Philippa Motte is a French writer, peer-support worker, trainer and corporate consultant on mental health in the workplace, working to provide the support to people with mental health issues. In 2021, she published Le jour où m’a mère m’a tout raconté (Stock), an account of her grandmother’s forced confinement in a psychiatric institution. In Et c’est moi qu’on enferme (Stock, 2025), she addresses her bipolar disorder and the realities of mental illness with honesty, from the dark experiences of institutionalisation and medical violence to the glimmers of hope born of human connection, solidarity, patience and rehabilitation.

David Thomas is a French novelist and short-story writer. After a career spanning twenty years in journalism, he turned his attention to literary writing and published his first collection of short stories, La patience des buffles sous la pluie (Bernard Pascuito, 2009), followed by the novel Un silence de clairière (Albin Michel, 2011). He is the author of around ten books, which have won several awards, including the Goncourt Prize for Short Stories for Partout les autres (L’Olivier, 2023). Published by the same publisher, Un frère (2025) offers a poignant account of his elder brother’s struggle with schizophrenia, and how mental illness affected their bond.

Lisa Appignanesi, a British-Canadian writer, journalist and historian, served as president of the English PEN in the UK before becoming President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016. Exploring themes of the female condition, identity and memory, her multi-award-winningc body of work includes novels and essays, including Memory and Desire (HarperCollins, 1991), Losing the Dead (Chatto & Windus, 1999), and Everyday Madness (4th Estate, 2018). A remarkable work, Mad, Bad and Sad (Virago, 2008) analyses two centuries of the treatment of mental disorders in women, unravelling patriarchal influences and shedding light on the infinite variations of the human psyche.

Horatio Clare is a Welsh author, radio producer and journalist, and presenter of Is Psychiatry Working? On BBC Radio 4. His critically acclaimed essays and travel and nature writing include Down to the Sea in Ships (Chatto & Windus, 2014, Stanford Dolman Prize) and We Came by Sea (Little Toller, 2025). Two autobiographical works – Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing (Chatto & Windus, 2021) and Your Journey Your Way: How to Make the Mental Health System Work For You (Penguin, 2024) – offer a compassionate exploration of the harsh realities of mental illness, from the depths of the psyche to reconciliation with oneself.

Claire Touzard, a French author and journalist, has worked for France Inter, Grazia, and Libération, among others. In Sans alcool (Flammarion, 2021), she offers a feminist perspective on cultural representations of alcohol. Following her debut novel Féminin (Flammarion, 2022), the writer published Folie et résistance (Divergences, 2025), in which, drawing on her own experience of bipolar disorder, she analyses the political instrumentalisation of the concept of madness andm its stigmatisation, questioning whether it is individuals or systems that are irrational. This gives rise to a transformation of psychological vulnerabilities into tools of resistance against unhealthy norms and an alternative, collective vision of care.

Olivier Vonlanthen is a Swiss poet and novelist, and also works as a teacher of French. His first collection of poetry, Ossuaires (Éditions Empreintes, 2022), an exploration of inner fragility, earned him the C. F. Ramuz Poetry Prize. Tracing in reverse the life of Marthe, a domestic worker from Fribourg, who was institutionalized after murdering her wealthy employer in Montpellier in 1968, the novel Notre-Dame-des-Démolies (La Veilleuse, 2025, Terra Nova Prize) reaches beyond the mental instability focused on by the media and the justice system – pointing to psychological suffering closely linked with poverty, religion, humiliation and class violence.

Rosa Montero is a Spanish writer and journalist who has been contributing to the daily newspaper El País since 1976. Her prolific literary output, spanning fiction and non-fiction, has won numerous awards and been translated into some thirty languages, blending the personal with the political. Among her books published in English are The Delta Function (UNP, 1992, trans. Yolanda Molina Gavilán) and Beautiful and Dark (Aunt Lute Books, 2010, trans. Adrienne Mitchell). A rich collage of scientific essay and personal narrative, The Danger to Be Sane (Europa Editions, 2026, trans. Lindsey Ford) examines the notion of madness and its role in artistic creation, offering a vital ode to unreason.

Najwa Barakat is a Lebanese writer and journalist. After fleeing the civil war in 1984, she settled in France and worked for RFI, the BBC, and Al Jazeera. Translated into several languages, her novels include, in English, Oh, Salaam! (Interlink, 2015) and Mister N. (And Other Stories, 2022), both translated by Luke Leafgreen. This last psychological thriller follows a writer adrift, driven mad by violence, and drowning his despair in the dark underbelly of what appears to be Beirut. Through ingenious narrative twists and turns, imagination and reality merge, offering a deep understanding of how the world’s turmoil and chaos affect individuals.

Antoine Wauters is a Belgian novelist, poet, and screenwriter. His first novel, Nos mères (Verdier, 2014), brought him to the attention of a wider audience. This was followed by eight books, translated into several languages, including Mahmoud ou la montée des eaux (Verdier, 2021), which won, among others, the Livre Inter Prize, the Wepler Prize, and the Marguerite Duras Prize, and Le musée des contradictions (Éditions du sous-sol, 2022, Goncourt Prize for Short Stories). Haute-Folie (Gallimard, 2025, Jean Giono Prize) offers a poetic and powerful reflection on the weight of trauma and its transmission, telling the story of a man whose mind is tormented by family secrecy.

Patrick Lemoine, a French psychiatrist and doctor of neuroscience, is the author of over forty essays and popular science books dealing with mental disorders, sleep and the placebo effect. Published by Odile Jacob, his works include Histoire de la folie avant la psychiatrie (with Boris Cyrulnik, 2018), La santé psychique de ceux qui ont fait le monde (2019) and La santé psychique des écrivains et de leurs personnages (with Sophie Viguier-Vinson, 2025). In these last two books, Lemoine dissects aspects of the lives of political and literary figures, and offers, not without humour, illuminating diagnoses of human frailties.

Witold Szabłowski is a Polish writer and journalist. A senior correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza, he has received numerous awards, including the European Parliament Prize for his investigations into migrants in Western Europe, as well as the English PEN Award and a prize from Amnesty International for his work on honour killings in Turkey. Dancing Bears (Text, 2018), How to Feed aDictator (Icon, 2022), and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin (Icon, 2023) are all published in English in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ translation. The last two pieces of literary reportage use the kitchen as a gateway to explore the madness of autocratic regimes.

Mircea Cărtărescu is a poet, novelist, literary critic, and a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and the European Cultural Parliament. His body of work, which has received numerous prestigious international awards, comprises more than thirty books. These include Blinding: The Left Wing (Archipelago, 2013), Solenoid (Pushkin Press, 2024), and Theodoros (Deep Vellum, 2026), all translated by Sean Cotter, as well as Nostalgia (Penguin, 2025). A masterpiece in the form of a hallucinatory diary, Solenoid skilfully weaves together the obsessions, dreams, and metaphysical anxieties of a man attempting to un-ravel the mysteries of existence while grappling with a strange conspiracy of normality.

Lucienne Peiry, Swiss art historian, curator and essayist, directed the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne from 2004 to 2011, before developing the museum’s research and international relations until 2014. She has organised more than forty exhibitions, including Seeing the Invisible. Art Brut and the Beyond at the International Museum of the Reformation in Geneva. A Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, she is the author of numerous books, such as L’Art Brut (Flammarion, 2016, reissued 2023) and Écrits d’Art Brut (Seuil, 2020), seminal works on art outside the mainstream of the art world, indifferent to social and cultural norms, and at once free, fragile, and subversive.

Michel Thévoz is a Swiss essayist, curator, art historian, and the first director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, serving from its opening in 1976 until 2001. His numerous publications include Requiem pour la folie (La Différence, 2017), Pathologie du cadre (Minuit, 2020), Les écrits bruts (Éditions du Canoë, 2021), and L’Art Brut ressourcé (Frémok, 2025). He recently contributed to the book Art brut en Suisse. Des origines de la collection à aujourd’hui (5 Continents, 2026), edited by Sarah Lombardi. Art history is reimagined through his erudite and subversive writing, questioning madness and conventions.

Adèle Yon is a French author, film studies researcher, and chef. She wrote a thesis on the “female phantom double” in cinema as part of the SACRe art and research laboratory. Following this, My True Name Is Elisabeth, to be translated by Alice Yang, and published in English in 2027 by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is an investigation into the silenced history of her great-grandmother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1950. Punctuated with archival excerpts and interviews, this hybrid work, blending essay and memoir, tackles with force and sensitivity the misogynist violence perpetrated by twentiethcentury psychiatry, as well as the toxicity of secrets.