by Drago Jancar
Katya has also worked in advertising, as creative director for Ideo Saatchi & Saatchi and Bright&Right, and as editor-in-chief for EGO and Bulgaria Air Inflight Magazine. Currently she is employed as a producer for Bulgarian National Television. She is the founder of the League of Storytellers (Bulgaria’s only competition for oral storytelling, running since 2005), and has edited numerous books, including work by Radoslav Parushev, Jordan Petkov, and Nikola Miladinov. Her own first collection of short fiction, Nespokoĭni istorii (Restless Stories), was published in 2006. She is also the author of a play entitled Eating the Apple, now in performance.
XURXO BORRAZÁS was born in Carballo, Galicia, in 1963. He writes in Galician and has been called the enfant terrible of contemporary Galician literature. He has written novels, short stories, and essays, and has received many prizes, including the Spanish Critics Award and the Galician Critics Award. Some of his first novels helped to introduce postmodern narrative techniques into Galician letters. His fiction is often considered transgressive and he is particularly provocative in his essays, for example in his successful and controversial book Arte e Parte: Dos Patriarcas à Arte Suicida (Inside Writing: An Engaged Intruder’s View, 2007), a challenging collection of essays on literature and politics.
ERIC CHEVILLARD was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold, 1987), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including La Nébuleuse du crabe (1993; The Crab Nebula, 1997), Au plafond (1997; On the Ceiling, 2000), Palafox (1990; 2004), and Démolir Nisard (2006; Demolishing Nisard, 2011). He maintains a website at http://www.eric-chevillard.net.
JENS DITTMAR was born in West Germany in 1950, and raised in Liechtenstein. After studying German language and literature in Zurich and Vienna, he worked as an editor for publishing houses in Munich and Stuttgart, and compiled the volume Thomas Bernhard: Werkgeschichte (Thomas Bernhard: Work History, 1981)—a comprehensive bibliography of writings, reviews, and translations by and of Thomas Bernhard. Back in Liechtenstein, he began publishing his own fiction in 2010 with the novel Basils Welt (Basil’s World). This was followed by the story collection Als wär’s ein Stück Papier (As If It’s a Piece of Paper, 2011), and his second novel, Sterben kann jeder (Anyone can Die, 2010). Dittmar’s forthcoming novel, So kalt und schön, from which “His Cryptologists” was excerpted, will appear in early 2014.
GURAM DOCHANASHVILI was born in Tbilisi in 1939. He graduated from Tbilisi State University and subsequently worked for the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography as an archeologist. His first work was published in 1966 and he has since published numerous short stories and novellas. From 1975 he spent ten years managing the prose section of the literary magazine Mnatobi, and since 1985 he has been the director of Georgian Film Studios. His most popular work is the 1975 novel The First Garment. His work has also appeared in Dalkey Archive Press’s anthology Contemporary Georgian Fiction.
NINA GABRIELYAN, born in 1953, an Armenian living in Moscow, writes poetry and prose in Russian as well as being a successful painter and scholar writing on feminism. She has several collections of poetry to her name, two collections of short stories, and the short novel Khozoain travy (2001), which was translated and published by Glas along with a selection of her stories as Master of the Grass in 2004.
ELVIS HADZIC was born in 1971 in Gradačac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. After graduating from the School of Applied Arts in Sarajevo, he was a refugee in Austria and Germany, where he had art shows in Stuttgart, Aachen, and Mönchengladbach. He started writing columns for Bosnian websites in 2010, and published his initial short stories there. His first novel, Beštije i Aveti (Beasts and Ghosts) was published 2012. He currently lives in Salt Lake City.
VLADIMÍR HAVRILLA was born in 1943 in Bratislava, Slovakia. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and later worked there as a professor in the sculpture department. In the ’70s, he focused on experimental film as well as classic and conceptual sculpture, along with traditional media such as drawing, painting, and ceramics. From the end of the 1990s on, he devoted his time to computer graphics and 3D computer animation. In 2007, he published a book entitled Filmové poviedky (Film Short Stories). For more information, please visit www.havrilla.net.
Born in Montreal in 1965, Thierry Horguelin has lived in Belgium since 1991. During the last twenty years, he has worked as a book reviewer and film critic for numerous magazines and newspapers in Canada, France, and Belgium. A former bookseller, he worked as a freelance translator, copyeditor, and proofreader for various publishers in France and Belgium. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Montreal-based bilingual journal Le Bathyscaphe, copyeditor-in-chief at Indications (Brussels), editor and book designer for les éditions Le Cormier (Brussels) and assistant manager of Espace Livres & Création, a Belgian small-press network. His books include Le Voyageur de la nuit (The Night Voyager, 2005), La Nuit sans fin (Endless Night, 2009), and Choses vues (Lost and Found, 2012). La Nuit sans fin received the Franz de Wever Book Award in 2009. For more information, visit www.locus-solus-fr.net.
OLJA SAVIČEVIĆ IVANČEVIĆ was born in Split in 1974, and published her first collections of poetry when she was fourteen years old. She studied linguistics and literature at the University of Zadar, and works as a columnist for the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija. Her first book of fiction, Nasmijati psa (Making a Dog Laugh) won the prize awarded by the prestigious magazine Vijenac for the best work of prose published in 2006, as well as the Ranko Marinković Prize for short-short stories. Her first novel, Adio kauboju won the tportal Prize for Literature as well as the Jure Kaštelan Award for Art in 2010, and will appear in an English translation by Celia Hawkesworth in 2015 as Farewell, Cowboy. Her poetry has been translated to English, French, Czech, Macedonian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Polish.
Born in 1972, Vladimir Kozlov grew up in Mogilev, an industrial city in what was then the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the country of Belarus. He has written more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, many of which chronicle childhood, life, and popular culture during perestroika and the period following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Several of his novels have been long-listed in Russia for honors such as the National Best-Seller Prize and Big Book Award. He was also nominated for GQ Russia’s Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012. His most recent novel Voina (War) is due for release in the autumn of 2013, and he recently wrote, directed, and co-produced a feature-length independent film adaptation of his novella Desyatka (10). He currently lives in Moscow.
HERKUS KUNČIUS was born in Vilnius in 1965, and graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Art, majoring in art history and criticism. He is an essayist and playwright in addition to a renowned author of “grotesque” fiction, famous for satirizing the often absurd reality of life in Lithuania under Soviet rule and thereafter. Provocative and transgressive, Kunčius is as often accused of destroying Lithuanian literary traditions as he is praised for being its most radical exponent. His first novel, Ir dugnas visada priglaus (The Ground Will Always Give Shelter) was published in 1996. Since then he has published more than eight novels, eight plays, one book of fairy tales, and one book of short stories. He lives and works in Vilnius.
VESNA LEMAIĆ was born in 1981, and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has a degree in Comparative Literature, was the founder of the Anonymous Readers reading project, is a member of the informal Lesbian Feminist University initiative, and is actively involved in the program activities of a gay club in the Autonomous Cultural Zone Metelkova in Ljubljana. She was an activist in the Slovenian Occupy movement and continues to be involved in struggles against the European Crisis policies. She made her debut as a fiction writer in 2008 with her book of short stories entitled Popularne zgodbe (Popular Stories), which won the 2009 Zlata ptica Award, the 2009 Slovenian Book Fair Award, and the 2010 Fabula Award. Lemaić has also received t
he Radio Slovenia Award and the Lapis Histriae Award for two of her short stories, and thinks awards are especially good for filling up empty spaces in author biographies. Her novel Odlagališče (The Dumping Ground) was published in 2010, and she is also the author of a radio play. She believes in solidarity, grassroots movements, fighting power relations, and is always out hunting for new ideals.
ÓSKAR MAGNÚSSON was born in Iceland in 1954. He holds law degrees from the University of Iceland, Reykjavik and George Washington University, Washington, DC. He has published two collections of short stories—Borðaði ég kvöldmat í gær? (Did I Eat Supper Last Night? 2006), and Ég sé ekkert svona gleraugnalaus (I Can’t See a Thing Without My Glasses, 2010)—as well as a novel, Làtið síga piltar (Lower it Down Guys, 2013). Magnússon is widely known in the Icelandic business world as a news editor, attorney-at-law, CEO of a number of prominent companies, as well as a newspaper and website publisher.
MOX MÄKELÄ was born in 1958. Based in Finland, she is a multidisciplinary artist and an avant-garde filmmaker as well as an author. She has been exhibiting her work in Finland and across Europe since the 1970s, and studied at the Turku Art Academy from 1980 to 1984. She works with sound, image, and text, and produces installations, assemblages, and short films, the latter being presented for free online at netmox.net. Her recent works include idiot ibidem, a combination installation, text, film diary, sound diary, and music performance, presented at the Rantakasarmin Gallery in Helsinki, Finland, in 2003, and the short film projects meta matka, published online in 2010, and Story Ambient, a spoken word video project launched on the web in 2011.
Prose writer and children’s author Ioan Mânăscurtă was born in Popești de Sus in the Drochia raion of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1953. He studied journalism at the Universitatea de Stat din Moldova and went on to work as an editor for Tinerimea Moldovei and Femeia Moldovei magazines. In 1992 he was appointed director of the Union of Moldovan Writers Press and he is currently director of the Princeps publishing house. He made his literary debut in 1979, with a collection of essays entitled Noi şi gândurile noastre (We and Our Thoughts). His other published works include Bărbaţii Universului (Men of the Universe, 1980), Artefact (a children’s novel, 1989), Mâine, când ne vom întâlni pe Pământ (Tomorrow When We Meet on Earth, 1989), Tăierea capului (The Beheading, 1995), Primul meu dicţionar în şase limbi paralele cu cea română (My First Dictionary in Six Languages Parallel with Romanian, 2004), Vânătoarea cea mare (The Great Hunt, 2004), and Înnodarea lui ceva cu altceva (The Conjoining of Something with Something Else, 2006).
TOM MCCARTHY was born in London in 1969. His first two novels, Remainder and Men in Space, have been published internationally to great acclaim. Remainder was the winner of the fourth annual Believer Book Award in 2008, while McCarthy’s third novel, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010. McCarthy is also the author of two works of nonfiction, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2008), and Transmission and the Individual Remix (2012). McCarthy also serves as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for literary achievement in 2013.
SUSANA MEDINA was born in Hampshire, England, in 1966 to a German mother of Czech origin and a Spanish father. Her family moved to Spain (Valencia) in 1968, where she was raised. She writes both in Spanish, her native language, and English. In 2012, she published Red Tales Cuentos rojos to critical acclaim (in English and Spanish, co-translated with Rosie Marteau), and her novel Philosophical Toys is forthcoming in 2014, offshoots of which include the short films Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys and Leather-bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne), which have been screened internationally. Her other books include a collection of poetry and aphorisms entitled Souvenirs del Accidente (Souvenirs from the Accident, 2004); the “anti-novel” Trozos de Una (Chunks of One, 1991), written when Medina was twenty-five years old, and which won a Generalitat Writing Grant; and Borgesland: A Voyage Through the Infinite, Imaginary Places, Labyrinths, Buenos Aires, and other Psychogeographies and Figments of Space (2006), which explores imaginary spaces in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges. She has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Max Aub International Short Story Prize, and a writing grant from Arts Council England for her novel Spinning Days of Night, now in progress. Medina has also published a number of essays on literature, art, cinema, and photography, curated various well-received international art shows in abandoned spaces (Space International), contributed texts to art catalogues, exhibited at the Tate Modern, and collaborated with numerous artists. Her mixed media work can be found scattered on the Internet, and she maintains a website at www.susanamedina.net.
ROBERT MINHINNICK was born in 1952 in Neath, South Wales. He studied at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Cardiff, and is one of the founders of Friends of the Earth (Cymru), for which he served as joint coordinator for several years. He is an advisor to the charity Sustainable Wales, and edits the international quarterly, Poetry Wales. His debut novel, Sea Holly, was published in 2007, and shortlisted for the 2008 Ondaatje Prize. Minhinnick’s other books of prose are Watching the Fire Eater (1992), winner of the 1993 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award; Badlands (1996); and To Babel and Back (2005), which won the 2006 Wales Book of the Year Award. His poetry collections include A Thread in the Maze (1978), Native Ground (1979), Life Sentences (1983), The Dinosaur Park (1985), The Looters (1989), and Hey Fatman (1994). A Selected Poems was published in 1999, followed by After the Hurricane (2002). In 2003, his translations from Welsh were published as The Adulterer’s Tongue: An Anthology of Welsh Poetry in Translation. His latest books are both poetry collections: The Keys of Babylon (2011), shortlisted for the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award, and a New Selected Poems (2012). Minhinnick lives in Porthcawl, South Wales
Renowned Estonian author TÕNU ÕNNEPALU was born in 1962 in Tallinn. He studied biology at the University of Tartu, and worked as a teacher of biology and chemistry on Hiiumaa Island until 1987, after which he became a freelance writer, translator, and journalist. He has worked as an editor at the literary magazine Vikerkaar, and for Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign affairs, as the director of the Estonian Institute in Paris. He began his writing career as a poet in 1985, with a collection entitled Jõeäärne maja (A Riverside House). His breakthrough came in 1993 when, under the name “Emil Tode,” he published the novel Piiririik (Border State, 2000), for which he received the annual literary award given by the Baltic Assembly.
Another pseudonym, Anton Nigov, published an autobiographical novel entitled Harjutused (Practicing) in 2002, while Emil Tode published a semi-sequel to Border State that same year: Raadio (Radio). Õnnepalu’s other books include the journal Flandria päevik (Flanders Diary, 2008), the poetry collection Kevad ja suvi ja (Spring and Summer and, 2009), and the novels Paradiis (Paradise, 2009) and Mandala (Mandala, 2012). He has translated numerous works from French into Estonian, including books by François Mauriac, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust.
KRYSTIAN PIWOWARSKI was born in 1956 in Bytom, Upper Silesia, Poland. He graduated from the Silesian University with a master’s degree in Polish Philology. Piwowarski has worked as a teacher, businessman, manual laborer, security guard, journalist, and clerk over the course of his life. His first novel, Londyńczyk (Londoner) was published in 1988; subsequently, he has published five further novels—Marlowe, Mann i Superman (Marlowe, Mann and Superman, 1989), Kochankowie Roku Kota (Lovers in the Year of the Cat, 1991), Paryżanin (Parisian, 1994), Homo Polonicus (2002), and Klaun (Clown, 2008)—as well as two collections of short stories. Currently, Piwowarski lives with his wife Halina in Częstochowa, and works at the Muzeum Częstochowskie. His daughter Ewa lives in the United Kingdom and is a teacher.
CHRISTOPH SIMON is an award-winning Swiss novelist. Born in 1972, he travelled in the Middle East, Poland, South America, London and New York before settling in Berne. He has published fou
r novels: his cult-hit debut, Franz, oder Warum Antilopen nebeneinander laufen (Franz, or Why Antelopes Run in Herds, 2001); Luna Llena (2003), which focuses on an ice-cream parlor of that name; Planet Obrist (2005), the sequel to Franz, nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize; and the much-loved Spaziergänger Zbinden (2010) which appeared in English in 2012 as Zbinden’s Progress, translated by Donal McLaughlin. Simon’s most recent book is a collection of his short work, Viel Gutes zum kleinen Preis (Lots of Good Things at a Low Price, 2011), which, among other things, includes a sequence of “Fairy Tales from the World of Publishing” and reflects the author’s considerable skills as a cartoonist. Simon has also published one collection of his poetry, as well as a book for children. In 2012, he had a six-month residency in New York, as reflected in the stories written in English and included on the website he maintains at www.christophsimon.ch.
LENA RUTH STEFANOVIĆ was born in Belgrade in 1970. She has received master’s degrees in Russian literature and diplomacy at Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, and the University of Montenegro, respectively. She worked for many years as an interpreter and advisor for the government of Montenegro. Her first published book was a collection of essays entitled Arhetip čuda (Archetype of Miracles, 2006). A collection of short-short stories appeared in 2008 as Io Triumpe, while her most recent title, the poetry collection Đavo, jedna neautorizovana biografija (The Devil, an Unauthorized Biography) was published in 2011. Stefanović has been a member of Montenegrin PEN since 2010, served as president of the Montenegrin jury for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011, and was elected to the executive board of the European Writers’ Council in 2013.