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”.
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.
Born in Limassol, Antonis Georgiou studied Law in Moscow and is a graduate of the Postgraduate Programme for Theatre Studies from the Open University of Cyprus.
His published work is comprised of Full Moon minus one (Poetry Collection), publ. Gavrielides, Athens, 2006; Sweet Bloody Life (Short Story Collection), publ. Rodakion, Athens, 2006 (National Award for Short Stories); An Album of Stories, publ. Rodakion, Athens, 2014 (National Award for Novels and European Union Literature Award for 2016); Like a Butterfly, Ι am (Poetry Collection), publ. Rodakion, Athens, 2019.
Rebekka Lotman is an Estonian literary critic, editor, journalist and translator, and since 2014 the editor-in-chief of Tallinn University Publishing House.
Elizabeta Bakovska (1969) received her BA and MA from the Faculty of Philology “Blaze Koneski” in Skopje, from the English Language and Literature Department. She holds Ph.D. in gender studies from Euro-Balkan Institute. She was the editor-in-chief of Blesok, an electronic magazine for culture and literature (www.blesok.mk). She translates, writes poetry and prose, as well as literary theory and criticism.
Isabelle Wéry is an actress and director for the theatre and an author. She played The Vagina's Monologues in Belgium. Her second novel, Marilyn désossée, received the European Union Prize for Literature in 2013. This novel is translated in many European countries.
Predrag Uljarevic was born in 1971 in Bileća. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Montenegro, in Podgorica. He is the founder of the publishing house Nova knjiga, where he has been employed as director and publisher since its founding in 1999. As a publisher, he has signed more than five hundred titles within the publishing production of Nova knjiga, which is currently one of the largest publishers in Montenegro and the region in terms of quality and number of published books.
After studying Italian literature, philosophy and linguistics, with a specialization in literary translation - between the University of Lausanne and the Università La Sapienza in Rome – Festa Molliqaj received a second Master of arts in teaching foreign languages from HEP Lausanne.
Teaching foreign languages pushed her to develop didactic-pedagogical projects, allowing her to join the Swiss Association of Italian Teachers (ASPI) and publish articles in Swiss literary journals.
Sibila Petlevski is a poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, theatre scholar and professor at the University of Zagreb.
Aleksandar Bečanović, born in 1971, is a Montenegrin writer, film critic and screenwriter. He is the author of five poetry books, Ulysses’ Distance (1994), Being (1996), The Pantry (1998), Places in the Letter (2001) and Preludes and Fugues (2007); two short story collections, I am Waiting, What Will Happen Next (2005) and Obsession (2009); and three novels, Arcueil (2015), Disorder (2017) and Vlatka (2018). He has also published two books of film criticism, Genre in the Contemporary Cinema (2005) and the 900-page long Lexicon of Film Directors (2015).
