Category: Fair guests

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is co-creator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London. Her most recent novel is The Future.

📸 Annabel Moeller

Artis Ostups (born 1988) is a Latvian poet and scholar. He studied philosophy at the University of Latvia and attended Charles University in Prague. He is currently pursuing comparative literature at the University of Tartu and works at the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia. Since 2014, he has been the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Punctum.

Ostups is the author of four poetry collections. His most recent collection, Variations on the Theme of a Moon (Variācijas par mēness tēmu), was published in 2022 and received the Days of Poetry Prize. His poetry has been translated into Croatian, Czech, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian, and Slovenian.

Katja Pantzar is a Helsinki-based writer and journalist who swims in the Baltic Sea year round. Raised in Canada, with stints in New Zealand and England, she is the author of The Finnish Way (Penguin Random House/2018), a bestselling non-fiction book about Nordic well-being, winter swimming and sisu (resilience) that has been translated into 24 languages. Her second book on sisu, Everyday Sisu: Tapping into Finnish Fortitude for a Happier, More Resilient Life (Penguin Random House/2022) explores through expert interviews and research-based information how we can better support our mental and physical health while taking care of each other and our planet.  She is also the author of three mini-guides to the Finnish capital, including 100 things to do in Helsinki (Siltala/2024).

Narine Abgaryan was born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, in the family of a doctor and a school teacher. She graduated from the State University of Linguistic Studies in Yerevan, with a diploma of a teacher of Russian language and literature. Abgaryan is the internationally bestselling author of a dozen of books, including her nationally bestselling and prize-winning trilogy about Manunia, a busy and troublesome 11-year-old in a small Armenian town Berd. The author’s powerful and moving parable Three Apples Fell From the Sky was translated into 23 languages and became a long seller throughout Europe.

Since 2022 Narine Abgaryan has moved to her native Armenia, sharing her time between Armenia and Germany.

NENAD VELIČKOVIČ (b. 1962) is a Bosnian writer and cultural commentator, considered to be one of the most interesting and relevant contemporary Bosnian writers. Born and raised in Sarajevo, he graduated in philology in Sarajevo. His work is extensive, includes novels and short prose, and is characterised by a witty style and a critical approach to society, current affairs and education in his home country.

His novel “Sahib. Impressions from the Depression” (Sahib. Impresije iz depresije) was published in 2002. In this satirical book, written in the form of letters, the author portrayed a homosexual British man on a peace mission to post-war Bosnia. In letters written in a serious tone to his lover, the British man talks about the country he has found himself in, its traditions, history, everyday life and people. Although it is clear that he has no understanding of Bosnian current affairs and culture. He sees it as a country where he is an arrogant colonialist ready to create a better tomorrow for the wild Bosnians. However, the questions are: how and at whose expense? Are the Bosnians really that clueless and do they benefit from peace missions?

This satirical novel remains relevant in its depiction of the ethnic, cultural, social, economic and political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is stuck in the eternal post-war period. The country is still divided under the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war, politically into a federation and a separatist Serb Republic, with a constitution that establishes three different religious faiths (Serbs, Croats and Bosnians), each of which elects its own president. This system and the wounds left by the war make Bosnia and Herzegovina politically and culturally very fragile.

With no Bosnian translated book yet published in Lithuania, Veličković’s novel gives Lithuanian readers a glimpse into the literature of unknown fields of Bosnain literature and a better insight into its post-war society, experiences and traumas.

Liudmyla Dolhonovska is a strategic communication expert, Doctor of Philosophy, Head of the Presidential Service of the American University Kyiv and a visiting lecturer at various universities. From July 2021 to early March 2023 she was an advisor on Strategic communication to the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny. In Ukraine, her book “The Iron General. Lessons of Humanity” became a huge bestseller.

Anna Brzezińska – a renowned writer and historian, three-time laureate of the Janusz A. Zajdel Award, the most prestigious Polish distinction in the field of fantasy, and an author of novels and short stories. The monumental and bestselling works Daughters of Wawel and The Twilight of the Knightly World, published by Literackie Publishing, were her first historical books. WL Publishing has also released: Tales from the Wilżyna Valley, The Witch of Wilżyna Valley, Water as Deep as the Sky, Water on the Sieve, and Fog. When she’s not writing, she tends to her garden, where she cultivates old varieties of roses and apple trees.

📸 Albert Zawada

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian non-fiction writer, investigative journalist, and oral historian who writes in Russian and works in various literary genres, including short stories, essays, and reportage. She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. She grew up and spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, where she studied journalism and worked as a reporter and teacher. As a journalist, she moved within the boundary between reporting and fiction and developed her own non-fiction genre that gathers a chorus of voices to describe particular dramatic historical moments (the Second World War, the Afghan War, the Chernobyl disaster, and the demise of the Soviet Union). Her “documentary novels” constitute “a living history” and “the closest possible approximation to real life.” Alexievich’s criticism of the political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus, along with her political activism, often forced her to live abroad. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013).

Tania Pjankova was born in 1985 in Vyhoda, an urban-type settlement in the Dolyna district of Ivano-Frankivsk region. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, specializing in Ukrainian language and literature. She is one of the founders and the creative director of the literary agency Zillia. She organizes festivals, creative literary and artistic events, performances, and theatrical literary readings. She is a member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine. Tania lives and works in Truskavets, Lviv region.

The writer works in the genre of poetic enchantment, using the dialects of Galicia, Boykos, Lemkos, and the Romani language. She is the author of poetry collections and novels.

Awards and recognitions:

Laureate of the literary competition From the Perspective of Autumn (2005 and 2015);

Laureate of the international award Hranoslov (2008);

Carpathian Knights Order Award (2015);

Panteleimon Kulish Award (2018);

Special recognition from Olha Bondar in the Coronation of the Word competition for a heartfelt and moving depiction of a social issue in the novel Nimotka (2019);

Third prize in the Coronation of the Word literary competition for the novel The Age of Red Ants (2022).