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.
Helén Foss has worked nearly 30 years in bookselling. She started out as part time help in a small bookshop while taking flying lessons, but advanced and was responsible for books in general in a larger bookshop. After taking the bookselling trade school, she became manager in very large bookshop just outside of Oslo. The last 18 years, she has worked as CEO for the independent bookshops Fri Bokhandel SA. She is a board member in the Norwegian Bookseller Association and a board member at Bokbasen, a company for shared metadata for the Norwegian book industry.
Liviu Papadima is a critic, essayist, professor and vice-rector of the University of Bucharest.
Clea Bautista is Sales manager at the Arnold Busck bookshop in Copenhagen.
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.
Alessia Rastelli (Civitanova Marche, Macerata - 1982) is a journalist for the "Corriere della Sera", where she is part of the editorial team of the Culture section and of the cultural supplement "la Lettura" (The Reading). She graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa after studying Modern and Contemporary Literature. She is the co-author of the web series "The noise of memory. Vera’s journey from the Shoah to desaparecidos", directed by Marco Bechis and turned into a movie.
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).
Claude D. Conter (born 1974) is a scientific collaborator (2004-2008), curator (2008-2012) and, since 2012, director of the National Literature Centre of Mersch. He studied German Literature and Mass Communication in Bamberg and Berlin. He was scientific collaborator for the German Literature Department of Bamberg. He completed his Phd in 2003. From 2004 to 2008 he worked as scientific collaborator for the same department in Munich. In 2017, he was guest lecturer at the University of Sewanee (TN, USA).
Toby Lichtig is the Fiction and Politics Editor of the Times' Literary Supplement (TLS). He writes for a range of publications, including the TLS, Wall Street Journal, Telegraph, FT, Jewish Chronicle and New Humanist, and has appeared as a guest critic on various television and radio programmes. He also freelances as a documentary producer. He was chair of judges of last year's JQ/Wingate Prize.
