Marta Breen

(Norway, 1976) 

Non-fiction writer and journalist. Her work focuses, above all, on women's history and feminism.
She made her literary debut in 2006, with a book focused on women and the challenges they face in the music industry. In 2014, she published the book Født Feminist (Born a feminist) and the best-selling work 60 damer du skulle ha møtt (60 women you should have heard about) in collaboration with illustrator Jenny Jordahl. The two also collaborated on the book F-ordet (With F for…), which won the Best Youth Textbook Award from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture.
The collaboration with Jordahl continued in her following works. In 2018 she presented Kvinner i kamp. 150 års kamp for frihet, likhet, søsterskap, which was translated into Spanish and was published that same year with RBA under the title Mujeres en lucha: 150 años de reivindicación feminista (Women in Battle). In this work, Breen and Jordahl show us, through the many battles won by the feminist movement, that the world for women is now a better place than it was 150 years ago, and that there is still a long way to go, and many battles to fight.
In 2019 she published the collection of essays Om muser og menn (Of Muses and Men) and in 2020 a book focusing on feminism, Hvordan bli (in skandinavisk) feminist. 20 veier til mer likestilling på jobben, i livet og i kjærligheten (How To Be a Scandinavian Feminist). 
From 2013 to 2018, Breen has preceded the Association of Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators. 

Other activities involving the participant:

Out loud: the feminist echo

T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher es una de las escritoras más reconocidas y exitosas en varios géneros literarios: comic, novela gráfica, álbumes ilustrados y cuentos infantiles, así como novelas fantásticas y de terror para jóvenes y adultos. Ha ganado los principales premios que se otorgan a obras de fantasía y ciencia ficción: el Hugo en cuatro ocasiones. El Nebula, dos veces. El Lodestar, una vez. El Locus en dos ocasiones, el Mythopoeic en tres ocasiones y el Premio Dragon tres veces. 

Estudió antropología, pero le dio por hacer cómics e ilustrar libros infantiles. Publicó el épico webcómic Digger por el que fue nominada al premio Eisner y desde entonces no deja de escribir. Bajo el nombre de Ursula Vernon ha escrito más de una veintena de libros infantiles y algunas novelas gráficas e historietas. También ha sido muy prolífica y versátil en sus novelas de horror y fantasía para jóvenes y adultos que firma con el pseudónimo de T. Kingfisher (y así evitar confusiones).

Gran Travesía ha publicado tres de las obras más destacadas y premiadas de T. Kingfisher: Manual de panadería mágica para usar en caso de ataque, ganadora de los premios Andre Norton Nebula, Lodestar, Locus, Mythopoeic, Dragón y Llibreter. Ortiga y hueso que ha merecido el premio Hugo y fue finalista del Nebula y el Locus. Y Mago menor, finalista de premio Lodestar. 
 

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
European Literature Festival

Victoria Aveyard

Victoria Aveyard creció en East Longmeadow, una pequeña ciudad de Massachusetts famosa sólo por poseer la mayor incidencia de embotellamientos de tránsito en la parte continental de Estados Unidos. Al mudarse a Los Ángeles, se licenció en escritura cinematográfica en la Universidad del Sur de California. La reina roja fue su debut literario y una aclamada tetralogía que la consagró como superestrella de la novela juvenil, que fue traducida en 41 idiomas. Saga a la que siguió la no menos exitosa trilogía Destructora de destinos, apareciendo en las listas de los más vendidos del New York Times y Publishers Weekly, entre otros. 

Samuel Shimon

(Iraq, 1956)

He was born into a poor Assyrian family in the Iraqi city of Habbaniyah. Since he left his country in December 1978 he has lived in Amman, Beirut, Cyprus, Cairo, Yemen and Tunisia, until he was granted the right of asylum in France in 1985.
Shimon started writing short stories and poetry in the late seventies, publishing the short stories in Jordanian newspapers and the poems in the magazine Al-Karmel by Mahmoud Darwish. While in Paris he published his first poetry collection in Arabic Old Boy (1987) and founded the Gilgamesh publishing house in which eleven books by Arab authors appeared.
In 1996 he moved to London, where he met the English researcher Margaret Obank and, together in 1998, they published the journal Banipal which had the aim of translating Arabic literature into English; they also created the Banipal Foundation to promote Arabic literature on a global scale and annually award the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for the best translation from Arabic to English.
His autobiographical novel Iraqi fi Baris (An Iraqi in Paris) was published in 2005 by Al-Kamel in Beirut, Lebanon and was very well received. It was reprinted in Egypt, Morocco and Algeria. It has been translated into French, English, Swedish, Kurdish and Hebrew. Boyd Tonkin described it in The Independent as "An Arabic response to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer".
In 2001, in collaboration with Margaret Obank, Shimon published in English the Anthology of Arabic poetry, and in 2010, with Bloomsbury House in New York and London, edited and published the anthology Beirut 39, which includes the work of 39 promising young people from the Arab world. In 2007, Samuel was selected by the British Booker Prize to be the first chairman of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, known as the Arab Booker. In 2013, Samuel launched a new cultural magazine called Kikah Magazine for World Literature and published a selection of fourteen short stories by Iraqi writers entitled Baghdad Noir at Akashic House in New York (2018). The book had a Spanish edition of Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2023.
The Spanish version of the magazine Banipal saw the light in the summer of 2020. In a review of the famous German newspaper Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung Samuel Shimon, the editor-in-chief of Banipal, is described as "a tireless promoter in the dissemination of Arabic literature". He is currently working on her second novel Underwear Under War, based on her experience in the ranks of the Palestinian resistance in Beirut during the years of the Lebanese civil war.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

An Assyrian on the streets of Paris. Biography of literary creation