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

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.

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

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.

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.