Ioana Pârvulescu

(Romania, 1960) 

A well-known and appreciated writer in Romania, she is a professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest, where she teaches Moderna Romanian literature and coordinates a master's degree in editing. For 18 years, she wrote a weekly chronicle in the magazine România literară (Literary Romania), and at the Publishing house Humanitas (Bucharest), she started and took care of the collection of world literature Cartea de pe noptieră (The book of the night table). Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages. In Spanish, she has been published La vida empieza el viernes (Life Begins on Friday) by Editorial Báltica (Madrid), translated by Joaquín Garrigós Bueno. In October 2024  Los inocentes,( The innocents) by Editorial Armaenia (Madrid), translated by Rafael Elias Pisot Diaz will be published.
She has twice received the European Union Prize for Literature, for the novel Life Begins on Friday (in 2013) and for the short prose A Voice (in 2018). 
Her novels in Romania are best sellers and long sellers: Life Begins on Friday (2009), Viitorul începe luni (The Future Begins on Monday)(2012), Inocenții (The Innocents)(2016), Prevestirea, (The Prophecy)(2020) and Aurul pisicii (Cat's Gold)(2024). Among her essays, the most successful have been those dedicated to everyday life: Return To The Interwar Bucharest (2003),  In the intimacy of the 19th century (2005), as well as the study of literary history Alfabetul doamnelor (The ladies' alphabet)(1999).
She has coordinated collective volumes, the most important being Și eu am trăit în comunism (I too lived under communism)(2015). She has translated authors such as Angelus Silesius, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Nadeau and Milan Kundera from German and French into Romanian, as well as several albums by Astérix by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.
 

Dolores Redondo

Invitado de Honor

(Donostia-San Sebastián, 1969) is the author of the Baztán Trilogy, the most important literary phenomenon in Spanish of recent times: El guardián invisible, Legado en los huesos and Ofrenda a la tormenta. The three film adaptations were successfully launched between 2017 and 2020 and are currently available on Netflix. The trilogy was followed by All this I will give to you (2016 Planeta Award), the best-selling novel to have won this award in recent years and the subject of a television series adaptation by France Télévisions.

In 2019, she returned to the Baztán universe with North face of the heart, which, together with the Baztán Trilogy, will inspire a series produced in the United States and Great Britain, a landmark in contemporary Spanish fiction. Esperando al diluvio is her latest novel, also in the process of being adapted for the screen. In 2021, Los privilegios del ángel, her first novel, was republished. Today, her works have been translated into 38 languages all over the world, and boast more than 4 million readers.

Other activities involving the participant:

“Evil never goes unpunished” The enigmas of the crime novel

Tomasz Rózycki

(Poland, 1970) 

Różycki writes poetry and fiction. He has published nine collections of verse (the most recent, Ręka pszczelarza [The Beekeeper’s Hand], appeared in 2022), epic poems and novels. He has won numerous literary prizes in Poland and abroad, including the Václav Burian Award (2017) and the Wisława Szymborska Award (2023). His collection of literary sketches, Błędna kartografia Europy [A False Cartography of Europe], won him the title “Ambassador of the New Europe”. Mira Rosenthal’s English translation of his poetry collection, Kolonie [Colonies], was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize (2014). In 2023 he received the Grand Continent Prize for his book The Lightbulb Thieves. He is a former resident of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme. His poetry has been translated into languages including Spanish, French, English, Bulgarian, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovenian and Ukrainian, and has appeared in many foreign anthologies and journals.

Other activities involving the participant:

Poetry Room

Ana Margarida de Carvalho

(Portugal, 1969)

Nació en Lisboa, donde se licenció en derecho y ejerció el periodismo durante 25 años. Hace crítica de cine y crónica. Su novela Que importa a fúria do mar (Teorema), recibió elogios de la crítica, fue finalista de varios premios y ganó por unanimidad el Gran Premio de Novela APE/DGLAB 2013. Su segunda novela, Não se pode morar nos olhos de um gato, fue nominada al mejor libro del año por la SPA, finalista del Premio Océanos, ganadora del Premio Literario Manuel de Boaventura y, nuevamente, el Gran Premio APE/DGLAB 2016 de Romance y Novela, entrando así en el reducido grupo de autores portugueses doblemente distinguidos. Pequenos delírios domésticos (Relógio d’Água, 2017), una colección de cuentos, ganó también el Premio de Cuento y Novela Camilo Castelo Branco/APE. O gesto que fazemos para proteger a cabeça, su tercera novela, fue finalista de prestigiosos premios. En 2023 publicó un ensayo sobre la soledad, Viver só, de la Fundación Francisco Manuel dos Santos.  Tiene dos libros infantiles: A arca do É, con ilustraciones de Sérgio Marques y A barata que acordou tranformada numa gigantesca menina, con Anna Bouza da Costa (2023).  Cartografias de lugares mal situados, 10 contos de guerra, es su libro más reciente. Y diez años después de la primera edición, Que importa a fúria do mar fue reeditada por Relógio d’Água, con prólogo y epílogo, con motivo del 50 aniversario del 25 de abril.
 

Cláudia Gavinho Burrows

Es lectora del Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, IP (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Portugal). Licenciada en ciencias políticas y relaciones internacionales y máster en traducción por la Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas de la Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Doctoranda en didáctica de la lengua portuguesa en la misma institución. Tiene el curso de formación de profesores de portugués como lengua extranjera por la Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. Es profesora invitada de portugués lengua extranjera en la Universidad de Guadalajara. Anteriormente, se desempeñó como profesora de portugués en la Universidad de Westminster (Londres) y en la Universidad de Ain Shams (Cairo). Fue examinadora de IGCSE en Cambridge International Examinations. Antes de dedicarse a la docencia trabajó como traductora y periodista de varias revistas y periódicos portugueses e ingleses.

Dylan Brennan

(Ireland)

Brennan divides his time between Mexico and Ireland and writes poetry and prose. He was the winner of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award. In 2022, he won the inaugural Drumshanbo Written Word Weekend Poetry Film Award for Four Attempts at Making a Human, a poetry film in collaboration with Jonathan Brennan. He has read at literary festivals in Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Italy, Ireland and the United States and has twice received a Culture Ireland Travel Grant. His work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Galician and Greek. His most recent book, Let the Dead (2023), is available from Banshee Press.

Claudia Durastanti

(United States of America, 1984)

Claudia Durastanti is the author of five novels. She is the Italian translator of Elizabeth Hardwick, Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway and writes for several literary supplements. Strangers I Know (Premio Strega Off in 2019, Pen Translates Award, longlist Prix Femina and Prix Les Inrockuptibles) has been translated into twenty-one languages. Missitalia (La Nave di Teseo, Premio Mondello 2024) will be published by Anagrama in Spain. She currently lives in Rome and curates the feminist imprint La Tartaruga.

Other activities involving the participant:

The Roma-Milan is Killing Us. Where does the new Italian literature come from?

Neige Sinno

(France, 1977)

She was born in 1977 in the Hautes-Alpes region. She lived in the United States for a while and currently resides in Mexico with her partner and her daughter. She is a translator and has published the short story collection La Vie des rats (2007), the literary essay Lectores entre líneas: Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia y Sergio Pitol (Aldus, 2011, Lya Kostakowsky Prize) and the novel Le Camion (2018). After its launch in France, Triste tigre, a non-fiction text that deals with the systematic sexual violence she suffered as a child, she immediately became the publishing phenomenon of the year and has received multiple awards, including in 2023 the Prix littéraire Le Monde; the Prix Blù Jean-Marc Roberts; the Prix Les Inrockuptibles; the Prix Goncourt des lycéens; the Prix Femina and in 2024 in its Italian translation the European Strega Award.

Deniz Utlu

Utlu studied economics in Berlin and Paris. He is the author of several novels and lives in Berlin. He has received several awards, such as the Alfred Döblin, the Literatour Nord and the Bavarian Book Prize. From 2003 to 2014 he edited the culture and society magazine freitext. Since 2013 he has been the curator of a literary series at the Maxim Gorky Theater and a researcher at the German Institute for Human Rights.

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

Invitado de Honor

Journalist, novelist and playwright, and he manages the Cultura/s supplement of La Vanguardia.He is the author of the fiction trilogy consisting of Una heredera de Barcelona, Estaba en el aire (2013 Nadal Award), and El informe Casabona, which combines family memory and chronicles of the time. He has also written the plays El club de la escalera and La agente literaria, which recently premiered at the Teatre Akadèmia in Barcelona.

He has published several books on literary, publishing and artistic topics, such as Pasando página, El síndrome de Frankfurt, Código best seller and Vargas Llosa sube al escenario, and the biography El joven Porcel. His latest book is Cultura española en democracia. Una crónica breve de 50 años 1975-2024 (Destino).

He was the curator of the Year of the Book and Reading 2005, and is a member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona. He received the 2020 Premio Nacional de Periodismo Cultural and the José Luis Giménez-Frontín Award from the Association of Writers of Catalonia (ACEC) for dialogue between cultures.

Other activities involving the participant:

Exploring of the outside from within
Meetings (and misunderstandings). Cultural journalism in an era of excess
The prescribers

Yuri Andrukhovych

(Ukraine, 1960)

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most significant writers at the contemporary literary scene in Ukraine. He is a prose writer, poet, essayist, translator, and public intellectual. His works have been translated and published in Poland, Germany, Canada, Hungary, Finland, Croatia, United States, Sweden, Spain and other countries – all together into 22 languages. Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the cofounders of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary group, which is associated with the emergence of Ukrainian postmodernism. He is an author of seven novels, and a few poetry and essays collections. ©Yana Stephanyshyn Andrukhovych has been awarded numerous national and international prizes, including the Herder Prize, the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, the Angelus Award, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Goethe Medal.

Other activities involving the participant:

With humor and irony: narrating in turbulent times

Eva Meijer

(Netherlands, 1980) 

Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer-songwriter. They write novels, philosophical essays, academic texts, poems and columns, and their work has been translated into over twenty languages. Recurring themes are language including silence, madness, nonhuman animals, and politics. 
Their philosophical work mostly focuses on language, democracy and social justice, with special attention for nonhuman animals and nature. Meijer currently writes columns and essays for Dutch newspaper NRC.
Their first novel Het schuwste dier (Prometheus) was published in 2011. Short stories and poems have been published in Dutch and Flemish literary magazines, such as De Revisor, Tirade and De Brakke Hond. Their second novel Dagpauwoog was published in November 2013, to critical acclaim. In 2016 the book Dierentalen (Animal Languages) was published, a popular philosophical book about nonhuman animal languages and the question what language actually is. Their third novel Het vogelhuis (Bird Cottage), was published in September 2016 and chosen as one of the books of the month by DWDD book panel on national television. It won the readers' prize of the BNG Bank Literatuurprijs. Dierentalen and Het vogelhuis are translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Swedish and Turkish. In 2017 De soldaat was een dolfijn was published, an essay about political animals, which won the 2018 Hypatia prize. In 2018 Meijer won the Halewijnprijs for all their books. In 2019, De grenzen van mijn taal was published, a philosophical essay about depression. Voorwaarts, a novel, was also published that year. When animals speak: Towards an interspecies democracy, an academic book, came out in November 2019 (New York University Press) and was awarded the ASCA Book Award in 2020. In 2020 their novel De nieuwe rivier was published, a magical-realist murder mystery. In 2021 Meijer wrote the essay for the Dutch Month of Philosophy: Vuurduin. Aantekeningen bij een wereld die verdwijnt. In the same year, the novella Haar vertrouwde gedaante was published. In 2022 Meijer published three books: a novel called Zee Nu, in which the North Sea floods the Netherlands, Verwar het niet met afwezigheid. Over politieke stiltes, an essay about politics and silence, and Misschien is een ander woord voor hoop. Een pleidooi voor meerstemmigheid in het politieke en publieke debat a pamflet about the public debate, and the role of language in politics. In 2023, the poetry collection Het witste woord and the novel Dagen van glas were published.   

Other activities involving the participant:

The language of plants and animals
Echoes of FIL

Carolina Schutti

(Austria, 1976)

Carolina Schutti was born in Innsbruck, where she still lives. She studied German philology, English and American Studies, classical guitar and classical voice. 
Her publications include short stories, poetry and radioplays. She works with musicians and develops interdisciplinary projects. Schutti has received several awards for her literary work, including the European Union Prize for Literature. Her books have been published in twenty countries. 
Carolina Schutti is known for her poetic yet powerful books that pay particular attention to society's outsiders. Her texts are often about the search for identity and home, about escapes from bleak living conditions and about the question of guilt and innocence. Her latest novel Ocean Breeze shows the power that books, education and encounters can have by showing two sisters from the lower classes living in great isolation that the world has more in store for them than a life of poverty and lies.
 

Ulla Lenze

(Mönchengladbach, 1973)

Lenze studied music and philosophy in Cologne and today lives and works as a freelance writer near Berlin. She has published several novels and received numerous awards, such as the Literature Award from the Culture Circle of German Companies and the Lower Rhine Literature Award for all her work. In 2023 she held the Max Cade Chair as a visiting professor at Dartmouth (EU).

Winston Manrique Sabogal

He is a Colombian-Spanish journalist and founder and director of WMagazín, a global digital literary and cultural magazine based in Spain. His vocation is pan-Hispanic and itinerant, participating in the leading fairs and gatherings of writers and the book universe in both America and Europe. This pioneering project caters to a dual, analog, and virtual world, featuring special editions in PDF and print that enrich journalistic genres and explore new narratives through individual and group video interviews, photo stories, video stories, and video chats with both established and emerging authors, as well as professionals in the field.

He collaborates with the Spanish newspaper El País, where he worked for 19 years as an editor and head of books and literature for the Babelia supplement and the Culture section, and was co-editor of its digital edition and the blog Papeles perdidos. He has interviewed leading writers and book professionals from around the world over the past few decades and has written reports on literary creation, the publishing industry, and the promotion of reading. From this work came the titles El destino del libro, Latinoamérica contra los tópicos and Historias del Boom.50 años de la literatura que cambió el español (El País-Amazon).

In Colombia, he worked for the newspapers El Espectador and El Tiempo, the Colombian news agency Colprensa (Research Unit), and the radio newspaper Agrohuila. He reported on issues ranging from the coffee crisis and alliances between paramilitary and religious sects, to social and cultural trends.

He is the author of La gran transformación: la belleza, el amor, el sexo y la felicidad en el siglo XXI (Galaxia Gutenberg), a work that analyzes the accelerated metamorphosis of these four great desires that are changing life. Over two hundred people, from writers and artists to philosophers and sociologists, have contributed to his journalistic articles since the 1990s.

Other activities involving the participant:

"Childness" Landscape in motion
A question of class: stories of fiction and non-fiction
The "other people": animals and nature in literature
Paths in time
Crossroads. Journalism and literature
Two-way journeys of literary agents And a tribute to Antonia Kerrigan