Arne Dahl
Sweden
Arne Dahl is regarded as one of the finest literary crime writers of Scandinavia. A Swedish award-winning author, critic, and editor, Dahl is the creator of the bestselling Intercrime series and Opcop quartet. His books have sold more than 4 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. For his eminent authorship, Dahl has been awarded the premier crime writing awards of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. In 2016 he began his new series about detectives Sam Berger and Molly Blom.
Donald Ray Pollock
USA
Donald Ray Pollock is an American writer. Born in 1954 and raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he worked at the Mead Paper Mill as a laborer and truck driver until age 50, the age at which he enrolled in the English program at Ohio State University. While there, Doubleday published his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, and the New York Times regularly posted his election dispatches from southern Ohio throughout the 2008 campaign. The Devil All the Time, his first novel, was published in 2011. His work has appeared in various literary journals, including Epoch, Sou’wester, Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, The Journal, Boulevard, Tin House, and PEN America. His newest book, a novel called The Heavenly Table, will be published by Doubleday in July 2016.
Francisco Bosco
Brazil
Francisco Bosco is an essayist with a doctorate in literature theory by UFRJ and author of the books A vítima tem sempre razão?, Orfeu de bicicleta: um pai no século XXI, Alta ajuda, E livre seja este infortúnio, Banalogias, among others. He was a columnist for O Globo between 2010 and 2015. Bosco was also president of FUNARTE (National Art Foundation) between 2015 and 2016. He founded and coordinated Batuta radio, Instituto Moreira Salles, a digital radio station specializing in old Brazilian music.
He is a lyricist of popular music and currently participates in the program Papo de segunda, on the TV channel GNT.
Marina Perezagua
Spain
Marina Perezagua is a Spanish writer, born in Seville in 1978. She has been praised by readers and critics for her extremely visual writing, which has made her a unique voice in contemporary Spanish literature. Having first published the short story books Criaturas abisales (2011) and Leche (2013), it was her first novel, Yoro, from 2015, which made her a consensual figure among critics. Her short stories were published in several literary magazines, such as Electric Literature, Granta (Spanish and British) or Maaboret (in Hebrew). She has a degree in Art History and a Ph.D. in Philology. She lives in New York, where she teaches Spanish at New York University and other institutions.
Valter Hugo Mãe
Portugal
Valter Hugo Mãe is one of the most outstanding Portuguese authors of the present time. His work is translated in many languages, having garnered acclaimed reception in countries like Brazil, Germany, Spain, France or Croatia. He published seven novels: Omens imprudentemente poéticos; A desumanização; O filho de mil homens; a máquina de fazer espanhóis (Portugal Telecom Best Book of the Year and Portugal Telecom Best Prize of the Year); o apocalipse dos trabalhadores; o remorso de baltazar serapião (José Saramago Literary Prize) e o nosso reino. He has written books for all ages, including Contos de cães e maus lobos, O paraíso são os outros e As mais belas coisas do mundo. His poetry is gathered in the publication volume of Mortality. He publishes the chronicle Autobiografia Imaginária in Jornal de Letras and also coordinates the poetry collection Elogio da Sombra.
Ralph Rothman
Germany
Ralf Rothmann was born in 1953 in Schleswig and grew up in the Ruhr region. As far as his literary style is concerned, Rothmann is linked to the American tradition of short stories. The authenticity with which the author recreates the environments and the street language makes his texts result from incomparable humanity. “My language only gains strength when I speak from experience,” he says. Rothmann has won numerous awards, including the Ruhr Literature Prize, the Hermann Lenz Prize, and the Hans Fallada Prize.
Lídia Jorge
Portugal
Lídia Jorge was born in 1946, in the Algarve. She is a high school teacher and regularly publishes articles in the press. The theme of women and their solitude is a central concern of Lídia Jorge’s work, as seen in Notícia da Cidade Silvestre (1984) and A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988). Día de Prodigíos (1979), another outstanding novel, contains a great inventive capacity, depicting the maladjustment of a small Algarvian village. O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) is yet another novel of the author and it approaches the relationship between a white woman with an African man and its behavior before a society of contrasts. This book won the Grand Prix of Romance and Novel of the Portuguese Writers Association in 2003.
Gonçalo M. Tavares
Portugal
Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in 1970. Since 2001 he has published books in different literary genres and has been translated in more than 50 countries.
His books received several prizes in Portugal and abroad. With Aprender a rezar na Era da Técnica he received the Prix du Meuilleur Livre Étranger 2010 (France), a prize awarded to Robert Musil, Orhan Pamuk, John Updike, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Elias Canetti, among others.
Some other international prizes include: Portugal Telecom Award 2007 and 2011 (Brazil), Internazionale Trieste Award 2008 (Italy), Belgrade Prize 2009 (Serbia), Grand Prix Littéraire du Web – Culture 2010 (France), Prix Littéraire Européen 2011 (France). He has also been a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Femina. Uma Viagem à Índia received, among others, the Grand Prize for Romance and Novel APE 2011. His books have been adapted to plays, dance, radio plays, short films and objects of plastic arts, videos of art, opera, performances, architectural projects, academic theses, etc.
Hélia Correia
Portugal
Contemporary Portuguese writer (1949), Hélia Correia graduated with a degree in Romance Philology and is a Portuguese secondary school teacher. Aside from her preference in poetry, it is as a fiction writer that she is recognized as one of the revelations of the Portuguese novels of the 1980s, although her tales and novels are always impregnated with poetic discourse.
She made her debut in poetry with O Separar das Águas, in 1981, and O Número dos Vivos, in 1982.
The novel Montedemo, staged by the group O Bando, gives the author certain notoriety.
Also outstanding is the production of the novels Casa Eterna and Soma and, in poetry, A Pequena Morte/Esse Eterno Conto.
In 2002 she received the PEN 2001 prize, attributed to works of fiction, for her work Lillias Fraser.
Hélia Correira also won the literary prize Correntes d’Escritas / Casino da Póvoa with the poetry book A Terceira Miséria.
She was awarded the Camões Prize in 2015.
Geovani Martins
Brazil
Geovani Martins was born in Bangu. He only studied until the eighth grade, working in a coffee shop and aa a human signboard, among others. He lived in the favelas of Rocinha and Barreira do Vasco, before going to Vidigal. He participated in the workshops of the Literary Festival of the Peripheries (Flup) in 2013 and 2015. In 2015 he presented at the Literary Festival – FLIP – the magazine Setor X, which published his texts and of other writers of Rio’s favelas. He was invited to return to Paraty in 2017, when he signed a contract with Companhia das Letras to launch his first book, O Sol na Cabeça. Even before publication, the short story collection was sold to publishers in nine countries, including Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA), Faber & amp; Faber (United Kingdom), Suhrkamp (Germany) and Mondadori (Italy). Film adaptation rights were also negotiated with filmmaker Karim Aïnouz at the helm of the project.
Christoffer Peterson
Denmark
Christoffer Petersen lives in southern Denmark. He grew up on Jack London stories and devoured any book to do with the Arctic and dog sledding. In 2006 he encouraged his Danish wife to move to Greenland and spent seven years learning about one of the most exciting countries and cultures in the world. While in Greenland, Chris started writing crime stories and thrillers set in Greenland and the Arctic. He graduated from Falmouth University with a Master’s Degree in Arts in Professional Writing in 2015, shortly after moving back to Denmark.
Elena Varvello
Italy
Elena Varvello was born in Turin, Italy, in 1971, and grew up in a small village in the woods not far from her birthplace.
In 1996 Elena completed a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the Scuola Holden in Turin. Back then she was writing poems and her first short stories.
Since 1999 she has been teaching Creative Writing at the same school, feeling grateful for the opportunity to work with dozens of students on their own short stories and novels.
She has published two collections of poetry, Perseveranza è salutare and Atlanti, a collection of short stories, L’economia delle cose (nominated for the Premio Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Settembrini Award and the Bagutta Opera Prima Award), and two novels, La luce perfetta del giorno and La vita felice, now translated into English as Can you hear me? (English PEN Award 2017), soon to be published in the UK, USA, France, Spain, and Poland.
Mathias Énard
France
José Eduardo Agualusa
Portugal/Angola
José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, in 1960. He studied Agronomy and Forestry in Lisbon. He has published more than a dozen novels and five short stories, a volume of poetry and five children’s books, one of which – A Rainha dos Estapafúrdios – was awarded the Manuel Antonio Pina Prize. With the journalists Fernando Semedo and Elza Rocha, he published a report about the African community in Lisbon, with the title Lisboa Africana (1993). His books are translated into 25 languages and adapted to cinema. He wrote four plays for theater: Geração W, Chovem Amores na Rua do Matador, A Caixa Negra (these two in collaboration with Mia Couto) and Aquela Mulher. In 2007, the English translation of O Vendedor de Passados was honored with the Independent Award for Best Foreign Fiction. In 2017, he won the International DUBLIN Literary Award.
Zeruya Shalev
Israel
Zeruya Shalev, along with Amos Oz and David Grossman, is one of the most read Israeli writers in the world. Author of five novels, her books are translated into 25 languages.
Her career has received numerous awards and honors, including the Étranger Fame Prize, The Independant Books of the Year in Translation, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2017, she was awarded the distinction of Chévalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Ricardo Araújo Pereira
Portugal
Ricardo Araújo Pereira (Lisbon, 1974) holds a degree in Social Communication from Universidade Católica and began his career as a journalist at Jornal de Letras. He has been a screenwriter since 1998. In 2003, with Miguel Góis, Zé Diogo Quintela and Tiago Dores, he formed Gato Fedorento. He writes for Visão (Portugal) and Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil) and is one of the hosts of Governo Sombra (TSF/TVI24). He is also writer and host of Gente Que Não Sabe Estar (TVI). He published six books of chronicles – Boca do Inferno (2007), Novas Crónicas da Boca do Inferno (Grande Prémio de Crónica APE 2009), A Chama Imensa (2010), Novíssimas Crónicas da Boca do Inferno (2013), Reaccionário com Dois Cês (2017) e Estar Vivo Aleija (2018), in addition to the volumes of Mixórdia de Temáticas, which bring together the scripts of the radio program with the same name, as well as an essay: A Doença, o Sofrimento e a Morte Entram num Bar (also published in Brazil ). In Brazil, the collection of chronicles Se não entenderes eu conto de novo, pá (Tinta-da-china, 2012) was also published.
Nuno Júdice
Portugal
Nuno Júdice was born in Mexilhoeira Grande, Algarve, in 1949. He has a degree in Romance Philology and was an associate professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where he retired in 2015. Between 1997 and 2004 he was Cultural Counselor and Director of the Camões Institute in Paris. He is the author of studies on literary theory and Portuguese literature. He has books translated in several languages, namely Spanish, Italian and French, where the Poésie / Gallimard collection was published. He directed, from 1996 to 1999, the magazine Tabacaria of Casa Fernando Pessoa. In 2009 he took over the magazine Colóquio-Letras of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He has received important poetry prizes in Portugal and abroad, among which the XXII Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry (Spain), the Poetry Prize of the Latin Víctor Sandoval (Mexico), in 2014, the Argana Prize for Poetry (Morocco) in 2015, and the International Poetry Prize Europe in Versi / Carrera Prize (Italy) and the El Ojo Critic Iberoamerican National Radio Award of Spain in 2016. Lenine’s Café is his most recent work of fiction.
José Gil
Portugal
Portuguese philosopher, born in 1939 in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique. In 1968 he completed his degree in Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of Paris, University of the Sorbonne. The following year he completed his Master’s Degree in Philosophy, with a thesis on Kant’s morals. In 1982, he completed his doctorate with the thesis Body, Space, and Power, published in 1988. He published several articles and scientific essays in magazines and encyclopedias around the world, highlighting in his preferences the reflection on the body. He also elaborated some works on the poet Fernando Pessoa.
In 2004 he published Portugal, Hoje. O Medo de Existir, his first work written directly in Portuguese, quickly became a sales success. The book speaks of everyday life in a simple and accessible way. Before that, he had already published several works on subjects as diverse as Salazar, Fernando Pessoa, Corsica, the body or even The Prince, from Saint-Exupéry.
In January 2005 the prestigious French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur integrated José Gil in the group of the 25 greatest thinkers of the world.
Dulce Maria Cardoso
Portugal
Dulce Maria Cardoso holds a degree in Law from the Faculty of Law of Lisbon.
She wrote the short stories Tem fé, uma família, um punhado de amigos, o Blui e o Clude. In 2001 she published her debut novel, Campo de Sangue, Grande Prémio Acontece, written during a scholarship of literary creation from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. Since then she has published the novels Os Meus Sentimentos (2005), European Union Prize for Literature, O Chão dos Pardais (2009), Pen Club Prize, and O Retorno (2011). She is also the author of two anthologies of short stories: Até Nós (2008) and Tudo São Histórias de Amor (2014).
Her first two children’s books, in the collection A Bíblia de Lôá, were published in 2014.
In 2012, she was awarded the Knight insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.
Her work is published in fifteen countries and studied in several universities. Some of her short stories and novels have been adapted or are being adapted for film and theater.