(The Netherlands, 1955) is always exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction. She shot to fame with her first novel De wetten (The Laws, 1991). Her two subsequent novels, De vriendschap (Friendship, 1995) and I.M. (1998), also became bestsellers. She went on to publish Geheel de uwe (Sincerely Yours, 2004), Lucifer (2007) and Logboek van een onbarmhartig jaar (Logbook of a Merciless Year, 2011). Palmen has written several collections of essays, such as Een kleine filosofie van de moord (A Brief Philosophy of Murder, 2004), Het geluk van de eenzaamheid (The Joy of Loneliness, 2009) and Het drama van de afhankelijkheid (The Drama of Dependence, 2017). Many of her novels are based on events in her own life; her essays are exceptionally narrative. In 2023, she published Voornamelijk vrouwen (Mainly Women), personal essays about eleven women and one man who shape their lives in idiosyncratic ways. Palmen engages with them, challenges them, and discovers differences and similarities with her own life. Her multi-award-winning work is also internationally successful and has been translated into twenty languages.

(India, 1970) grew up and was educated in Calcutta, Oxford and Cambridge. His book The Lives of Others, about life in Calcutta, was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize and highly praised in the international press. The novel, which will be released in Dutch translation during the festival, portrays a bourgeois Calcutta family. When one of the sons joins a radical political group, its already complicated relationships come into sharp focus. The ruling hierarchy of the family, three generations of which live under one roof, reflects the complex Indian caste sytem. Mukherjee's first novel, A Life Apart, is about an Indian man who moves from Calcutta to London to build a new life. Mukherjee is a critic for The Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New York Times and other papers.

(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.