Liam McIlvanney is the winner of the Saltire First Book Award and the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. He is a regular contributor to publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian. He is Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he lives with his wife and four sons.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Dakar in 1990. He studied literature and philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Brotherhood, his first novel, won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma and the French Voices Grand Prize, in Alexia Trigo’s translation. He was named Chevalier of the National Order of Merit by the president of Senegal.
Ann Goldstein is a celebrated translator of Italian and long-time chief of the copy department at The New Yorker. She has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Story of the Lost Child, which was shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.
Maki Kashimada’s accolades include the 1998 Bungei Prize for her debut novel, Two, the Mishima Yukio Prize for Love at 6,000 Degrees Celsius, and the Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, published in English by Europa Editions in 2021.
Kavita Bedford is an Australian-Indian writer with a background in journalism, anthropology and literature. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian and she was a recent Churchill Fellow exploring migrant narratives. She works and teaches in Sydney in media and global studies. Friends and Dark Shapes is her first novel.
Born in Japan, Mieko Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006. Her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World (2007) was awarded the Tsubouchi Shoyo Prize for Young Emerging Writers. In 2008, Kawakami published Breasts and Eggs as a novella and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. In 2016, she was selected as Granta Best of Young Japanese Novelist. Kawakami has also written novels Heaven and the newly expanded Breasts and Eggs, her first novel to be published in English. She lives in Tokyo.
Born in Teramo Province, Abruzzo, Donatella Di Pietrantonio completed her studies in the provincial capital, Aquila, and now lives in Penne. Her short fiction has been published by Granta Italy, and her novel, Bella mia, was nominated for the Strega Prize and won the Brancati Prize. A Girl Returned, her third novel, won the Campiello Prize.
Festival appearance is generously supported by Istituto Italiano di Cultura.
Shokoofeh Azar moved to Australia as a political refugee in 2011. She is the author of essays, articles, and children’s books, and is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, originally written in Farsi, was shortlisted for Australia’s Stella Prize for Fiction and is shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. It is her first novel to be translated into English.