Ognjen Spahić was born in 1977 in Podgorica, Montenegro. He published collections of short stories Sve to (All of That, 2001), Zimska potraga (Winter Search, 2007) and Puna glava radosti (A Head Full of Joy, 2014) for which he received the European Union Prize for Literature in 2014. His novel Hansenova djeca (Hansen’s Children, 2004) won him the Meša Selimović prize for 2005, awarded to the best new novel from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Chloé Billon (born 1986 in Nantes, France) is a literary translator and conference interpreter. After graduating in humanities with a focus on English and German literature, having in the meanwhile begun to travel regularly to former Yugoslavia, she studied Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian languages and cultures at the Inalco (French National Institute for Eastern languages and cultures), and lived in Belgrade and Zagreb.
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.
Born in 1976, Gilles Collard funded the Pylône magazine in 2003. He is teaching Philosophy at the Superior School of Visual Arts – La Cambre where he is also in charge of the “Texts and Literary Creation” master degree.
Journalist and writer. Born in Madrid, in 1970. A graduate in Catalan Philology. He has collaborated in several stages with the newspaper El País, the last, between 2007 and 2013, in the cultural supplement Quadern.
He is currently responsible for the culture of the weekly newspaper El Temps, a columnist for Levante-EMV as well as a talk show by Onda Zero. From the creation of the new Valencian television broadcasting À Punt he has collaborated in the television talk show of "El Matí" and right now he does so in À Punt radio.
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.
Born in 1965. He spent his childhood, boyhood and youth in the Niksic suburb of Straševina. He graduated from the Department of Serbo-Croatian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niksic. He has been involved in journalism and literary criticism since 1995. He is the author of the books “Records” and “Conversations”. He is the editor of the Culture section of the Montenegrin daily Pobjeda. He works in Podgorica.
Sibila Petlevski is a poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, theatre scholar and professor at the University of Zagreb.
Lindita Tahiri teaches at the Department of English Language and Literature and at the Department of Journalism of the Faculty of Philology in Prishtina, and her courses cover Literary Criticism, Stylistics, Language and Culture, Language and Ideology, Mass Communication, and Translation. She has been Vice Rector of the University of Prishtina from 2012-2016.
Siri Odfjell Risdal (41) is Festival Director for Kapittel, Stavanger International Festival for Literature and Freedom of Speech at Sølvberget Library and Cultural Centre. Risdal is educated a librarian with a master’s in Literacy Studies, and has been a jury member for the Norwegian Ministry of Culture’s prizes for childrens literature, head of the jury for the Brage Prize for childrens literature and head of the Norwegian Cultural Council’s committee for comic books. From 2014 – 2019 Risdal was Project Manager for the Nordic Conference on childrens literature.
