Fernando Valls

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.

Stephen Bonanno

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.

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.

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).

Elín Edda Pálsdóttir

Elín Edda Pálsdóttir is the manager of the Forlagið Bookstore (Bókabúð Forlagsins) in Reykjavík since 2015 and one of two editors of the literary magazine Tímarit Máls og menningar since the fall of 2018. She holds a BA-degree in Literature studies from the University of Iceland, a master's degree in Applied Editing and Publishing from the same school and a one year master's degree from the Literature-Culture-Media programme at Lund University, Sweden.

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.

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.