was educated in literature and political science in Paris. He has experience in international co-operation in the field of development in education and the capacity building of civil society. He works as Co-ordinator of International Co-operation Programmes for the Solidarite-Laique Association. Solidarite-Laique Association is a French non-govermental organisation specialising in international co-operation for development. It was founded in 1956 as a network of local French Educational Organisations and is based in Paris with partners and programmes all over the world, including Eastern Europe and the Mediterrean, West Africa as well as Central Asia and India.
was born in 1958 in Shetland and grew up in the crofting community of Sandness and lives in Edinburgh. His work includes three novels Soor Hearts (1984) Thin Wealth (1986) and A Day in the Office, two collections of poetry, Shoormal (1986) and Nort Atlantik Drift (1999) two plays and a libretto. He was the co-editor of Edinburgh Review until 1998, and had edited several anthologies of Scottish writing. His own work, written in Sjetlin - the Shetlands dialect - Scots and English, has appeared in major anthologies of contemporary Scottish writing including The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse and The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction. He has been teaching creative writing at the University of Edinburgh since 1993.
(1976) is a poet and writer. Her book of poetry, Brez (Without), was published in 2009. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Slovenian and foreign literary magazines and anthologies. She translates Czech and Polish literature and received the award for the most perspective young translator in 2009. She also works as a belletristic editor and proof-reader and is a teacher of Slovene as a foreign language.
, born in Maribor in 1948, is the most prominent Slovenian writer of today. Novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright, his works have been translated into many European languages, including five Czech editions with a sixth on the way, and his dramas have seen a number of foreign productions. Among his novels are Galjot (The Galley Slave, 1978) Severni sij (1984) set in the dark year of 1938 in the author's native town and published in English as Northern Lights, Posmehljivo poželenje (1993) a melancholy autobiographical account of a Central European intellectual's encounter with American culture, translated into English as Mocking Desire, and Zvenenje v glavi (Headnoise, 1998) an allegorical treatment of a prison revolt, recently made into a film. His collections of short stories and novellas include Pogled angela (The Look of an Angel, 1992) and Augsburg in druge resnicne pripovedi (Augsburg and Other Real Tales, 1994) containing the title story of a dream-like journey through contemporary Europe. He spent 1985 in the USA as Fullbright Fellow, was engaged in the democratization process in his native country as President of the Slovenian P.E.N. Centre between l987-91, and received the highest Slovenian literary award, the Prešeren Prize for his lifetime achievement in 1993. He lives in Ljubljana.
was born in Cēsis, Latvia, in 1982. Her first novella, Viņpus stikla (“Behind The Glass”), was released in 2006. Four of her short stories have been published in the daily newspaper Diena, and her stories “Mēness vīzijas” (“The Visions of the Moon”) and “Brīnišķīgā jaunā Latvija” (“Brave New Latvia”) were included in short-story anthologies in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Jansone participated in the 2004 National Drama Competition with her play Margarīna paaudze (“The Margarine Generation”), and in 2008 she read an excerpt from her new novel, Insomnia, at the annual Prose Readings.
is a Polish poet, translator and literary critic, who lectures in English at the universities of Lodz and Warsaw. He has published nine volumes of poetry, six critical books on contemporary British, Irish and American literature (most recently a study of Philip Larkin), and has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, Cambridge Review. His poetry has been translated into many languages and presented in international magazines, including Index on Censorship, Paris Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Wales, and in The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999). He is editor of the literary monthly of international literature Literatura na Swiecie (Warsaw) and has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, Philip Roth, Edmund White, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Craig Raine and Simon Armitage.
, born in 1950 in Ljubljana, is a poet, playwright and translator who studied comparative literature in Ljubljana. In the 1960s he was a member of an avant-garde literary-performance group. Now a freelance writer and winner of the Prešeren Foundation Prize (1986), Jesih has translated more than forty plays (Shakespeare, Chekhov, Bulgakov). He has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Soneti, drugi (New Sonnets, 1993) and Iambus (2001).
(Porto 1973) is a poet and translator. He holds an M.A. in theory of literature and is working on his doctoral thesis. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Sonótono (Cotovia, 2007) which was awarded the PEN prize for Poetry. He has translated some of the greatest classics of world literature, including Waugh, Auden and Pirandello. His translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published in 2006, and his new version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was staged by the Teatro Nacional de São João in Porto. He has also written stage plays for the company Teatro Bruto. He lives in Porto.
was born in 1955 in Harvey, Western Australia, and spent her childhood in small mining towns in the Australian outback. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Western Australia where she is now Associate Professor teaching Literature and Film Theory. Her first collection of short stories The House of Breathing won four prestigious Australian literary awards and brought the author to the forefront of contemporary Australian writing. Her second collection Fetish Lives (1997) translated into Italian, German and Czech, weaves fact and fiction around well-known historical figures to reveal how the lives of others can become the subject of desire and obsession – in other words: a fetish. Her novel Black Mirror, set in the author’s native region and in Paris, is due to be published this year.
is a prize-winning author of four novels, a book of essays, and a collection of short stories. He lives in his native Majorca and reviews for El Pais. He has been published to great acclaim in France and his novel This Breathing World was published in English translation by Arcadia Books. The novel, which intertwines two stories, one set in first century Rome, the other at present day Harvard, has been praised by critics as "an elegant, disturbing and labyrinthine thriller" and "an ambitious, wickedly clever story about the frailty of the flesh and the dark side of the lust for immortality".www.arcadiabooks.co.uk