Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin.  His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City was published in 2023. He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel and writing a new book about Irish literary salons.  He was the 2022 Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and curated the Unseen Plays series for the Abbey Theatre (2021).

Disha Bose is the author of two novels – Dirty Laundry and I Will Blossom Anyway. Her debut, Dirty Laundry, was an Irish Times bestseller, a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and the inaugural An Post Book Club selection.

Disha was selected by An Post Irish Book Awards as one of Ireland’s best New Voices.

She was born and raised in India, and has lived in Ireland for a decade, since graduating with a Masters in Creative Writing from UCD.

Daniel Mulhall is a former Irish Ambassador to Malaysia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Since his retirement from the diplomatic service, he has been Global Distinguished Professor of Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Harvard University. He is Honorary President of the Yeats Society (Sligo), patron of the AE George Russell Society, and a consultant with the global law firm, DLA Piper, Rockwood PR and the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation. He is Brand Ambassador for the Carlichauns, an animated children’s entertainment venture based on Irish folklore.  Throughout his diplomatic career, he has lectured and published extensively on Irish history and literature. His most recent publications are Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books, 2022) and Pilgrim Soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (New Island Books, 2023).  He is a regular media commentator, columnist and book reviewer.

Dike Chukwumerije is a performance poet, spoken word theatre practitioner, author, public speaker, and cultural administrator.

His novel, ‘Urichindere’, won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize for Prose Fiction in 2013. His poems and short stories have been published in several literary magazines including The Combat Magazine, The African Writer, Saraba, The Dream Catcher, and Wasafiri.

Since 2013, he has hosted and headlined an annual poetry show in Abuja, Nigeria, and has directed three feature-length spoken word theatre productions, including the production “The Made in Nigeria Show” which toured the country for seven years.

Between 2013 and 2023, he was the Programs Director of the Abuja Literary Society (ALS) in which capacity he oversaw an annual program of book readings, open mics, and poetry slams. In 2019, he participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), a US Government exchange program, on the theme ‘Promoting Social Change through the Arts’. In 2022, he was named as one of the judges on the Nigeria Prize for Literature in the Poetry category for that year.

He is the Executive Director of the Simply Poetry Foundation, a not-for-profit he established in 2018 to promote the use of art for social change, and is currently working on a program that leverages art in tackling issues of polarization in society.

Clara Ministral studied Translation and Comparative Literature in Madrid and London and has been translating fiction and non-fiction from English to Spanish for over fifteen years. She has translated works by Jan Carson, Rebecca Solnit, Louise Kennedy, Rónán Hession, John Haines and Rebecca Miller, among others. During that time, she has also held other positions in the arts sector, primarily in publishing, worked as a bookseller and completed a master’s degree in Conflict Studies and Human Rights. Clara is a keen advocate of Irish literature in Spain, with a particular interest in the North, and currently runs Wheeker Books, a project intended to introduce Northern Irish works to Spanish-speaking publishers and audiences. She lives between Madrid and Belfast.

Xiaolu Guo is an award winning novelist and film director. She has published a dozen books with Random House. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist, she also directed several feature films including the Golden Leopard Winner of her feature She, a Chinese and MoMA New Directors’ selection We Went to Wonderland. Her new non-fiction Everyday Tang will be published by The New York Review of Books in 2026. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, and a Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.