Stephen Bonanno is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta Junior College. He lectures on Maltese Literature in general, while his research focuses mainly on the narrative genre. In 2016 he coordinated a conference on the subject in Maltese Contemporary Narrative. He contributed several papers on the Maltese novel and short stories to numerous scholarly journals.
Margot Dijkgraaf is a literary critic (NRC Handelsblad, Dutch national newspaper), author, interviewer and curator of (inter-) national literary events. She was the Director of the Centre Français du Livre at the French Cultural Institute in Amsterdam, as well as of the Academic-Cultural Centre SPUI25. Ten years ago she initiated the European Literature Prize in The Netherlands, which is now an important prize for European literature translated into Dutch.
Ludvig Berggren is a German-Swedish translator and freelance writer. He translates mainly from Geman poets such as Lutz Seiler and Peter Huchel, among others. He also works as a literary advisor at the Goethe-Institut Schweden in Stockholm. He is a member of the Swedish Writer’s Union and resides in Stockholm.
Author of several books, including a thesis on love in the Arab-Islamic tradition, Raja Ben Slama is a professor at the University of Manouba and a psychoanalyst. She is director-general of the National Library of Tunisia since 2015. Her latest book, in French, is Gender Orders / Disorders : Cross-Readings on Violence and Love (Tunis, 2020).
Elín Edda Pálsdóttir is the manager of the Forlagið Bookstore (Bókabúð Forlagsins) in Reykjavík since 2015 and one of two editors of the literary magazine Tímarit Máls og menningar since the fall of 2018. She holds a BA-degree in Literature studies from the University of Iceland, a master's degree in Applied Editing and Publishing from the same school and a one year master's degree from the Literature-Culture-Media programme at Lund University, Sweden.
Vladimír Opatrný (born 1978) is a bookseller. He completed his studies at the Institute of Information Science and Librarianship in Prague in 2006. For several years he worked in university libraries as a specialist in electronic information resources. He started his business with an e-commerce focused on professional literature and opened a shop in the center of Jablonec nad Nisou in 2012. He organizes meetings in the bookstore focused not only on literature and he considers the store as a place in the city center where people meet, not only for buying books.
Rachelle Deguara has been working in the book industry for the last three years building close relations with authors, promoting their work and contributing to the National Book Festival (Malta). Her work in the literacy field started when she had the role of public relations officer in the voluntary organisation Għaqda tal-Malti Universitá which is the university association that strives to promote emerging authors and make sure that the pioneers of Maltese literature are not forgotten.
Iris Meijer has been working as a bookseller at Linnaeus Boekhandel in Amsterdam since 2015. Apart from day-to-day sales in store, she is responsible for the selection and purchase of English titles and partially responsible for the selection and purchase of fiction and non-fiction titles. Apart from her work at Linnaeus, she co-organises the annual nationwide event De Week van het Korte Verhaal [The Week of the Short Story] and she also coordinates booksales at the Lowlands Festival.
Ana Geršak (1983) has been working as a literary critic and editor for a number of years. She is a contributor to various literary journals, newspapers, web portals and the national radio. She was on the organisational team for the international critics’ symposium coordinated by the Slovene Literary Critics’ Association. In 2011, she received the Stritar Award, which is presented annually by the Slovene Writers’ Association to the most promising literary critic.
Bora Babić is editrix-in-chief and directress of the publishing house Akademska knjiga. She is also the co-founder and vice-president of the UPIS-Association of Serbian Professional Publishers. She began her professional career working in the publishing department for both Matica srpska Novi Sad and Izdavačka knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića.
