(Turkey, 1968) is of Kurdish descent. In 2011 Dağın Ardına Bakmak (Looking Behind the Mountain) appeared, for which she took to the mountains to interview PKK rebels, the first time a writer sketched the personal stories and traumas of the Kurdish fighters. In 2011 Doğunun Kapısı: Diyarbakır (The Gate of the East: Diyarbakir) also appeared, a portrait of the 3000 year old capital of Kurdistan. As a columnist for the English language newspaper Zaman Matur writes regularly about the Kurdish question. In addition she chairs the Diyarbakır Cultural Art Foundation. She also leads social projects for women, children and adolescents and makes a tv-programme on culture, art and politics. She read law at the University of Ankara. Since the publication of her first book of poetry in 1996, Rüzgâr Dolu Konaklar (Wind-Filled Countryhouses) she has created her own mythology - inspired by age-old Sufi traditions from the region of her birth. Meanwhile she has six books of poetry to her name and an anthology with poems she translated. Her work has been translated in seventeen languages.

(Lebanon, 1970) is a poet, journalist, translator, editor and consultant. In her work she focuses on eroticism and the liberation of Arab women from their paternalistic yoke. Hoe ik Sheherazade heb vermoord, bekentenissen van een boze Arabische vrouw (How I killed Scheherazade, confessions of an angry Arab woman) in 2010 attracted a great deal of international attention. In this autobiographical essay she stood up for the sexual liberation of Arab women - at the same time condemning western clichés. Haddad speaks seven languages and has translated various works of prose and poetry into and from Arabic. As head of the cultural pages of the Lebanese daily An Nahar she interviewed well-known writers such as Umberto Eco, Wole Soyinka and Paul Auster. By the end of 2008 she launched Jasad (Arabic for body), the first Arab erotic cultural magazine. The flamboyant writer now works on a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne on the translation of the Marquis de Sade in Arabic. A selection of her poetry can be read in English translation on www.joumanahaddad.com. Her work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Polish, English and Italian, and she has won numerous international literary prizes.

(1974) was elected journalist of the year in 2008. Vermeulen is a correspondent in Istanbul for NRC Handelsblad, NOS News, VRT and Radio Nederland Wereldomroep. From 2002-2009 he was correspondent in southern Africa. About that time he wrote Help, ik ben blank geworden (Help, I've become white, 2009). In 2007 he was recipient of the Dick Scherpenzeel Award for his reports from Mugabe's bankrupt Zimbabwe. Early 2011 VPRO broadcast his In Turkey, a seven part documentary on the country where he now lives. At the end of 2011 it earned him the Erasmus Euro Media Award. In the programme Bram Vermeulen treks across Turkey in search of the fast changes taking place everywhere. He travels along the borders of a country with a regained self-confidence, from the Mediterranean to the snow-capped mountains of the far east, from the closed borders with Armenia to the open southern borders with neighbouring Arab states with which the Turks have strengthened lost ties.