Walid Nabhan is the translator of Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “the Land of Sad Oranges” from Arabic to Maltese. Walid was born in Amman, Jordan in 1966. His family fled Al- Qbeybeh, a small village in the outskirts of Hebron, Palestine after the 1948 war which established the state of Israel and resulted in the first Palestinian Diaspora. Walid took his first education in United Nations schools in Amman. He arrived in Malta in 1990 where he studied laboratory technology. In 1998 he graduated in Biomedical Sciences from Bristol University in England. In 2003 he gained a masters degree in Human Rights and Democratisation from University of Malta. His short story “the Silent” appeared in the “Book for Burning”. Walid is currently teaching the Arabic language at University of Malta.

Fatima Naoot is counted among the most remarkable voices in Arabic poetry. She works as journalist, and architect. Born in Cairo in 1964, she graduated in 1987 from the faculty of Engineering at Ein Shams University, Cairo. She has published 15 books so far: six poetry collections, six translated anthologies from English into Arabic, and three books of criticism. She translated into Arabic the novels and stories of Virginia Woolf, John Ravenscroft, Chimamanda Nagozi Adichie, in addition to tens of British and American contemporary poets. She writes four constant weekly columns in press for newspapers in Egypt and the Middle East. She won the first prize of the "Arabic Poetry 2006" competition in Hong Kong, for her fifth poetry collection, A Bottle of Glue, a Chinese/English edition (Nadwah Press, 2007). She has represented the name of Egypt at several international festivals and conferences in Europe, Latin American, and Middle East. Some of her poetry collections were the issue of some academic masters and doctorates degrees. And her poetry has been translated into several languages such like: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, Persian, and Kurdish.

Udaya Narayana Singh is Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India and is a renowned linguist as well as a reputed poet, playwright and essayist in Maithili and Bengali. He previously set up the Centre in Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of Hyderabad, and taught in the Universities at Delhi, Baroda and Surat as well. As a creative writer, he has published four collections of poems and twelve plays in Maithili (writes under the pen-name ‘Nachiketa’), as well as six books of literary essays and two volumes of poetry in Bengali, besides translating several books. His recent books include an anthology of poems – Madhyampurush Ekvachan (2005) translated and published in English (2007), Tamil (2008) and German (2009), a play – No Entry: Maa Pravisha (2008) and a collection of one-acts – Priyamvadaa aa anya ekaankii (2008).

Amjad Nasser was born in 1955 in al-Turra, Jordan. From 1976 he worked as a journalist in television and newspapers, then in the cultural section of Al-Hadaf journal in Beirut, and in Cyprus was arts editor of Al-Ufq magazine. Since 1987 he has been Arts Editor of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily newspaper in London. He has published nine collections of poetry and one travel book. Three different volumes of selected poetry have been published, in Cairo in 1995, in 1999 by the House of Poetry in Palestine. In 1998 selected poems were published in French, introduced by Adonis, and in 2000 a volume of his poems was published in Italian. He is one of the founding editors of Banipal magazine.

Samira Negrouche trained as a medical doctor and is a francophone Algerian writer, poet and translator. She has published several collections of poetry including l’opéra cosmique (2003), Iridienne (2005) and her latest, Cabinet secret (2007). She also writes for theatre and collaborates with various theatre groups. A devoted translator, she mainly works on translations of contemporary Arab poetry. She likes to cross the boundaries of art forms in her work and she regularly performs and reads with artists such as Ammar Bouras and jazz Dimitri Porcu and Lionel Martin.

Tal Nitzan is a poet, editor and one of the leading translators from Spanish in Israel today. Born in Jaffa, she has lived in Buenos Aires, Bogota & New York, currently lives in Tel Aviv. Recipient of the Women Writers’ Prize in 1998, and the Culture Minister Prize for Beginning Poets in 2001, Nitzan has published three poetry collections: Domestica (2002, recipient of the Culture Minister's Prize for First Book), An Ordinary Evening (2006), and Café Soleil Bleu (2007). Her forthcoming book, A Short History, has won the ACUM (artists & writers rights society) Prize for poetry (2007). An ardent peace activist, Nitzan has organized several political-poetic events, and has edited the ground-breaking anthology With an Iron pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984-2004 (2005), a collection of 99 Hebrew poems of the last 20 years that protest against the Israeli occupation (forthcoming publication of English version in SUNY Press, USA). Nitzan has translated over 50 books into Hebrew, mainly from Spanish, including two anthologies of Latin American poetry, and adapted a Hebrew version of Don Quixote for youth (2006). Her translations include poetry works by Cervantes, Machado, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Borges, Vallejo, Pizarnik & Hierro, and prose by García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Onetti, Delibes, Mendoza, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter and many others. She has won numerous awards for her translations, among them the Culture Minister Creation Prize for translators (1995, 2005), and in 2004, an honorary medal from Chile’s president, for her translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He has published three novels and five books of poetry, his most recent book Gæska (Kindness) was published in 2009. As well as writing text-on-page he works with performance and sound poetry and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals. Icelandic critics have found reason to compare him to such dissimilar writers as Snorri Sturluson and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In his poetry Eiríkur explores the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, focusing on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. His novels investigate the relationship between the social, the mental and the political by creating pseudohysterical situations for pseudo-hysterical characters. Eiríkur is a founding member of the Nýhil poet cooperative and instigator of the Nýhil International Poetry Festival. He is also an avid translator of foreign literature. In 2008 Eiríkur received the Icelandic Translation Award for his translation of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. Among other books he has translated the selected poems by Allen Ginsberg and an anthology of foreign contemporary and experimental poetry.