(Austria, 1980) is considered a younger, female Haruki Murakami. She grew up in Austria, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Austrian father. Her debut novel I Called Him Necktie is a bestseller in Germany and has been translated into seven languages. The novel is about a Japanese phenomenon: young people who shut themselves off from the world, somtimes sitting in a little room for years. Flašar describes how one such boy emerges after a two-year period of isolation and comes to sit in a park across from a salaryman, smartly dressed and holding a packed lunch. They stare at each other for days before falling into conversation about lives full of fear and failure, disappointment and shame. They have almost become friends when one day the wage slave no longer turns up. Flašar studied literary theory, Germanic studies and Romance languages. In 2008 she debuted the short story collection Ich bin (I Am), and in 2010 published the novella Okaasan - Meine unbekannte Mutter (Okaasan: My Unknown Mother).

(Amsterdam, NL, 1963) studied Dutch language and literature in Amsterdam. He writes reviews, interviews, columns and obituaries, and heads the books section of De Volkskrant newspaper. In 2011 he published Eindelijk Sneeuw (Snow at Last: twelve wintry stories about artists, writers, and books, from Willem Witsen's cityscapes to the tears of Mrs. Dickens). Exerpts from his reviews and interviews were published in the books Langzaam lopen is al verdacht (Walking Slowly is Suspicious, 1999), De ongeneeslijke lezer – een werkboek (The Incurable Reader: a workbook, 2002), Het woord is aan de schrijver (The Writer Has the Floor, 2005), and De Broodschrijver (The Hack, 2006), about Bart Chabot's biography of Herman Brood. In 2012 he published Kreten uit een urn (Cries from an Urn), a lecture on the role of the critic in our time. His text "Naar boven mit Brakman" ("Up With Brakman") accompanied the 2015 unveiling of the Brakman monument in Enschede.

(1977) is an Islam specialist and a columnist with Trouw newspaper and Volzin magazine. She was raised by a Dutch mother and an Islamic, half-Indonesian father. Her father's uncle was Inayat Khan, the founder of Western Sufism. After her studies Youskine moved to Syria to experience "real Islam" and learned that women are not as oppressed there as the West likes to think. She was discredited in 2012 after stating in her Trouw column that she would "love to punch in the nose" anyone who might insult the Prophet Mohammed. At first Youskine aimed to improve the world via her pen, but has lost that illusion. She criticizes the debate about Islam in the Netherlands: "There is no more knowledge. If this continues, the Netherlands will become intellectually and spiritually vacant." Yet she remains committed to increasing knowledge about Islam in the Netherlands through her writing.