ZEHRA ÇIRAK was born in 1960 in Istanbul, Turkey. She moved to Germany with her family in 1962 and has lived in Berlin since 1982. Among other awards, she has won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (1989 and 2001) and the Hölderlin Prize (1994). She is the author of Vogel auf dem Rücken eines Elefanten: Gedichte (Bird on the Back of an Elephant, 1991); Fremde Flügel auf eigener Schulter (Stranger Wings on One’s Own Shoulder, 1994); Leibesübungen (Abdominal Exercises, 2000); and Der Geruch von Glück (The Scent of Happiness, 2011), among others.
KRISTIINA EHIN was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She studied Comparative and Estonian Folklore at the University of Tartu, and in her native Estonian has to date published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories, and a retelling of South-Estonian fairy tales; she is also the author of two plays. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala (Protected Area, 2005), a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent as a nature-reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including, in English, six books of her poetry and three of prose, with her work making frequent appearances in English-language journals. She is a highly acclaimed performer of her own writing, and travels extensively around Estonia and abroad to perform her work, sometimes accompanied by musicians.
GYRÐIR ELÍASSON was born in Reykjavik in 1961, but spent most of his childhood in Sauðárkrókur in northwest Iceland. He is a poet, fiction writer, and translator: his first poetry collection was published in 1983, and since then he has published poetry collections, novels, and collections of short stories—the latter including 2003’s Steintré (The Stone Tree), which was published in English translation in 2008. Elíasson is also a diligent translator, mainly from English, and has translated works by William Saroyan and Richard Brautigan. He has been labelled “the great stylist” in Icelandic contemporary literature, and won the Icelandic Literary Prize as well as the Halldor Laxness Prize for Literature in 2000 for his short-story collection Gula húsið (The Yellow House). He was nominated twice for the Nordic Council Literature Prize before he won the prize in 2011. He currently lives in Reykjavík with his wife and three children.
PAUL EMOND was born in Brussels in 1944. After obtaining a degree and a doctorate of letters at the University of Louvain (with a thesis on the novels of Jean Cayrol), he spent three years in Czechoslovakia and wrote his first novel, La danse du fumiste (The Dance of a Sham, 1979). Returning to Belgium, he published other novels and worked for the Archives et usées de la littérature in Brussels, eventually becoming a professor at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion, in the Graduate School for Theater and Film, where he teaches now. An accomplished dramatist as well as fiction writer, Emond’s first play debuted in 1986, with more than fifteen to follow, these being performed in numerous countries, including France, Quebec, the United States, England, Romania, and Bulgaria.
RAY FRENCH was born in Wales. His first book was The Red Jag & other stories (Planet, 2000). His novel All This Is Mine (2003) was translated into Italian and Dutch, and he was a co-author of Four Fathers (2006) a collection of stories about fatherhood, which was translated into Spanish. His second novel Going Under (2007) is about a middle-aged man who, faced with redundancy, buries himself alive in his back garden and refuses to come up until everyone’s job is saved. The Sunday Times said, “Given that our hero spends most of its three hundred pages in a box, the pace and plotting of this novel are remarkable… ” It was translated into French and German, and adapted for German radio. His forthcoming novel Welcome To The Reservation, is about a Native American who arrives in a desolate ex-mining town in the Welsh Valleys, pledging to save an ancient yew from being chopped down to make way for a supermarket. He teaches at the University of Hull.
CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT, born 1962, has been called “one of Denmark’s finest prose writers” by the major daily Information. After early work in poetry and experimental prose, she has published eight novels, one collection of short stories, and three volumes of linked stories: Camilla and the Horse (2008); Camilla—og resten af selskabet (Camilla—and the Rest of the Party, 2010); and Selskabet gør op (The Party Breaks Up, 2012). Various of her books have been published in Norwegian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Arabic.
KIRILL KOBRIN was born in 1964 in Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky), Russia. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, co-edits the Moscow magazine of sociology, history, and politics Neprikosnovennij Zapas (Emergency Rations), and conducts research into the cultural history of Russia and the Czech Republic. Kobrin is the author of twelve books, of which the latest is a tribute to Flann O’Brien entitled Tekstoobrabotka (Bookhandling). He has been hailed by critics as the “Russian Borges” and is considered one of the founders of Russian psychogeography. His work has been translated into several European languages. Kobrin lives in Prague.
ŽARKO KUJUNDŽISKI was born in 1980 in Skopje, Macedonia. His first novel Spectator, was published in 2003 and went through five editions. His later works include (in Macedonian): Andrew, Love, and Other Disasters (2004), America (2006), Found and Lost (2008), and a collection of short stories, 13 (2010). He has also published award-winning short stories and essays, several of which have been translated. In 2009 he received his MA in World and Comparative Literature from Sts. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He is editor-in-chief at the Antolog publishing house and e-zine Reper (reper.net.mk). He also writes weekly columns for the daily newspaper Dnevnik.
DAN LUNGU was born in 1969 in Botoani, Romania. A sociologist by training, he is one of Romania’s leading authors today. To date, he has written four novels, two volumes of short stories, and he has edited several collections. His books have been translated into ten languages, and his novel Sînt o baba comunista! (I’m a Communist Old Hag!, 2007) is currently being made into a film. He has founded the literary group Club 8, playing an important part in the literary life of postcommunist Romania. He has been nominated for the Jean Monnet European Literature Prize and received many other literary prizes.
TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN was born in Dublin in 1938. He received his doctorate in biology from Cornell University and has worked as a biological researcher and university lecturer in the USA and Ireland, as well as a journalist, editor of the newspaper Anois, translator (from Catalan), and editor of the literary and current affairs journal Comhar. His collection of short stories, Cinn Lae Seangáin (The Diary of an Ant, 2005) won the award for best short story collection in the Oireachtas competition in 2005, and his novel An Tionscadal (The Project, 2007) won the main Oireachtas award in 2007. His most recent novel is the futuristic science fiction An bhfuil Stacey ag iompar? (2011).His work has been translated into many languages, most recently into Slovenian, Romanian, and Catalan. He now lives and works in Catalonia, Spain.