Aamer Hussein was born in 1955 in Karachi, Pakistan. He has lived in London since the 70s. He is the author of five collections of stories, most recently Turquoise (2002), This Other Salt (2005) and Insomnia (2007). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lectures at the University of Southampton. He is also Director of the MA in National and International Literatures in English at the Institute of English Studies (University of London). He has reviewed for the Independent, the TLS, Literary Review and the New Statesman and was on the jury of the Commonwealth Prize (Eurasia) 2006/7.

Abdourahman Waberi is a major writer from the African nation of Djibouti. An essayist, novelist, teacher, poet and short story writer, Waberi is partially based in France and has been named one of the 50 Writers of the Future by the French literary mag Lire. Most of his works were originally published in French

Agnès Desarthe is the author of nine novels for adults in her native French, many of which have been translated to critical acclaim, most notably Chez Moi, The Foundling, and Five Photos of My Wife, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Fiction Prize. Her books have been featured in The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, The Telegraph, The Independent, Kirkus Reviews, and many other places. She is also the translator for several authors, including Cynthia Ozick, Jay McInerney, and Virginia Woolf. She lives in France.

Almelda Faria was born in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal in 1943. A fiction writer playwright and essayist, he currently lectures in Aesthetics at the New University of Lisbon. The recipient of many prizes, he published his first novel Rumor Branco (White Noise) in 1962 at the age of 19. His other novels include A Paixão (The Passion, 1965), the first part of a trilogy set. His O Conquistador (The Conqueror, 1990) is an ironic and erotic parody which “weaves a devilish black comedy of subtle double entendres on philosophical, linguistic and ideological levels”. His books are translated into many languages, including Spanish, Franch, Italian, Dutch, German, Greek, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian and Bulgarian.

Alvin PANG, PhD is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist, translator and researcher whose broad creative practice spans over two decades of literary activity in his native Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, including Swedish, Macedonian, Croatian, Chinese and French. For contributions to literature, he has received Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year Award, the Singapore Youth Award and the JCCI Education Award. In 2021, he was appointed to the honorary position of Adjunct Professor of RMIT University. His books include the bestselling What Gives Us Our Names (2011), When the Barbarians Arrive (2012), What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (2017) and Uninterrupted time (2019).

Anatoly (Anthony) Kudryavitsky was born in 1954 in Moscow of a Polish father and half-Irish mother. He lives in Co. Dublin and writes in both English and Russian. His poems and short stories have been translated into eleven languages. He was the recipient of a number of literary awards.

Andrew O’Hagan was born in 1968 in Glasgow. In 1995 he wrote THE MISSING and in 1999 he published his first novel, OUR FATHERS, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and was winner of the Holtby Prize for Fiction.

Anne Fine has written highly acclaimed novels for adults and is also one of Britain’s most prestigious writers for children, having twice won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. In 2003 she was awarded an OBE for her contribution to literature. Her work has been translated into thirty five languages.

Carlo Gébler was born in Dublin in 1954.  He lives outside Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.        He is the author of several novels including A Good Day for A Dog and The Dead Eight (shortlisted for the Kerry Irish Fiction Prize), the short story collection W.9. & Other Lives, works of non-fiction including the narrative history, The Siege of Derry and the memoir The Projectionist, The Story of Ernest Gébler.  He has also written novels for children as well as plays for radio and the stage, including 10 Rounds, which was short-listed for the Ewart-Biggs Prize.  He is a member of Aosdana. Photo Credit: Bobbie Hanvey

Carmen Callil was born in Melbourne in 1938 and graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA Arts degree in History and Literature. A Doctor of Letters from Sheffield, York, Oxford Brookes and The Open University, Carmen has lived in London since 1960. She has pursued a wide-ranging career since founding the Virago Press in 1972. Now a critic and writer, Carmen Callil’s work includes: The Modern Library: The Best 200 Novels in English since 1950, written with Colm Toibin and published by Picador in April 1999; a biographical account of her family in New Writing 5, edited for the British Council by Christopher Hope and Peter Porter and Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland, a book about Vichy France and Louis Darquier, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in Pétain’s government.

Catherine Dunne is author of nine novels. The most recent, The Things We Know Now, won the 700th anniversary Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013. It has also recently been shortlisted for the Eason Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2013. Catherine has also published one work of non-fiction, a social history of Irish immigrants in London, called An Unconsidered People. She was awarded the International Prize at the Vigevano Literary Festival in Vigevano, Italy, in 2006, and has been shortlisted for, among others, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Italian Booksellers’ Award. Catherine Dunne lives in Dublin.

Cathy Rentzenbrink was born in Cornwall, grew up in Yorkshire, lived in London for twenty years, and has now moved back to Cornwall. She is the author of The Last Act of Love, which was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller of the year and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize and the Portico Prize. She followed this with A Manual for Heartache and her next book is called Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books and will be published in September 2020. Cathy presents The Bookseller podcast, writes a column for Prospect, reviews books for The Times, and speaks and writes regularly on life, death, love and literature. She is often to be found doing events in bookshops and libraries, at festivals, and in prisons.

Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19.   His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City will be published early in 2023.   Among his other books are Yeats on Theatre (2021),  A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002),  A History of the Media in Ireland (2009) and he is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016).  He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel.  He was the 2022 Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and curated the Unseen Plays series for the Abbey Theatre (2021);  from 2009 to 2014, he served as the first chair of the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.  He was elected to Membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, and to Fellowship of Trinity in 2016.  His latest book, as of 2023, is Dublin: A Writer’s City.

Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin. The Lives of Women will be published in May 2015 and will be her 8th book. The Cold Eye of Heaven won the Irish Novel of the Year of the Year 2012 and was nominated for the IMPAC 2013 award. Her novel Last Train from Liguria was shortlisted for the Prix L’Européen de Littérature and her novel Tatty was chosen as one of the 50 Irish Books of the Decade as well as being nominated for The Orange Prize. Her first novel The Dancer was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year. In March 2014 her first play, Snow Angels, was staged at the Project Theatre Dublin and played to full houses and critical acclaim. Christine is a member of Aosdana.

Clíona Ní Ríordáin was born in Cork. She moved to France to pursue post-graduate studies and now lives in Paris where she is Professor of English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. She teaches translation studies and Irish literature. Her most recent book, English Language Poets in University College Cork 1970-1980, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She translated Michel Déon’s memoir Horseman Pass By (Lilliput, 2017). She has also edited three anthologies of Irish poetry, the most recent, Jeune Poésie d’Irlande: les poètes du Munster (Illador, 2015), was co-edited and co-translated with Paul Bensimon. The duo will publish a volume of Gerry Murphy’s poems, Plus loin encore, with Circe in March 2022. She chairs the Fondation irlandaise’s Translation Prize and sits on the Strategic Committee of the Centre Culturel Irlandais

Clive Sinclair’s first novel was published in 1973, his first collection of stories in 1979. Since then his books have won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction, and the PEN Silver Pen. He was among the twenty original Best of Young British Novelists. His most recent publications are Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West (2008), and Death and Taxes; Texas (2013). He lives in London with his partner – the painter, Haidee Becker – and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Courttia Newland is the author of seven works of fiction that include his debut, The Scholar. His latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published in 2013 and has been optioned by Cowboy Films. He was nominated for the Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Frank O’ Conner award, The CWA Dagger in the Library Award, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Theatre 503 Award for playwriting as well as numerous others. His short stories have appeared in many anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2016 her was awarded the Tayner Barbers Award for science fiction writing and the Roland Rees Busary for playwriting. He is associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and is completing a PhD in creative writing. Photo Credit: Sharmila-Chauhan

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some forty books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. Forthcoming books include the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and translations of novels from Angola, Guatemala and Brazil. He is currently chair of the Society of Authors, and on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature and free speech.

David Karashima is an author, translator and associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He coedited (with Elmer Luke) the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is coeditor (with Michael Emmerich) of Pushkin Press’s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, his book on Haruki Murakami’s early English translators/translations, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2020.

Martín Veiga is a Cork-based Galician poet, translator and academic. He lectures in Hispanic Studies at University College Cork and is the director of the Irish Centre for Galician Studies. His poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the author of six award-winning poetry collections, including As últimas ruínas (Espiral Maior Poetry Prize), Ollos de ámbar (Esquío Poetry Prize), Fundaxes (Fiz Vergara Vilariño Poetry Prize) and Diario de Crosses Green, translated into English by Keith Payne as Diary of Crosses Green. His most recent books are the poetry collection a ganancia e a perda and the bilingual Galician-English volume Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. In 2017 he was awarded the Pedrón de Honra Prize for his trajectory in the international promotion of Galician culture. Photo Credit –  Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez.

Rita Sakr grew up in Lebanon reading world literature in three languages, studied and worked at British universities, and has been living in Ireland for the past ten years. She is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Maynooth University. Among various other publications, she is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study and of ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies, co-editor of  The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut, and co-director/co-producer of the RCUK-funded documentary on Beirut, White Flags. Rita currently researches literary/cultural production related to forced displacement and serves on committees and projects focused on migration and sanctuary.

Dubravka Ugresic is a free lance writer, based in Amsterdam and is the author of several novels, short stories and essays. Her books, including, Baba Yaga Laid An Egg, Nobody’s Home, The Ministry of Pain, Lend Me Your Character, Thank You For Not Reading, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and Fording the Stream of Consciousness, which have been translated into many European languages and received several international literary awards. Her latest book of essays Karaoke Culture will appear in English language later this year.

Eibhlín Evans grew up in Dublin. She moved to England where she gained a PhD in English and Philosophy and taught in universities for many years. Since her return to Dublin in 2004, she has been a member of the School of English and Drama at University College Dublin where she has been involved in the recently established M.A. Degree in Creative Writing. She has published academic articles, essays and reviews and has edited a collection of essays on Irish writing. Her research has been chiefly centered on twentieth century and contemporary writing, including Irish writing and women’s writing. She is actively involved in the literary life of Dublin city. Working with Dublin City Libraries she has given talks, lectures and interviews on literary subjects and has been a key supporter of and participant in the Dublin One City One Book initiative and The Dublin Writer’s Festival. She is also a published poet, and a painter.

Eilis Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin. She is a novelist, short story writer and playwright, and writes in both Irish and English. She is also a literary critic who reviews frequently for The Irish Times.  Her fiction includes The Dancers Dancing (1999), The Bray House (1990), Fox Swallow Scarecrow (2007) and The Shelter of Neighbours (2012),  Hurlamaboc (2009) and several other books.   Her latest books are Selected Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017) and a memoir, Twelve Thousand Days (Blackstaff Press, 2018). Eilis has won many awards for her work, including the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, Bisto Book of the Year`Awards, several Oireachtas awards for play and novels, and a shortlisting for the Orange Prize for Fiction.  She received the Irish Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature in 2015, and a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2016. A well-known teacher of Creative Writing, she has been Writer Fellow in UCD and Trinity College, and  is a member of Aosdána.  Photo credit – Hazel Coonagh

Elizabeth Nunez emigrated from Trinidad to the US after completing high school. She received her Ph.D. in English from New York University and is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College, NY. She is the author of eight novels and is co-editor of the anthology, Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. She is the cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and executive producer of the 2004 Emmy-nominated TV series Black Writers in America.

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, OBE is an independent critic, broadcaster and editor and is currently Visiting Professor at Goshen College, Indiana. She is the editor of Safe House: Explorations in Creative Non-fiction (Cassava Republic, 2016) and Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara (Bloomsbury, 2014). The former Deputy Editor of Granta magazine, she sits on the boards of Art for Amnesty, the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Writers’ Centre Norwich. She is patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature and served as a judge for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Her journalism has appeared in the Independent, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Observer and she has been a regular contributor to the book pages of NPR in the USA.  Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson

Emmanuel Dandaura is the Executive Director, Institute of Strategic and Development Communication at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria. He is a creative writer, literary critic, festival curator, scholar, and multiple award winning playwright based in Abuja, Nigeria where he was born over fifty years ago.

Dandaura has in the last three decades provided valuable contributions to the development of African literature and popularised Africa’s diverse cultural expressions through his creative works, scholarly publications, public lectures and researches. He is a member of the Pan African Writers Association and has served as jury to many literary competitions and theatre festivals in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Dandaura has over the years provided strategic interventions and consultancy services in his dicipline to the African Union, UNESCO, European Union, UNICEF, World Bank, Robert Bostch Stiftung, British Council, etc

Enda Wyley is an Irish poet, author and teacher. She has published six collections of poetry, from her debut Eating Baby Jesus, (1993 ), through to Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems, (2014), and her most recent, The Painter on his Bike (2019 ), all published by Dedalus Press. Awards include the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Melbourne University and she is a recipient of a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry. She has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised, including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. Her books for children include, I won’t Go to China! Boo and Bear and The Silver Notebook, O’Brien Press. With her husband Peter Sirr she co-hosts the podcast Books for Breakfast, about books and writing. Enda Wyley is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists.

Eve Patten is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, where she specialises in Irish writing and in the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel. She has published widely on contemporary British and Irish fiction .She regularly reviews new fiction for the Irish Times and is an essayist for the British Council’s Contemporary Writers series. She was awarded Fellowship of Trinity College in 2005.

Evelyn Schlag was born in Austria in 1952 and studied German and English Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. An award-winning poet and novelist, Evelyn is also a translator of contemporary English and American poetry. Evelyn has given poetry lectures at Graz and Klagenfurt Universities and was writer-in-residence in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She was also poetry lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in 2010. Evelyn lives in Waidhofen/Ybbs.

Evie Wyld was born in London and grew up in Australia and South London. She is the author of two novels, All the Birds, Singing, winner of the Miles Franklin Award; and After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; and one graphic memoir, Everything is Teeth. In 2013 she was included on Granta Magazine’s once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list. She lives in Peckham where she part owns a small independent bookshop called Review.

Gabrielle Alioth was born 1955 in Basel, Switzerland, and having studied economics (M.A.) and the history of art worked in econometric forecasting before emigrating to Ireland in 1984. Her first novel „Der Narr“ („The Fool“) was published in 1990. It received the Hamburg literary award for best first novel. Her seventh and most recent novel „The Bride from Byzantium“ appeared in 2008. She also writes children´s and travel books. Gabrielle does extensive reading tours in Europe, India, Canada and the United States. She was a member of the Irish delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1996 and member of the Swiss delegation in 1998. She was also Guest lecturer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (1997) and at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, (2002); and Writer in Residence at University College Dublin (2005/6). Since 2004 she has been a lecturer at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. She lives in Julianstown, County Meath.

Belfast born poet Gerald Dawe has published six collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Morning Train and Lake Geneva. He is a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin where he is Lecturer in English and director of the graduate writing programme. He has edited several anthologies of Irish poetry and criticism as well as publishing volumes of his own literary essays. He lives in Dun Laoghaire.

Giles Foden was born in in 1967 to Irish and English parents. He grew up mostly in Africa, spending his summer holidays in north Kerry. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked on newspapers and magazines in Britain, during which period he published his debut novel The Last King of Scotland, which won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. He is author of three other novels — Ladysmith, Zanzibar and Turbulence — and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. Giles is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has been a judge on the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, and the MAN Booker Prize.

Hanan al-Shaykh was born in Lebanon and grew up in Beirut. Her most recent novel, Only in London, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Hanan was educated in Cairo and wrote her first novel there when she was nineteen before returning to Beirut to work as a journalist for Al-Nahar newspaper Al Hasna Magazine. Hanan writes in Arabic and her work has been translated into 21 languages. She has also written a collection of short stories, I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops; and two plays, Dark Afternoon Tea and Paper Husband which have been performed at the Hampstead Theatre. Her latest work is a story about the life of her mother, Hikayati. Since 1984 she has lived in London with her family.

Hans-Christian Oeser, born 1950 in Wiesbaden, studied German and Politics in Marburg and Berlin. In 1980 he moved to Ireland to take up a post as Lecturer in German at UCD. Since then he has been working as a literary translator, editor and travel writer. He has translated numerous novels, short story and poetry collections, particularly by Irish writers such as Sebastian Barry, Brendan Behan, Maeve Brennan, Anne Enright, Dermot Healy, Claire Keegan, Eugene McCabe, John McGahern, Bernard MacLaverty, John Montague, Jamie O’Neill, Patrick Pearse, William Trevor and Oscar Wilde. In 1997 he was awarded the Aristeion Prize for his translation of Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy. In 2010 he received the Rowohlt Prize for his life’s work, in 2014 the Braem Prize for Mark Twain’s Autobiography.

Photo Credit – Barbara-Schaper-Oeser

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In 2002 he published his first novel, Waiting for an Angel. Waiting for an Angel has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize, 2001, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2006 he co-edited the British Council’s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in February, 2007. He currently teaches Creative Writing at the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his family.

Ian Sansom is a novelist, critic and academic. He is the author of 13 works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Truth About Babies, Ring Road and the Mobile Library series of novels. His most recent book is Death in Devon (HarperCollins, 2015), book no.3 in his 44-book County Guides series of novels. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New Statesman and The Spectator. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Iglika Vassileva is the acclaimed translator of James Joyce’s Ulysses, of almost all novels by Virginia Woolf, the prose of Walt Whitman, Nabokov and many other distinguished writers. Her translations of Ulysses, The Waves and To the Lighthouse have been met with high acclaim by literary critics and reading public alike. The recipient of numerous prizes, Iglika Vassileva was awarded four times the Prize of the Union of Bulgarian Translators, twice the Prize of the Ministry of Culture, twice the “Hristo G. Danov” National Prize for Literary Translation and the Sofia City Prize for Achievements in the field of Literature. Currently Iglika Vassileva is teaching literary translation at Sofia University.

James Ryan is a native of Rathdowney, Co Laois and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. His postgraduate studies, also at Trinity, focused primarily on creative development. His first novel, Home from England, was published by Phoenix House, London in 1995. Dismantling Mr Doyle followed in 1997 and his third novel, Seeds of Doubt, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2001. South of the Border, his most recent novel was short-listed for the 2008 Kerry Group Literary prize.  He is a lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film in UCD, currently directing the postgraduate programme in creative writing.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories and Postcard Stories 2 (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland in 2019 and the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction in 2020. It was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize in 2020. The Last Resort, a ten part BBC Radio 4 short story series and accompanying short story collection is forthcoming from Doubleday in early 2021. In 2018 Jan was the inaugural Translink/Irish Rail Roaming Writer in Residence on the Trains of Ireland. She was the Open Book Scotland Writer in Lockdown 2020.

Photo Credit – Jess Lowe

Jane Koustas Jane Koustas is currently serving as the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin. She is a Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario where she also directed Canadian Studies. Professor Koustas’ research interests include English-Canadian literature in translation, translation theory and practice, translation history in Canada Quebec theatre and theatre translation. She is the co-editor of two books, Robert Lepage: Théâtre sans fronti res: essays on the dramatic universe of Robert Lepage with Joe Donohoe and Vision/Division: l’oeuvre de Nancy Huston with Marta Dvorak. She has published numerous articles in journals such as The University of Toronto Quarterly, Quebec Studies, Theatre Research in Canada, Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction and Annuaire théâtral. Professor Koustas has served on the jury of the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Award.

Jaume Subirana was born and lives in Barcelona. He is a writer, critic and translator who has published both prose and poetry (he has won the most prestigious Catalan awards: Carles Riba in 1988 and recently the Gabriel Ferrater), and has also written and edited books on Barcelona and Catalan culture. He served as director of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, and is a member of PEN Català. Associate Professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, he has been Visiting Professor at UBC, Brown University and Ca’ Foscari-Venezia. He regularly updates his blog Flux. Photo Credit: Victor P. deObanos

John Boyne was born in Dublin in 1971. He is the author of 8 novels, including the international bestsellers Mutiny On The Bounty, The House of Special Purpose and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which sold 5 million copies worldwide, topped the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a Miramax feature film. His second children’s novel, Noah Barleywater Runs Away, was published in October 2010. His books are published in over 40 languages.

Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham, grew up in Dudley, and studied English Literature at Sussex University, where he stayed on to take an MA. From there he moved to King’s College, London, where he researched the work of the Scottish poet/artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. After working as a university tutor, stage hand, maker of theatrical sets and props, bookshop manager, decorator and builder, he was commissioned in 1987 to write the Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto.

He went on to become an editorial director at Rough Guides, and to write further guidebooks on Tuscany & Umbria and Florence, as well as contributing to the Rough Guide to Classical Music and Rough Guide to Opera.

His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997. It was followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), So He Takes The Dog (2006), Contact (2010) and Telescope (2011), Nostalgia (2013) and The River is the River (2015).

From 2003 to 2005 he held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Sussex, and from 2007 to 2011 was an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

Jordi Soler was born in 1963 in La Portuguesa, a community of Catalan exiles located in the jungle of Veracruz, Mexico. He currently lives in Barcelona and is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines in Spain and México. Soler has published books of poems, story collections, and ten novels translated in to several languages. Los rojos de ultramar ( 2004), La última hora del último día ( 2007) and La fiesta del oso (2009) are a trilogy of novels that the author devoted to his family, forced to emigrate to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War. The trilogy was published in a single volume entitled La guerra perdida, and was awarded in France with the Prix Littéraire des Jeunes Européens (2012).

José Luis de Juan was born in Palma in 1956. He graduated in Law and International Relations in the universities of Barcelona and Johns Hopkins, working as a lawyer and civil servant in different organisations. Following a period of art activities, he began to publish his literary work in the 90s: six novels, short stories and two non-fiction books, as well as poetry. He has received literary awards in Spain and France. His works has been translated into English, French and Italian and presented in international literary festivals including Berlin (2004) and Edinburgh (the novel This breathing world, Arcadia 2007). He lives in Majorca.

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He’s the author of Down the Rabbit Hole (shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award), Quesadillas and I’ll Sell You a Dog (to be published in English in 2016). His novels have been translated into fifteen languages. He writes for several publications, including Granta, Letras Libres, Gatopardo and English Pen’s Blog, and translates Brazilian literature into Spanish. He lived in Barcelona for several years, then moved to Brazil, and is now back in Spain. He is married with two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan children. Photo Credit: Renato Parada

Kamila Shamsie is the author of five novels including Kartography, Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and has been translated into more than 20 languages. She is Deputy President of English PEN, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Trustee of Free Word. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.

Kapka Kassabova is a poet, novelist, and writer of travel and history. Her travel memoirs are Street Without a Name (2008) and Twelve Minutes of Love, a tango story (2011). Born and raised in Bulgaria, she moved with her family to New Zealand in the early 1990s, where she published her first fiction and poetry. She now lives in the Highlands of Scotland. She has written for The Guardian, Vogue, and 1843 magazine. Her latest book is Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (2017). Photo Credit: Marti Friedlander.

Kate Pullinger is a novelist and digital writer. Her 2009 novel ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction; it was long listed for both the Giller Prize and IMPAC Dublin. Her new novel, ‘Landing Gear’ was published in 2014. She has been at the forefront of literary digital innovation for more than a decade; her on-going web project ‘Inanimate Alice’ and her 2014 digital war memorial ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ have gathered readers and writers around the world. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University.  Find her at www.katepullinger.com

Katy Derbyshire was born in London and has lived in Berlin for the past twenty years. She translates contemporary German writers, including previously Dublin Literary Award longlisted Simon Urban and Helene Hegemann along with Inka Parei, Clemens Meyer, Jan Brandt, Felicitas Hoppe and many others. She writes occasional criticism and essays in English and German, published by Lithub, The Quarterly Conversation, Music & Literature, New Books in German and Der Tagesspiegel. Katy co-hosts a monthly literary translation lab in Berlin and has taught translation in London, Leipzig, New York, New Delhi and Norwich. Photo Credit: Anja Pietsch

Krista Kaer was born in Tapa, Estonia. She studied English Language and Literature at Tartu University. She has worked in Tartu University Library and the Estonian Institute. As a translator from English, she has translated more than 80 novels and plays of English, Irish and American authors (Doris Lessing, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt, John Banville, Sebastian Barry, Oscar Wilde, William Boyd et al.) She has written articles on contemporary British and Irish literature and interviewed novelists including Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien, for print and television. She is one of the directors of Tallinn Literary Festival HeadRead and the editor-in-chief of Varrak Publishers.

Lilian Faschinger was born in Carinthia, Austria in 1950. She studied English and History at Karl Franzens University, Graz, where she earned a Ph. D. in English also working there as a college lecturer. She has worked as a literary translator and freelance writer, receiving numerous awards for both her fiction and her translations. Since 1998, she has held several writer-in-residence positions at American colleges and universities, including Dartmouth College and Washington University in St. Louis. Currently, she is writer-in-residence at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
In addition to several plays, Lilian Faschinger has published two volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and five novels. Her most successful novel to date, Magdalena the Sinner has been translated into 16 languages

Maciej Świerkocki is a former academic teacher with a Ph.d. in comparative literature, currently an award-winning freelance translator, critic, screenwriter, novelist and editor. He has translated more than 50 books from English into Polish, including works by John Barth, Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Ciaran Carson, Robert Graves, Richard Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, John Irving, Howard Jacobson, John Updike and W.B. Yeats. His prose was published in English in The Tampa Review and The Yellow Nib. His latest book, a collection of essays called Echa postmodernizmu [Echoes of Postmodernism] came out in 2010. Member of the Polish Writers’ Association and the Polish Film Academy. He lives and works in Łódź, Poland.

Martin Middeke is Professor of English at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has held scholarships by the International Beckett Foundation at the University of Reading, UK, and he was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, USA. He also held a Visiting Professorship at the University of Barcelona and was Long Room Hub Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in 2017. Major book publications include works on contemporary British theatre, nineteenth- to twenty-first century fiction, and literary theory. Recent publications as (co-) editor include The Literature of Melancholia (Palgrave, 2011); Theory Matters (2016); Of Precariousness (2017) and four volumes on British, Irish, American and South African Contemporary Playwrights (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2011-2015). He’s the co-editor of ANGLIA: Journal of English Philology, founded in 1878 and the oldest journal dedicated to matters Anglia in world.

Mary O’Donnell is a poet, novelist, translator and critic who is based in Co. Kildare, Ireland. She has published four volumes of poetry, most recently September Elegies (2003) and has presented several series of poetry programmes for the Irish national broadcaster, RTE. Her critically acclaimed third novel, The Elysium Testament, appeared in 1999. Her work has been published in literary magazines and journals in Ireland, the UK and the USA and anthologised in collections in Ireland and abroad. She recently presented ‘Crossing the Lines’, a series of radio programmes on European poetry in translation. Mary is a member of Aosdana – membership of this organisation of 200 living Irish artists is by peer nomination and election.

Maya Jaggi is an award-winning critic and cultural journalist in Britain who received an honorary doctorate from The Open University in 2012 for her outstanding contribution to education and culture over 25 years, especially in ‘extending the map of international writing.’ A longstanding profile writer and critic for the Guardian Review, she also writes for the Financial Times, Independent, Newsweek and Literary Review, and appears on BBC radio and television. Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she has interviewed 12 Nobel prizewinners in literature, and judged literary awards including the Orange, David Cohen, Caine and Commonwealth Writers prizes. She chaired the Man Asian Literary Prize jury in Hong Kong in 2013.

Meaghan Delahunt was born in Melbourne and lives in Edinburgh. She is the author of novels In the Blue House, The Red Book and To the Island. Her latest book is Greta Garbo’s Feet & Other Stories (2015). Awards for her work include the Flamingo/HQ Australian Short Story Prize (1997), a regional Commonwealth Prize, a Saltire Book Award and a nomination for the Orange Prize. She teaches Creative Writing part-time at the University of Stirling and is an Arts & Culture editor for www.bellacaledonia.com

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1957, and moved to England in 1961. He went to schools in Bristol, Edinburgh and Winchester, and studied at Cambridge for seven years. Since 1983, he has been a   freelance writer and reviewer. In 1993, he was offered a teaching post at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He lives in Hamburg and London.He is the author of four books of poems and a Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2008), a book of criticism called Behind the Lines (Faber and Faber, 2001), and the translator of many German authors, including Brecht, Kafka, Jünger and Roth. In 1998, his translation of Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Among his recent translations are Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (Penguin) and Angina Days (Princeton U.P.), the selected poems of Günter Eich.

Born in 1965, Mike McCormack grew up in the West of Ireland. He has published a collection of short stories Getting it in the Head and two novels – Crowe’s Requiem and Notes from a Coma. In 1996, McCormack was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 1998, Getting it in the Head was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Notes from a Coma (2005), was short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award and described in the Irish Times as ‘the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended’. In May 2016, Dublin publisher Tramp Press published his novel Solar Bones; this went on to win the Goldsmiths Prize. The book was unusual in that it was written as a single sentence. He was elected to Aosdána in 2018. In June 2018, McCormack won the Dublin Literary Award.

He worked as a language editor and editor in two publishing houses, and from 1981 as a freelance writer. For eleven years he devoted himself exclusively to the translation of literary texts, especially novels from German, English and Swedish. In 1984 he was in Weimar as a Goethe fellow to study secondary literature for his translation of Goethe’s Faust. In the spring of 1990 he spent several months on the Fulbright Program at the UCLA in Los Angeles. From autumn 1992, he spent nearly two months in the Czechoslovak foreign service, and from January 1993 two and half years in the Slovak diplomatic service. He served as Chargé d’Affaires, a.i. in Norway, accredited also for Iceland. During his tenure, in 1994 the first Nordic head of state – Iceland’s president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir – visited Slovakia.

From 1995 to 2002, Richter worked in the newly established Slovak Literature Center, where he founded the Department SLOLIA (Slovak Literature Abroad) and the magazine Slovak Literary Review (SLR). In 2000 he founded his own publishing house MilaniuM, specializing in Slovakian poetry, as well as in poetry and prose from Scandinavia and other countries, publishing authors such as H. C. Andersen, Emily Dickinson, R. M. Rilke, Franz Kafka, Edith Södergran, Harry Martinson, Elias Canetti, Milan Rufus, Tomas Tranströmer, Reiner Kunze, Volker Braun, and many more.

At the invitation of the Austrian Society for Literature, in 2004 and 2005 he collected in Vienna material for an anthology of Austrian poetry. In 2006 and 2007, he held a Rilke scholarship in Raron, Switzerland. In 2011 he spent three months in Weimar as a fellow of the Goethe-Gesellschaft.

Dr Mpalive-Hangson Msiska is a Reader in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, with special interest in Post-colonial and Global Literatures.  He has written widely on African and Post-colonial Literatures, including the following books: Post-colonial Identity in Wole Soyinka (2007) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (2007) (co-authored).  He has been a judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing as well as the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.  He sits on the Boards of the Royal African Society, The Canon Collins Education and Legal Trust and The British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1953, Nancy Huston has been living in Paris since 1973. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, in both French and English, translating herself in both directions. Her novels have won numerous prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (France), the Prix Elle (Québec) and the Governor General’s Award (Canada). Published in 2006 in French and in 2008 in English, Fault Lines, her eleventh novel, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize in Great Britain and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada. Distinguished by the Prix Femina in France, it became an international bestseller has been translated into nearly forty languages.

Niall MacMonagle  was born in Killarney and studied at UCC where he wrote an MA thesis on Virginia Woolf. He taught English for thirty-five years, first at Bandon Grammar School and then at Wesley College, Dublin. He has edited several anthologies and textbooks including the Lifelines series, Poetry Now and Windharp Poems of Ireland since 1916. He writes a weekly art column in the Sunday Independent and broadcasts frequently on RTE Radio 1. He founded Poetry Aloud, has done many public author interviews and has served on the boards of the National Library and the Seamus Heaney Foundation. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by UCD for services to literature.

Nicky Harman is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and translates Chinese literature (and some non-fiction and poetry) into English. Her authors include Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Dorothy Tse, Xinran, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. She mentors new translators, teaches summer schools, and judges translation competitions. She works with others on the literary website Paper Republic (paper-republic.org), writes blogs and runs events to promote Chinese literature in English, in collaboration with the London Free Word Centre, Southbank Centre and the Writing Chinese project (Leeds University). She tweets as @cfbcuk and @NickyHarman_cn. She is based in Weymouth, UK.

Nino Ricci’s first novel was the internationally acclaimed Lives of the Saints. It spent 75 weeks on the Globe and Mail‘s bestseller list and was the winner in Canada of the F.G. Bressani Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and in England of the Betty Trask Award and Winifred Holtby Prize. In the U.S. it was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book, and in France it was an Oiel de la lettre Selection of the National Libraries Association.

Published in seventeen countries, Lives of the Saints was the first volume of a trilogy that continued with In a Glass House, hailed as a “genuine achievement” by The New York Times, and Where She Has Gone, nominated for the Giller Prize. The Lives of the Saints trilogy was adapted for a television miniseries starring Sophia Loren and Kris Kristofferson.

Books in Canada commented that Ricci’s trilogy “so amply demonstrates the author’s tremendous talents that we would be foolish as readers not to follow him down whatever road he next chooses to follow.” That road led him to Testament, a fictional retelling of the life of Jesus. Hailed as a “masterpiece” by Saturday Night, Testament was a Booklist Choice for the Top Ten Historical Novels of the Year and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Prize and for the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and was a winner of the Trillium Award.

Testament was followed by the national bestseller The Origin of Species, which earned Ricci the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award as well as his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Set in Montreal in 1980s, the novel casts a Darwinian eye on the life of Alex Fratarcangeli, who is torn between his baser impulses and his pursuit of the Good. “This novel does so well, on so many levels,” wrote the Toronto Star, “that it’s hard to know where to begin tallying up the riches.”

Ricci is also the author of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a short biography that forms part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, edited by John Ralston Saul. Ricci’s biography, according to HistoryWire, “provides the best, and best written, perspective on Trudeau there is.”

Ricci most recent novel is Sleep, published in the fall of 2015, the harrowing tale of David Pace, an academic whose life unravels after he comes down with a sleep disorder. “A frightening and essential addition to the oeuvre of one of this country’s best and most important writers,” wrote Quill & Quire, hailing the book as “Ricci’s darkest and most thematically daring work to date.” Sleep won Ricci his second Canadian Authors Award for Fiction and was a Toronto Star Top 5 Book for 2015 as well as a Globe and Mail and National Post Best Book. “If endemic narcissism is one of the central pathologies of contemporary culture,” the Toronto Star wrote, “then Ricci has crafted with Sleep one of its holy texts.”

Nino Ricci was born in Leamington, Ontario, to parents from the Molise region of Italy, and completed university studies in Toronto, Montreal, and Florence, Italy. He has served as a writer-in-residence for the Toronto and Kitchener public library systems and for the University of Windsor and the University of Toronto Scarborough, and has held the Mariano Elia Chair at York University, the Chair in Religion and the Arts at Assumption University, the G. M. Hopkins Chair in Literary Studies at John Carroll University, the Killam Visiting Professorship in Canadian Studies at Bridgewater University, and the Pathy Visiting Professorship in Canadian Studies at Princeton. He is also a past president of PEN Canada, a writers’ human rights organization that works for freedom of expression.

Ricci has been a recipient of the Alistair MacLeod Award for Literary Achievement, of York University’s Pinnacle Achievement Award, of the Engel/Findley Award for a Writer in Mid-Career, and of an honorary doctorate from the University of Windsor. He was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2011 and recently held the inaugural Alice Munro Chair in Creativity at the University of Western Ontario. He lives in Toronto with his wife, writer Erika de Vasconcelos.

Patricia Duncker was born in Jamaica and has lived most of her life in Northern Europe. She was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and is the author of four novels : Hallucinating Foucault (1996), winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize, James Miranda Barry (1999), The Deadly Space Between (2002) and Miss Webster and Cherif (2006) which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has also written two collections of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003). She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.

Patrick Mc Cabe was born in Ireland in 1955. He has published many novels including The Dead School and The Butcher Boy. Movie adaptations of his books include Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy, both directed by Neil Jordan and, new movie The Ballad of Honky Mc Swaine directed by Kevin ‘Twin Town’ Allen which premiered in June 2012. He has completed two new novels, Goodbye Mr. Fish and No Orchids for Mr. Lonely. He is married with two grown-up children to the artist Margot Quinn.

Paolo Ruffilli was born in 1949. Attended the University of Bologna, where he studied modern literature. After a period of teaching, he became editor with the publisher Garzanti in Milan, and is presently the general editor of the Edizioni del Leone in Venice. Beginning in 1972, he has published nine volumes of poetry. The more recent: Piccola colazione (1987, American Poetry Prize, in english translation Malaria, Poetry Chicago 1989, and Story Line Press 1991, now Like it or no, Bordighera Press 2005), Diario di Normandia (1990, Montale Award), Camera oscura (1992, Prix Victor Hugo), Nuvole (1995), La gioia e il lutto (2001, Prix Européen, in english translation Joy and Mourning, Dedalus Press 2004). He published also the novel Preparativi per la partenza (2003), essays, novels and translations from English.

Rachel Billington worked in television in London and New York before taking up full-time writing. Her first novel All Things Nice is set in New York.
RB has written nineteen adult novels, four childrens’ novels, five religious books for children and three non-fiction books. Her latest novel is Lies & Loyalties published in 2008. RB has also written and continues to write journalism for newspapers both in the UK and the US, including a three year stint as a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.
RB was President of English PEN, the writers organisation from 1998-2001 and remains a Vice-president. During her time as President RB initiated PEN’s Readers & Writers Programme which sends books and writers to meet readers in schools and prisons. RB is a Trustee of the Longford Trust which was set up in memory of her father, Lord Longford. In 1991 RB became a member of the editorial team of Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners.

Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, Ireland. She has published 10 collections of poetry, a memoir in 2010 and a book of essays with poems in 2019. She left formal education at 14. As an adult, in NUIG she received a Dilploma sa Gaeilge and a Diploma in Women’s Studies 1994-1996.

Poetry collections from Salmon Poetry include; Goddess on the Mervue Bus(1986), Witch in the Bushes (1988), Goddess and Witch (1990), Philomena’s Revenge (1992) Higher Purchase (1996).  Poetry collections from Bloodaxe include; Sunny Side Plucked (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems in May 2005 (to mark her 50th birthday) Ireland is Changing Mother(2011) and Tongulish (2016).

Memoir & Essays include Hurting God, part essay part rhyme 2010 (Salmon)a memoir in prose and poetry.
Our Killer City, essays and poems from Salmon in 2019. Her plays include; Face Licker Come Home (1991), (published by Salmon) God of the Hatch man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993) Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Big Break 2004 (screenplay) The Empty Frame (inspired by Hanna Greally, 2008),
THE PLASTIC BAG (A play for radio 2008). The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors (2012) Screenplays in the Irish Language Straois / The Smirk (2018) Screenplay Í dTeanga Eile/ They Speak in Tongues (2018)

As editor, Out the Clara Road: The Offaly Anthology (1999), Word and Image: a collection of poems from Sunderland Women’s Centre and Washington Bridge Centre in 2000. Co-edited ‘FIZZ’ Poetry of resistance and challenge, an anthology written by young people, in 2004.

Rita Ann Higgins is a recipient of Galway County’s Writer-in-Residence in 1987, Writer in Residence at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 1994-95, Writer in Residence for Offaly County Council in 1998-99. Green Honors Professor at Texas Christian University, in October 2000. Other awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989, several Arts Council bursaries. Sunny Side Plucked’ received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Honorary Fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University Nov 2006. She is a member of AOSDANA

As competition Judge; The IMPAC fiction prize in 2005, The Listowel Novel of the Year prize in (2013)
The Fish Prize (2000), The Listowel Prize for poetry in (2007), The Hotpress ,Write Here, Write Now prize (2018)

Selected anthologies include; Dogs singing, Ed Jessie Lendennie. Salmon Poetry, Everything to Play For: Ed, John Mc Auliffe, Images of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry,Ed By Myra Scneider & Dily’s Wood, Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Ed by Alexander G Gonzalez, Lucy Collins: Poetry by Women in Ireland a critical Anthology. Fermata-writing inspired by music Ed by Eva Bourke & Vincent Woods.
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume V. Arguments of Heart and mind: Selected essays 1977-2000 Janet Montefiore. The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Ed Patrick Crotty. The Wake forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry 1976-2000. Dodging Around the Grand Piano, Sex, Politics and Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry by Ailbhe Smyth. Shine On: Daedalus Press Ed Pat Boran. Don’t Ask me What I mean (poets in their own words) Ed Claire Brown & Don Patterson.

Radio appearances include; Arena (several times), The Brendan O Connor Show, Playback (several times), Lyric FM, BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Manchester. National Television Appearances: The Saturday Night Show 2014, The Late Late Show 2016, The Late Late Show 2017

Prison Workshops: Cork Prison, Limerick Prison, Loughan House Open Prison. Co Cavan, Mountjoy Prison, Mountjoy Women’s Prsion Dochas, Mahgaberry Prison Belfast, Highpoint Prison UK.

Voluntary Community workshop 2013-2015 with Galway Grow Group- promoting positive mental health where they produced a play based loosely on Chekov’s Ward No Six. Written and performed by the group.

Salim Bachi was born in Algiers and grew up in eastern Algeria. He studied French literature both in Algeria and at Sorbonne. He moved to Paris in 1997 where he lives and works. He has published six novels, Le Chien d’Ulysse, La Kahéna, Tuez-les tous, Le silence de Mahomet, Amours et aventures de Sindbad le Marin and Moi, Khaled Kelkal which were hailed by the critics and have won many literary prizes. His latest novel, Amours et Aventures de Sindbad le marin (2010), a fable about our time, relates the life of a man in search of absolute love. His work has been translated into several languages.

Shreela Ghosh was born in Shillong, India and lives in London. She has worked in the Arts for more than 30 years and in 2009, she became the founding director of the Freeword Centre in London which brings together people working in literature, literacy and free expression. For several years the International Translation Day conference was held at Freeword. Shreela continues to champion translators and promotes translating as a creative act. Between, 2011 – 2018, she was part of the British Council’s Global Arts senior management team. During this period, she felt privileged to live and work both in Dhaka, Bangladesh and in New Delhi, India. Shreela believes that novels are the best place to start if you want to understand another culture.

Sinead Moriarty was born and raised in Dublin. After living in Paris and London for many years, she has returned to Dublin. She is the bestselling author of 15 novels published by Penguin Random House. Her books have been translated into 25 languages.

Her first children’s book has been published by Gill publishing.

Sinead has been a columnist with the Irish Independent for 7 years. She is also the books ambassador for Eason’s Must Reads book club. Sinead sat on the board of the Arts Council. She is a passionate advocate for fellow writers and the books industry in Ireland.

Victoria White is a native Dubliner and a graduate, with an M. Litt in English Literature, of Trinity College, Dublin.  Following a period teaching English at the University of Pavia, Italy and elsewhere, she has worked in Dublin as a writer and journalist, working first as a theatre critic and guest editor of Theatre Ireland magazine and as a features writer and subsequently as Arts Editor of The Irish Times. She has published short stories, a polemic on motherhood in Ireland (Mother Ireland, 2010) and worked most recently as an opinion columnist for the Irish Examiner and The Herald which garnered her a nomination as Popular Columnist of the Year.

Susan Bassnett is a writer and professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of over 20 books, which include translations, collections of her poetry,and academic writing. Recent publications include a study of Ted Hughes(2009)and a co-authored book on translation and global news (2010). A collection of her short essays , Reflections on Translation; will appear in 2011. She travels all over the world to give lectures and run workshops, but always finds time for her children, grandchildren and beloved dogs.

Tash Aw is the author of three novels, The Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World and Five Star Billionaire, which have won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize, they have also been translated into twenty four languages. His short fiction has won an O. Henry Award and been published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others. He lives in London.

Tessa Hadley has written three novels: Accidents in the Home, published by Jonathan Cape 2002, and by Holt in the US (longlisted for the Guardian First Book award); Everything Will Be All Right, Holt 2003, Cape 2004 (shortlisted for the Encore Award); and The Master Bedroom, Cape and Holt 2007 (longlisted for the Orange). A new novel, The London Train, will be out in January 2011. She has had stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Guardian, and published a collection of stories, Sunstroke, in 2007 (Cape and Picador US, shortlisted for the Story Prize in the US). She reviews for The London Review of Books and The Guardian, and was Chair of the Editorial Board of New Welsh Review from 2005-8. Tessa is also a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University, where she teaches on the MA in Creative Writing, courses on The Short Story, and Writing and Politics. Her book on Henry James, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard and now lives in Italy. Author of bestselling books on Italy, plus a dozen novels, including the Booker short-listed Europa, he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso and Machiavelli. He runs a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan. His non-fiction works include, Translating Style, Medici Money, and, most recently, Teach Us to Sit Still, described by David Lodge as: “A darkly comic self-examination of the connections between writing, personality and health.”

Timothy Taylor is an award winning novelist and journalist. His novels – Stanley Park (2001) and Story House (2006) – were national bestsellers and he has received nominations for numerous literary prizes including the Giller Prize, the Writers Trust Fiction Prize, and both the Vancouver and British Columbia Book Awards. His short story collection Silent Cruise (2002) earned him the Journey Prize and second place in the Danuta Gleed Award, given to the best collection of stories published in Canada in a given year. Taylor is also the winner of three National Magazine Awards. He lives in Vancouver where he splits his time between fiction, writing for screen and journalism. He’s a contributing editor at enRoute Magazine and Vancouver Magazine, and a columnist for the Globe and Mail.

Valentine Cunningham (British) is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
He has lectured widely around the world and has been a Visiting Professor in the USA, Australia and Germany (where he was Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz for ten years). He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio on literary and musicological topics. He has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize (1992 and 1998), and was a Regional Chair for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region) in 1999 and 2000. His most recent book is Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems and Poetics (2011).

Timothy Taylor is an award winning novelist and journalist. His novels – Stanley Park (2001) and Story House (2006) – were national bestsellers and he has received nominations for numerous literary prizes including the Giller Prize, the Writers Trust Fiction Prize, and both the Vancouver and British Columbia Book Awards. His short story collection Silent Cruise (2002) earned him the Journey Prize and second place in the Danuta Gleed Award, given to the best collection of stories published in Canada in a given year. Taylor is also the winner of three National Magazine Awards. He lives in Vancouver where he splits his time between fiction, writing for screen and journalism. He’s a contributing editor at enRoute Magazine and Vancouver Magazine, and a columnist for the Globe and Mail.

Victoria White is a native Dubliner and a graduate, with an M. Litt in English Literature, of Trinity College, Dublin.  Following a period teaching English at the University of Pavia, Italy and elsewhere, she has worked in Dublin as a writer and journalist, working first as a theatre critic and guest editor of Theatre Ireland magazine and as a features writer and subsequently as Arts Editor of The Irish Times. She has published short stories, a polemic on motherhood in Ireland (Mother Ireland, 2010) and worked most recently as an opinion columnist for the Irish Examiner and The Herald which garnered her a nomination as Popular Columnist of the Year.

Vona Groarke has published seven collections of poetry with Gallery Press, the most recent being X (2014) and Selected Poems, reviewed in The Dublin Review of Books as a collection ‘of almost sublime purity’ and awarded the Pigott Prize for the best book of poetry by an Irish poet in 2016. Described in the Irish Times as ‘intriguing… erudite and elegant’, her book-length essay on art-frames, Four Sides Full, was also published in 2016 and was the Book on One on RTE Radio. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books and The Threepenny Review. A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and Selector for the Poetry Book Society, she is a Senior Lecturer in poetry at the University of Manchester.  She was the 2017 inductee into the Irish Literary Hall of Fame, and has been a member of  Aosdána since 2010.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, essayist and filmmaker. She has published seven novels, short story collections and a memoir with Random House UK/USA. Her novel A Concise Chinese English Dictionary For Lovers was translated into 27 languages and was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. UFO In Her Eyes, a study of totalitarianism in a semi-real Chinese village, has been translated into 9 languages and made into an award winning feature film. Her other novels such as Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Prize. Her most recent novel is I Am China about the artist’s role in a politicized world, longlisted for Baileys Women’s Fiction Prize. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East is released in 2017 by Penguin Random House. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books. Her work has been translated into English, French, and German, among other languages. She was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. The English translation of her latest novel The Chili Bean Paste Clan was published by Balestier Press. She has recently started to write in English. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.

Yannick Garcia is a Catalan writer and translator based in Barcelona. He has published poetry, for which he won the Gabriel Ferrater Prize, as well as short story collections, such as Barbamecs and La nostra vida vertical which was awarded the Documenta Prize. Many of his stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and have been translated into Spanish, Italian or Galician. He has also translated dozens of books from English and French into Catalan and Spanish by authors such as George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Sherman Alexie, David Vann, Sebastian Barry, Joseph O’Connor, Carson McCullers or Joseph Conrad. He has taught translation, interpretation and creative writing at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Zoë Strachan was born in Scotland and is the award-winning author of three novels: Ever Fallen in Love, Spin Cycle and Negative Space. As an editor, she has collected six new writing anthologies, and she also publishes short stories, essays and criticism. She teaches Creative Writing at University of Glasgow and has a PhD in Scottish Literature. Fellowships include the International Writing Program of University of Iowa, the University of Otago, UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence at the National Museum of Scotland and a Robert Louis Stevenson Award. Two of her works for stage are Panic Patterns (with Louise Welsh) and an opera adaptation of The Lady from the Sea (music by Craig Armstrong) for the Edinburgh International Festival, where it won a Herald Angel Award.

Zoë Wicomb is a South African writer. Her critical work focuses on South African writing and culture. Her fiction includes You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, David’s Story, Playing in the Light, short stories in various collections, and her latest novel, The One that Got Away. She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.