(Uganda) grew up in Uganda and studied creative writing at the University of Lancaster in the UK; she received her doctorate in the same subject. In 2013 she received the Kwani Manuscript Project for her thesis project, The Kintu Saga. This prize is given to still-unpublished manscripts by African writers. Her manuscript was published as a novel, titled Kintu, in 2014. She has won various other prizes including the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for "Let's Tell This Story Properly" and the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. A mixture of Ugandan oral storytelling traditions, folktakes, myths, biblical elements and history is characteristic of her work. She lives and works in Manchester, where she teaches creative writing at the university.

(Israel, 1982) studied psychology at the University of Tel Aviv and then film at Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film School. She has written various screenplays and short stories. Her first novel, One Night, Markovitch (2012) won various (international) prizes. Her second book, Waking Lions (2014) has been translated into many languages and turned into a TV series in the US. The surgeon Etan Green accidentally kills a refugee with his car and drives on. The widow, however, manages to find and blackmail him into providing hundreds of illegals with medical help. Although it reads like a thriller, the novel is mainly about moral questions: should Green have told the truth? Does he help the refugees out of guilt and self-preservation or is he a hero? The reader is continually prodded to ask him- or herself the question: what would I have done?

(Morocco, 1975) is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright and curator. His 1996 debut, Bruiloft aan zee (Wedding By the Sea), was an immediate success. His second novel, De langverwachte (The Long-awaited) won him the prestigious 2003 Libris Literature Award. Benali's subjects vary, but sports and the migrant who never really feels at home are recurring themes. He has written novels about his great passion of running, about his travels, and about migrants' cultural identity (Bad Boy). His work has been published internationally. Recent books include the novel Paradijsvogel boven Hoge Woerd (Bird of Paradise over Hoge Woerd, 2022) and Het andere verhaal (The Other Story, 2022), an essay about his research into 75 years of modern Moroccan art.

(1974) is a Kurdish poet, short story-writer, translator and editor. As editor-in-chief of the Kurdish  literary-cultural magazines Jiyana Rewşen en Rewşen-Name during the years 1997-2003, and afterwards as founder of publishing house Bajar, Nemir has made a lasting impression on important Kurdish literary works. He also translated many books and poems from English to Kurdish and from Kurdish into Turkish. In 2019, he publishes his Kurdish translation of Ulysses by James Joyce. Through the Dutch Foundation of Literature, Nemir is since June 2018 the temporary inhabitant of the Amsterdam Vluchtstad appartment in Anne Frank's former home. Nemir studies English language and literature at the Hacettepe University in Ankara and at the University of Istanbul.