný

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.

Ilvi Liive

Ilvi Liive built up the Estonian Literature Centre in 2001, and has been running it since then. She studied Estonian and German languages and literature at Tartu University, and Dutch language, literature and history of Dutch art at Groningen University. She has been working as publisher and literary translator from Dutch and German.

Albert Marshall

Born in Malta in 1947, Albert Marshall has distinguished himself as a theatre and television director, playwright, poet and TV presenter in a career spanning over 50 years. His literary works are widely published in Australia, Canada and Malta. He spent 15 years working in Australian radio, theatre and television and became the first Maltese national to direct at Sydney Opera House. Marshall recently published a collection of his poetry written between 1964 – 2019 and is currently working on the publication of literary works for theatre and television.

Oleksandra Koval

Oleksandra Koval is director of the Ukrainian Book Institute. She was the president of the Publishers’ Forum NGO from 1995 to 2018. She is also co-founder of the Ukrainian Association of Book Publishers and Booksellers and of the Ukrainian Association of Reading.

Peter Legård Nielsen

Peter Legård Nielsen was born in 1960. He has published 8 novels, 2 poetry collections and 15 anthologies. He has received the the 3 Year Scolarship from The Danish Arts Foundation. He has been appointed by the Minister of Culture as a member of the board of The Danish Arts Counsil and has been chairman of Danish Fiction Writers Association from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2002 to 2007.

Lindita Rugova

Lindita Rugova holds a Doctoral Degree in Philological Sciences from the University of Prishtina. Since 1998, she as been an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the same University, becoming Dean of the Faculty of Philology in 2016. Her lectures ranges from Contrastive Linguistics, Semantics, Grammar and Syntax. Dozens of her articles have been published in numerous international scientific publications. She has been a guest lecturer for Universities in Prague, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rende, Naples and Zabreb. 

Pavel Mandys

Pavel Mandys (born 1972) is a journalist, book critic, and organizer of the annual Magnesia Litera book award. He has written numerous book reviews as an editor of the online literary magazine iLiteratura.cz. In 2012, he published the book Prague: The City of Literature to support the city’s successful bid to become a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. He was the editor of the short stories collection Prague Noir (2018) and in 2020 he wrote a book of the crime genre in Czech literature (Dějiny české detektivky, with Michal Jareš).

Tina Bilban

Dr. Tina Bilban (1983) is a literary critic, author, editor and a research associate at the Institute Nova revija. She is president of the Slovenian section of IBBY – International Board on Books for Young People and a member of the executive committee of the Slovene Literary Critics' Association. She works at the crossroads between contemporary philosophy, science and literature. Tina is author of five books, the sixth will be published this year.