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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”