Kim Sun Mi

Kim Sunmi es una escritora y artista literaria coreana. Su novela Galleta ganó el Premio de Contenido Creativo de Corea, el primer Premio de Literatura Fantástica Wisdom House, el Premio de Cultura Nueva y Antigua, y el primer Concurso Search-Light organizado por Kyobo Books, y es un éxito de ventas y crítica en su país y el mundo asiático, que ahora llega en español gracias a Océano Gran Travesía

Natalka Sniadanko

(Ukraine, 1973)

She is a writer, translator and cultural journalist born in Lviv, Ukraine. Since 2001, she has published nine books, including seven novels translated into eleven languages. Her best-known work includes The Passion Collection and Frau Müller Does not Wish To Pay More. With an ironic and feminist writing voice, Sniadanko explores themes of identity, freedom and the female experience in Eastern Europe. She has been awarded the Joseph Conrad Prize and the Translation Prize of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture for her version of The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. She was also a finalist for the Angelus Literary Award. Her career combines literary work with social criticism, and active participation in the European cultural dialogue.

Other activities involving the participant:

Fiction, Tension and Memory
Experience, narrative, and resilience

Jan Carson

(Ireland)

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two microfiction collections. Her novel, The Fire Starters  won the European Literature Prize for Ireland, in 2019. Her most recent novel, The Raptures, was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year awards. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024, and by Scribner (USA) in July 2024. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE. She is a 2025 Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first play, an adaptation of the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, was produced by the Replay theatre company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in March 2025. Her next novel is Few and Far Between, which is to be published in early 2026.

Other activities involving the participant:

Territory of Affections, Silences and Encounters
Annual International Storytellers Conference

Valentijn Hoogenkamp

(Países Bajos, 1986)

Artista multidisciplinar holandés que combina la escritura y las bellas artes para explorar cuestiones de identidad e intimidad. Tras escribir diez obras de teatro e interpretar poesía en escenarios nacionales e internacionales, escribió su primera novela Adoring Louis Claus, en 2021. Esta novela fue elogiada en la prensa nacional, nominada al Premio Anton Wachter y publicada en Alemania por Atlantik. Su ensayo de no ficción Antiboy, un coming-of-gender sobre su transición de género, se publicó en 2022 y actualmente está siendo traducido por Michele Hutchinson, ganadora del Premio Booker. Antiboy será lanzado internacionalmente por Seagull Press en el Reino Unido, Estados Unidos e India y por SKUC en Eslovenia en 2024.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

The Place We Are and Inhabit

Antje Rávik Strubel

(Germany, 1974)

Writer and translator. She grew up in East Germany, and her early works analyze the dissonances and conflicts that resulted from German reunification, especially the damages caused by ideologies and by the long shadow cast by dictatorial systems. Her later novels deal with borderline experiences, both in the social and personal environment, the question of what we consider normal, love, sex and power relations, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and the pressure exerted by social norms.
Her publications include the novels Unter Schnee (Snowed Under, 2001), Fremd Gehen. Ein Nachtstück (2002) (Going Strange , 2002), Tupolew 134 (2004), as well as Sturz der Tage in die Nacht (When Days Plunge into Night, 2011). Her work has earned her numerous awards, her novel Kältere Schichten der Luft (Colder Layers of Air, 2007) was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and received the Rheingau Literature Prize and the Hermann Hesse Prize. In 2019 she was awarded the Prize of the Houses of Literature. Her novel Blaue Frau (Blue Woman) was awarded the 2021 German Book Prize. Strubel has written numerous essays on socio-political and literary topics, published in the volumes Es hört nie auf, dass man etwas sagen muss (It's Impossible to Stop Saying Something, 2022) and nah genug weit weg (close enough very far away, 2023). She is also the author of travel essays about Sweden and her native region, Brandenburg. 
In March 2025 her new novel was published, Der Einfluss der Fasane (The Influence of the Pheasants) and in the autumn an essay on skiing, writing and death with the title Kein Schnee, nimmermehr (Snow, Never Again). She has translated from English and Swedish, among others, Joan Didion, Monika Fagerholm, Lucia Berlin and Virginia Woolf. 

Other activities involving the participant:

The Place We Are and Inhabit

Vivek Shraya

(Canadá, 1981)

Artista cuyo trabajo cruza los límites de la música, la literatura, las artes visuales, el teatro, la televisión, el cine y la moda.
Vivek, tres veces ganadora del Premio Canadian Screen, es la creadora y guionista de la serie original de CBC Gem, How to Fail as a Popstar, cuyo estreno internacional fue en Cannes. Fue nominada al Premio Polaris de Música y ha colaborado con íconos musicales como Jann Arden, Peaches y Jully Black. Su exitoso libro I'm Afraid of Men fue aclamado por Vanity Fair como un "impulso cultural".
Su decimotercer libro, una novela distópica, The Hystericals, se publicará en otoño de 2026 por McClelland & Stewart.
 

Other activities involving the participant:

Literature, identity, and resistance
Bodies in transit: writing the self beyond labels

Latifa Labsir

(Marruecos, 1965)

Escritora marroquí nacida en Casablanca. Es profesora en la Universidad de Literatura Moderna, en Hassan II en Casablanca. Ha publicado algunas colecciones de relatos cortos, y fue presentadora en el programa Cultural Salon, que salió al aire en colaboración con Deutsche Welle y Moroccan television. Labsir ha publicado numerosos artículos en revistas marroquís y de Medio Oriente, y desde 2008 publica una columna mensual y artículos sobre literatura en la revista marroquí Women of Morocco. Ha patrocinado por muchos años talleres de escritura en la Facultad de Artes y Humanidades de Casablanca, y en varias instituciones y asociaciones en Marruecos. 

Other activities involving the participant:

Creating worlds and inhabiting silences

Huda Al-Naemi

(Qatar) 

Writer, doctor in medical physics, she worked for years in the scientific field before devoting herself completely to literature. She received the Qatar National Prize in Healthcare Medical Sciences (2018). Precocious, both in her literary and journalistic production, her first collection of short stories  Al-Mikhala saw the light in 1997. It was followed by Untha , 1998, and Abatil , 2000. Two years later she would publish Ayn tara, a compilation of articles that appeared in various Qatari and Arabic newspapers. In 2010, she published a new anthology of short stories, Hala tushbihuna, which was followed in 2012 by a children's play, al-Naba al-dhahabi . She has been part of a good number of technical commissions and juries under the Ministry of Culture of Qatar, especially for the awarding of prizes for theatrical work. In the international scene, she was a member of the jury of the Arabic Novel Prize, known as Arab Booker, in its 2012 edition, as well as that of Katara, also for the novel written in Arabic, of the year 2018.
In 2021, she published a new collection of short stories, Qumut (Diapers), set in the shops of goods and clothes for babies in the seventies and eighties of the last century. Among her most recent works we find a fictionalized autobiography, Hina jabuhu al-najil   2023, and her novel Zaafarana, 2024.

The most recent sample of his literary work we have in the Huda wa Kalila collection (Huda and Kalila), published by the Hamad ben Khalifa University Press, Doha, in 2025, from where the short stories presented in the summer publication of the magazine have been extracted from Banipal.

Other activities involving the participant:

Annual International Storytellers Conference

Samer Abu Hawwash

(Lebanon, 1972) 

He is a Palestinian poet, writer and translator, born in Beirut in 1972. He has been publishing since 1991 in several Lebanese magazines and newspapers. He graduated in journalism and communication from the Lebanese University in 1996. He published his first collection of poems, titled Life is Printed in New York, in 1977, which has been followed by nine others, including: I'll Kill You Death, One Last Selfie with a Dying World, Happiness or A Series of Explosions that Rocked the Capital, This is Not the Way Pizza is Made, Ruins. He has lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates since 2004, where he worked as a translator of American poetry and fiction works in the English language. He currently resides in Barcelona. He has translated more than twenty American poets into Arabic, including Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Kim Addonizio, Robert Bly, in addition to more than forty works by the most important American writers, including: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, Life of Pi, by Yann Martel and Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi. In 2009 he was one of the 39 Arab authors chosen for the Beirut39 project, which took place in Beirut in 2009-2010 on the occasion of being the World Book Capital. In this year, 2024, he received the Sargon Boulus Prize for Poetry and translation.

Other activities involving the participant:

The Poetry Room