(Geldrop, NL, 1979) debuted in 2010 with De eerste hond in de ruimte (The First Dog in Space), tales of young people on all-night techno and drug binges that broaches themes of loneliness, addition and relationships. These collected stories had previously appeared in the Flemish literary magazine DW B. His second book Het licht (The Light, 2012), which made the Golden Book-Owl prize longlist, again focused on a group of friends who listen to music, experiment with drugs and sex, and endlessly keep up with social media until their lives are disrupted by a series of suicides. His 2014 poetry debut, Niemand had er enig idee van wat er aan de hand was (No One Had Any Idea What Was Going On), was nominated for the C. Buddingh Prize. Van Rooij's poems tend to conjure an uneasy, tense atmosphere via out-of-context quotes, showing a world that repeatedly defies our plans and expectations.

(Belgium, 1982) debuted in 2014 with her poetry collection Deze zachte witte kamer (This Soft White Room), which won the Herman De Coninck debut prize and was nominated for the C. Buddingh Prize. She does regular readings and organizes small poetry festivals. For her, poetry is "a means to exercise control over what is uncontrollable, with a pen for a weapon and my magnifying glass for a shield." She writes about everything: "what I read in magazines about psychology and science, or something I saw, a man in a suit and yellow sneakers... Yet mainly it's people who inspire me: weaknesses and neuroses, beauty in ugliness: the death of my father, and the fact that my daughter's fingernails have the same shape as his did." In her book and on her website, Svetlikova pays a lot of attention to design. Not surprisingly: besides language and literature, she also studied graphic design.

(Belgium, 1984) calls herself a poetic cabaret artist. She makes short films, writes columns, and tours Flanders for her own prime-time programme Het is de moeite (It's Worth the Trouble), which brings poetry to the people. In her poetic cabaret, she pokes fun at traditional poetry readings that make both poets and the public feel uncomfortable. Vanhauwaert studied Language Arts at the Antwerp Conservatory, where she now teaches. She wrote columns for De Morgen and contributed to the cultural programme Bar du Matin on Radio 1. She won the 2011 Female Debut Award for her first volume of poetry, Ik ben mogelijk (I Am Possible). Her second collection from 2014, Wij zijn evenwijdig (We Are Parallel), won the Herman de Coninck Audience Award as well as the 2015 Hugues C. Pernath Prize, and the collection is nominated for the VSB Poetry Award. She was a finalist in both the 2012 World Poetry Slam competition and at the 2014 Leids Cabaret Festival. For Flemish TV she took to the streets in 2014 to acquaint people with poetry in unexpected places.

(Syria, 1930), the favourite poet of Rotterdam's Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. After studying philosophy in Damascus, he moved to Beirut and then Paris. His most famous volume, The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus, was published in 1961. His poems, essays, letters and interviews are often translated, especially into French. He broke with the formal structure of Arabic poetry and experimented with free verse and prose poems. In Arabic, Adonis wrote: "To write poetry in this language [...] means to unveil the invisible and reveal the abyss of absence that that distinguishes us from the unseen." In his work, he distances himself from Islam but holds up a mirror to the West, which fails to honour its thinkers and poets an thereby stands in the way of mutual understanding between East and West. His first anthology of work translated into Dutch, Wat blijft (What Remains), will come out during the festival.

(1959) is a composer, arranger and musician whose work blends many influences, including jazz, classical and folk music from all corners of the world. He was composer-in-residence of LOD Music Theatre in Ghent from 1989 to 2013. Among other projects, he created musical theatre productions with actor and director Koen De Sutter and Alain Platel of Les Ballets C de la B. His own folk fanfare Banda Azufaifo and the heartwarming House of Hidden Tunes I & II combine various musical styles, from Mozart to Camarón de la Isla. In 2001 he won the Louis Paul Boon prize for “his social engagement and his bond with mankind, evident in his whole oeuvre.” Three years later he was awarded the Grand Theatre Festival Prize. Van der Harst was the civic composer of Ghent in 2007 and 2008. He has made various CDs, including ones featuring Christmas and New Year songs from different cultures. At the festival, he will play and create music as musician-in-residence, both making and choosing music for various programmes.

(Belgium, 1963) is a journalist, philosopher, and literature and theatre scholar. She has interviewed many big names from the art world for Belgian public television, and was the jury chairwoman of the Golden Owl prize from 2000 to 2006. She has written for newspapers and magazines such as De Morgen and De Standaard, and Knack, Humo and Vrij Nederland. For a commission from the Flanders and Klara festivals, she reworked a reportage into an opera libretto. She is a core contributor to the "living books programme" Uitgelezen, and was a visiting professor of art philosophy at The School of Arts in Gent. As a writer-in-residence in Bucharest she wrote De weg van de mier (The Way of the Ant), about a Romanian chauffeur who misses his lover, who fled the Ceaucescu regime. She makes IM (In Memoriam) for the Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren institute, a multi-year series in which talks to well-known people about how they'd like to be remembered.

(Germany, 1943) is a writer, translator and publisher. He has said that his life's goal is to "show people that a day without poetry is a wasted day." The late Michael Zeeman called him "a romantic in the era of cynicism, a lyrical voice of desire." A selection of Krüger's poetry, Voor het onweer (Before the Storm), was published in 2012, translated by his longtime translator Cees Nooteboom. In his introduction, Nooteboom praised Krüger's "utterly unique" voice "that pulls you into an intimacy, parlando poetry of deceptive simplicity that sees and tells much." From 1968 to 2013, Krüger worked for the famous German Carl Hanser publishing house, which he eventually directed. Since 1975, he has been a jury member for the Petrarch Prize for European poets. In 2013 he became President of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

(Leeuwarden, NL, 1956) studied several languages, East Asian art history, and anthropology from 1977 to 1984. In 1984 he self-published his debut poetry collection Virus, virus, and in the late eighties he joined Maximalen, a group of poets who called for more action in poetry. Since then he has written a dozen further collections as well as stories and novellas. One of his most impressive titles is De aardse komedie (The Earthly Comedy), an enormous "novel poem" that rivals the great poetry of the past. After the death of his wife he wrote the memorable grieving volume Doodsbloei (Deathbloom), followed by the extatic song of renewal Mensenhand (Human Hand) that brings to life his new wife, Hera. The 2015 collection Zelf (Self) articulates how Boskma's grief for his wife penetrates to the core of his poetic being; it was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize. Boskma's poems have been translated and published in China, the Czech Republic, France, and the United States. In 2012, he was one of the poets who participated in "The New York to Pittsburgh and Back Dutch Poetry Tour."

(Belgium, 1947) is a writer and translator. Formerly he was also a journalist and newsreader with the Flemish television journal. He became well known as the author of well-documented books about Belgium and Brussels. In 1989's Het Belgisch labyrint (The Belgian Labyrinth), he analyzes his country of birth with passion and erudition. Mijn Nederland (My Netherlands) appeared in 2005, a response to the request to explain Holland to the desperate Dutch. With 1991's Verhalen van het Heggeland (Stories from Heggeland), but even more so with 1997's Altrapsodie, he made his name as a novelist. In his poetry, he breaks with a society losing itself in "disastrous modernization." In various debates he's stated his belief in a Greater Netherlands, a Benelux, in which the German, French and Dutch languages and cultures would enrich one another. In 2007 his daughter Judith Vanistendael published the graphic novel De maagd en de neger (The Virgin and the Negro), based on a short story of her father's about the love between and economics student and a political refugee from Togo. His collection Het was wat (That Was Something) has been nominated for the 2016 VSB Poetry Prize.

(Belgium, 1984) studied with Dina Grossberger and Katelijne Van Laethem in Leuven, and was coached by Jard van Nes and Catrin Wyn Davies. She prefers contemporary opera and musical theatre but is also very active in Baroque repertoire. Her own Baroque ensemble Bel Ayre, which was named Selected Promising Ensemble at Antwerp's Festival Laus Polyphoniae in 2011, performed at Bozar in Brussels, the Rotterdam Opera Days, and the Flanders Festival in Mechelen. She has worked as a soloist with James Wood, Erik Van Nevel, Marcel Pérès, Titus Engel, Il Gardellino, and the vocal ensembles Encantar and Psallentes, among others. She was selected for the prestigious Lucerne Festival Academy in 2014, where she sang first soprano in Luciano Berio’s Coro under Sir Simon Rattle. She has sung and created works by contemporary composers like Frank Nuyts, Thomas Smetryns, and Alain Craens, and  worked on various productions of Het Muziek LOD, Transparant Music Theatre, and the Flemish Opera. 

(Belgium, 1962) is a versatile performer. He works in various disciplines, such as musical theatre, dance, and contemporary classical and improvised music. He has contributed to productions of the Scapino Ballet, Walpurgis, Xynix, Amsterdam Theatre Group and the Spectra Ensemble. As a solo percussionist he has played the biggest venues of Europe and Australia. In Belgium, Konink mostly plays music written especially for him by composers such as Peter Vermeersch, Luc Brewaeys, Frank Nuyts, Philippe Boesmans, and Fredic Rzewski. He has played in various school programmes with Quatuor Danel as well as a percussion duet with Marcel Andriessen. As a composer, he has written theatre music for Ensemble Leporello, Teneter, and Compagnie Boktor. Konink also teaches at the Ghent Conservatory.

(Amsterdam, NL, 1962) studied jazz guitar at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. He admires Django Reinhardt but is also inspired by contemporary guitarists like Jim Hall, Jimmy Raney, Pat Martino, and Boulou Ferre, as well as Eastern European (gypsy) music. Voet has played in a number of his own ensembles (Cravat Quartet with Hady Mouallem and Deux-Creme-Deux with guitarist Henk de Geus) and performed with guitarists Jimmy Rosenberg and Fapy Lafertin, klezmer clarinettist Marcel Salomon, and artist/violinist Armando. Together with Dick van der Harst, he worked with the musical theatre troupe Het Muziek LOD. His biggest current project is Reinier Voet and Pigalle44, a collaboration with guitarist Jan Brouwer.

(Belgium) is a violist and cellist. He began his studies with the famous violist Pierre Penassou. Then he performed with various string ensembles, especially in the classical arena. As a member of his own group, Quatuor Danel, he played on pianist Kris Defoort's Conversations/Conservations album. He teaches chamber music at the Brussels Conservatory.