Renate Punka wears three hats in her daily professional life. She is managing director of Janis Roze Publishers – one of the oldest and most respectable publishing houses, the home of many established and aspiring writers from Latvia and, mostly, from abroad.
Ben Andoni was born in Tirana. He studied Geography and History. Since 1996, his main profession has been as a journalist. For 12 years, he was the manager of a National Cultural Supplement. He works regularly for columns concerned with national politics and Kosovar issues. He has translated more than 20 prominent authors from Slavic and English literature. He also published 5 books of his own, concerned with history, publicity and geographic issues, and is the co-authors of some reports of the Civil Society.
Lucia Butnariuc was born in 1995. She studied History at the Faculty of History and Philosophy of Moldova State University,. Since September 2019, she is a bookseller at Cărturești Chișinău.
Darin Tenev is an associate professor in the Literary Theory Department of the University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski” and director of the Institute for Critical Social Studies at the University of Plovdiv. He gave lectures in Tokyo, Kyoto, New York, Berlin, Münster. He has published two books – Fiction and Image. Models (2012) and Digressions. Essays on Jacques Derrida (2013).
Anahit Avetisyan is a literary translator and conference interpreter. She holds a Master degree in translation from the Ecole de traduction et d’interpretation of the University of Geneva, and was also part of the Fellowship Programme in Paris organized by BIEF and French National Book Center (CNL) for foreign publishers, editors and rights managers.
João de Melo was born on the island of São Miguel (Azores, 1949), but came to study in Lisbon at the age of eleven, and it is in this city where he has lived since 1967. Mobilized for the colonial war, he was in Angola between 1971 and 1974, as a sergeant nurse. After graduating in Romance Philology from the Faculty of Letters, he practiced the teaching profession in secondary and higher education.
Arno Jundze (1965) is a Latvian prose writer, cultural journalist, literary critic and theorist. He is host of TV show Grāmatu kods/The Book Code on RigaTV 24, has been a host of 100g of Culture and other TV programmes, and was one of the creators of the programme Melns uz balta/ Black on White, with interviews and video profiles of celebrated Latvian writers for Latvian television (LTV1). Arno Jundze was an editor (2005 – 2020) of the cultural news section for one of the biggest newspapers in Latvia and helps in shaping country's most important art and literature forums and outlets.
Hanna Nordenhök is a Swedish novelist, translator and literary critic, born in 1977. Her latest novel ”Caesaria” (2020) was shortlisted for the Swedish Radio’s Novel Prize and her work has been awarded literary prizes from The Swedish Academy, Swedish Writer’s Union, Albert Bonniers Publishing House, amongs others. She recently translated Mexican author Fernanda Melchor’s internationally acclaimed ”Hurricane Season”.
Mariana Cocieru, PhD, is head of the Folklore Sector of the Institute of Romanian Philology „B. P.-Hasdeu”. She is especially interested in intangible cultural heritage, folklore, ethnography, ethnology, and literature. She published several books, including Ethnofolkloric constituents in the prose of Romanian writers from Bessarabia (1960–1980) (Chisinau, 2018, and coordinated several multimedia publications, including Voice archive: Interviews with personalities in the field of culture (in 20 volumes) (Chisinau, 2016, 2019).
Born in 1973, he holds Master degrees in Marketing and Management as well as Law from the University of National and World Economy, Sofia. He has been selling books for more that 25 years and has experience in various forms of trade - direct sales, online - including 15 years as a sales manager at one of the largest bookshop chains in Bulgaria.Since 2012, he is a managing partner in Bookoholic Ltd, an import and wholesale company, trading with English, German, French, Spanish and Bulgarian books.
