The recipient of the “Notable Short Story Award/Yaşar Nabi Youth Awards 1993”, İlhan’s stories were published in numerous literary magazines from a young age on. Her first book Rüya Tacirleri Odası (Chamber of Dream Merchants, Artemis, April 2006) is a collection of short stories. Her second book Sürgün (Exile, Everest, March 2010) won the “2011 European Union Prize for Literature”.
Kostas Hatziantoniou was born in 1965 in Rhodes, where he also grew up. He studied political sciences and public administration at the Law School (University of Athens), and made his first appearance in literature in 1990, as a publisher of the literary magazine Remvie. Since then, he has collaborated with all of Greece’s notable literary magazines, as well as with encyclopaedic publications, writing literature, critical essays and historical articles.
The prose writer Inga Zolude was born in 1984 and received her master’s degree in English from the University of Latvia. She studied English literature at Southern Illinois University through the Fulbright Program and worked as a project coordinator and manager in the field of culture and education. She is currently studying for her doctorate at the University of Latvia. She has been a member of the Writers’ Union in Latvia since 2010.
Immanuel Mifsud was born in Malta in 1967, the youngest in a working class family of eight children. He has been active on the literary scene since the age of 16, when he started writing poetry and co-founded the literary group Versarti. He later founded several drama groups and also directed plays written by himself and by a variety of famous playwrights. He is a leading contemporary poet and fiction writer and some of his works have been translated and published in some European countries and the USA.
Jelena Lengold (b.1959) is a storyteller, novelist and a poet. She has published five books of poetry, one novel (Baltimore, 2003, 2011) and four books of stories, including Pokisli lavovi (Rain-soaked Lions, 1994), Lift (Lift, 1999) and Vašarski mađioničar (The Fairground Magician, 2008, 2009). She has been represented in several anthologies of poetry and stories, and her works have been translated into several languages. Lengold worked as a journalist and an editor for ten years in the cultural department of Radio Belgrade.
Tomáš Zmeškal (b.1966 in Prague) studied English language and literature, and he lived and studied in London for a number of years. In the 1980s, he played for a while in the band Psí vojáci, led by writer and musician Filip Topol. He works as a writer, translator and a secondary-school teacher of English literature.
Iren Nigg was born in 1955 in Schaan, in the Principality of Liechtenstein. She also grew up in Schaan and attended the Höhere Töchterschule St.Elisabeth. Nigg then travelled extensively before she studied journalism at the Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikation, University of Fribourg in Switzerland, from 1981-1984. After her studies, she did press and PR work for various newspapers and non-profit organisations. From 1997-99 she was responsible for the PR of the association Aktion Miteinander, which promoted rights for foreigners in Liechtenstein.
Kalin Terziiski was born in 1970 in Sofia. He graduated from medicine at the Medical Institute in Sofia, and for four years worked as a psychiatrist in the second largest psychiatric hospital in Bulgaria, the ‘St. Ivan Rilski’. However, he says, “because young doctors were receiving very low wages, making it hard to live”, he started writing for newspapers and magazines. During this time, he wrote a series of stories and cutting-edge alternative texts for magazines.
Poet and author Ófeigur Sigurðsson was born in Reykjavík on November 2, 1975. He has published six books of poetry and two novels. Ófeigur has tried his hand at a number of things: working as a uniformed night-watchman at a hotel, pre-packing ham and bacon at a factory farm, exercising his brawn as a dock worker, and exercising his brains as a student at the Philosophy Department of the University of Iceland, from where he received his BA degree in 2007, with a thesis on the taboo and transgression in the works of Georges Bataille.
Rodaan, who first called himself Al Galidi (his complete name is Rodaan Al Galidi) is a writer of Iraqi descent. As his native country didn’t register births when he was born, he does not know his birth date. He studied as an engineer in Iraq before fleeing to escape military service, arriving in the Netherlands in 1998. However, his request for asylum was rejected, and since he was not allowed to follow the official courses of Dutch language, he taught himself the language and started writing.
