The publisher Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, born in 1954, who has always been committed to promoting literature and the written word, founded the publishing group Libella with Jan Michalski. Since 1987 numerous authors have been brought out in French, Polish and English at various publishing houses, including Noir sur Blanc, Buchet-Chastel, Phébus, and Wydawnictwo Literackie. In 2004 Vera Michalski created the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature, whose mission is to foster literary creation and encourage the practice of reading through a range of initiatives and activities.

The British novelist and biographer Jonathan Coe was born in 1961 in Birmingham (UK). He studied at the King Edward’s School and Trinity College, before going on to earn a PhD in English literature. He teaches at the University of Warwick. Coe made a name for himself internationally with his fourth novel, What a Carve Up! (Viking Press, 1994). His body of work has earned Coe a number of awards in his native Britain; published by Gallimard, his books have also garnered several prestigious prizes in France, including the 1998 Prix Médicis étranger for La maison du sommeil (The House of Sleep), and the 2019 European Book Prize for Le cœur de l’Angleterre (Middle England). In 2004 he became a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. His latest novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is published in 2024 by Viking.

The Italian writer and journalist Andrea Marcolongo was born in 1987 in Crema, Italy. A scholar of ancient Greek with a degree in Classical Literature from the Università degli Studi in Milan, she has written several best-selling books, including La lingua geniale. 9 buone ragioni per amare il greco in 2016 (The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek, 2019); La misura eroica. Il mito degli argonauti e il coraggio che spinge gli uomini ad amare in 2018; Alla fonte delle parole. 99 etimologie che ci parlano di noi in 2019; and La lezione di Enea in 2020 (Starting from Scratch: The Life-Changing Lessons of Aeneas, 2022). Her books have been translated in nearly thirty countries. She is also a member of the jury for the Prix du Grand Continent and is a regular contributor to Italian and foreign newspapers, including La Stampa and Le Figaro. Published in 2024, her essay Courir (Gallimard) wins the Jules Rimet Prize the same year.

A prize-winning Portuguese writer and professor of epistemology at the University of Lisbon, Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1970. He is seen today as one of the main literary voices in that language and has published in a variety of genres, from novels and poetry, to plays and essays. His works have been translated into over fifty languages and have won a number of national and international awards, including the José Saramago Prize for Jerusalem in 2005, and France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for Learning to Pray in the Age of Technologyin 2010. In 2019 was published in English Reading Is Walking (Quantum Prose), and in 2025 A Girl is Lost in Her Century, Looking for Her Father (Ingram).

A celebrated Icelandic novelist, poet, lyricist and screenwriter, Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson) was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1962. His novels include in English The Blue Fox (2005 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize), From the Mouth of the Whale, The Whispering Muse, the trilogy CoDex 1962 and Red Milk (2019), published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and translated into thirty-five languages. His long-time collaboration with the singer Björk led to an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, “I’ve Seen It All” from Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. The most recent film he co-wrote is Robert Eggers’ feature The Northman (2022), inspired by the Icelandic sagas. He is the president of the Icelandic PEN Center.

An author, novelist and short-story writer, Scholastique Mukasonga was born in 1956 in Rwanda. Faced with the persecution of the Tutsi people, she was forced into exile in Burundi before settling in France in 1993. She wrote her first novel, Inyenzi ou les cafards (Gallimard, 2004), in English titled simply Cockroaches (Archipelago, 2016), in the aftermath of the tragedy of the 1994 Tutsi genocide during which thirty-seven members of her family were killed. Today her work boasts eleven novels and short-story collections translated in over twenty languages. She has been awarded numerous prizes in France and internationally, including the 2012 Prix Renaudot for Notre-Dame du Nil (Gallimard, 2012), translated as Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago, 2014), and the Prix Simone de Beauvoir. Two of her books, The Barefoot Woman (Archipelago, 2008) and Kibogo (Blackstone Publishing, 2020) were shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2013, she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Her latest novel, Julienne, was published by Gallimard in 2024 and won the Prix de l’Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer.

Born in 1975 in Geneva, Nicolas Grospierre is a Franco-Polish visual artist and photographer. He wholly embraced his artistic calling following studies at Paris’s Institut d’études politiques and the London School of Economics. Now based in Poland, he sees modern architecture as central to his practice, putting it in dialogue with the themes of collective memory and the Anthropocene. In fusing different mediums he creates photo installations that offer viewers halls of mirrors and plays of light. He was awarded a Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. His work has been exhibited in museums throughout Europe and the Americas.