(1949- ) Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese living in France since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. His literary work ranges from fiction and essays to opera librettos and he has been, since 2011, a member of the French Academy. He is a living example of a borderline person, as he considers himself to be, for being crossed by several fracture lines (ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural), the author knows he is in a privileged position to act as a courier and to help launching bridges of dialogue and understanding between cultures, seeing in... Read More

(1964- ) Anne Weber is a German writer born in Offenbach (Germany), living in Paris since 1983. She translates her own works from French to German and she has already authored a dozen narrative or essays. Amongst them, Ida invente la poudre (1998) [Ida Invents the Powder], Cendres & Métaux (2006) [Ashes & Metals] and Vaterland (2015) [Motherland] stand out. Her work has been widely acclaimed by critics, both in France and in Germany and Anne Weber was awarded the literary Prize Heimito von Doderer (2004), the Kranichsteiner Prize (2010) and the translation Prize Johann... Read More

(1942- ) Portuguese writer, born in 1942, in Lisbon. Graduated in Psychiatric Medicine, he practiced clinical activity during the Colonial War in Angola and, subsequently, in Lisbon, at Miguel Bombarda Hospital. After the publication of Os Cus de Judas (1979) [The Land at the End of the World], he became one of the most translated and internationally renowned Portuguese contemporary novelists; since that novel which completes an auto-biographic-inspired trilogy, which includes Conhecimento do Inferno [Knowledge of Hell] and Memória de Elefante [Elephant’s Memory], describing a descent to the infernos, from the experience of the Colonial... Read More

(1971-) David Van Reybrouck has amultifaceted scientific and cultural career. He is an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a historian, a chronicler, an essayist, but he is also a dramaturge and a Dutch speaking Belgian fictionist. Coming from a Catholic Flemish family, he studied philosophy and archaeology in Leuven, having followed anthropo-zoology, a scientific field about which he has published some studies of renowned significance. In 2007, he definitively breaks with academic teaching and scientific research, focusing entirely on literary and essayistic writing. He published several works in Dutch that were translated to French: Le Fléau [The... Read More

(1949-) Dubravka Ugrešić, the winner of the Neustadt Prize for International Literature (2016) and author of several essays, novels and short fictions, challenges the usual rating of literature by the authors’ nationality. Dubravka Ugrešić was born in the former Yugoslavia and became a Croatian citizen after the country’s disintegration in the 1990’s. However, Ugrešić quickly showed her total disagreement with the new establishment’s nationalist and xenophobic course very soon, wherefore, in 1993, she changed Croatia for exile, first in Berlin and later in Amsterdam, where she has been emigrated for more than 20 years. Although she... Read More

(1923 – ) Eduardo Lourenço was born in São Pedro do Rio Seco, a village of the Almeida county and the region of Guarda. Having published more than thirty original books, Eduardo Lourenço has gained prominence in Portuguese language literature and thought, as a philosopher and an essayist. The theme of Europe has always taken a prominent place in the lourencian literary work, as has been pointed out by Miguel Real and João Tiago Lima, among others. We can even state that it belongs to one of the main chapters of the so-called “lourencian mythologies”... Read More

(1971 – ) Elif Şafak is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. She was born on October 25, 1971, in Strasbourg. After her birth, her parents divorced and she was raised by her single mother. She uses her mother’s name as her surname (Şafak). She finished her education in different places because her mother was a diplomat. She focused on the contribution of women for literature. Her masters’ thesis won a prize from an association of Social Sciences. When she was studying for her masters’ thesis, Şafak wrote her first storybook, Kem Gözlere... Read More

(1919-1989) Fernando Gonçalves Namora was born in Condeixa-a-Nova. His bibliography includes around thirty titles comprising novels, narratives, biographies, chronicles and writer’s notebooks. He was awarded numerous literary prizes and his works were translated into several languages and countries. Presently he figures side by side with the best novelists of the Portuguese Neorealism, although he embraced the existential novel as of Cidade Solitária (1959) [Lonely City] and, especially, since Domingo à Tarde (1961) [Sunday Afternoon]. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Huxley, Sartre, Camus and, in particular, Malraux, are the main European voices one can hear in Namora’s novels and... Read More

(1978- ) Jean-François Dauven is a Belgian francophone writer from Brussels, of the new generation of fictionists that feels little to no link to Belgitude, the Belgian movement of identitarian claims in the 1970’s. Graduated in philosophy, Dauven was a high school colleague of another Belgian francophone contemporary fictionist, Grégoire Polet, at the Martin V high school in New Leuven (Walloon). Dauven got to work as a plumber and currently works as an editor in Paris, where he lives Actually, the narrative fiction of both writers points to generic stylistic and thematic resemblances. In fact,... Read More

(1922-2010) Saramago was born to a peasant family from Azinhaga do Ribatejo, a village in the Golegã county, and went to live in Lisbon when he was two years old, accompanying his parents who moved to the capital for work related reasons. The Azinhaga of his childhood, the village of grandparents Josefa and Jerónimo, of the peasant misery where “everyone walked barefoot, except the men who wore working boots” (1996), is his home, the place he inhabits, notwithstanding having lived in several places along his life. Azinhaga impregnates Saramago’s soul of an existential melancholy, of... Read More