Author of Struck

Susanna Bissoli is the author of the short story collection Caterina sulla soglia (Terre di Mezzo, 2009), the novel Le parole che cambiano tutto (Terre di Mezzo, 2011), and several plays. She teaches Italian and runs oral storytelling circles in schools and hospitals.

Struck was shortlisted for the Ortebello Prize in Italy.

Praise for Struck:

“Susanna handles illness and pain while remaining miraculously joyful.”Paolo Cognetti

“A family story, universal and intimate, poetic and persuasive… a meta-novel full of grace that seeps into the readers’ hearts and beats page after page. A fluorescent bolt of lightening.” La Stampa

“An intense literary novel… at once sparkling and intense in its expressive vivacity.” Il Corriere della Sera

Photo - Barbara Rigon

Author of In Late Summer

Magdalena Blažević, born in Žepce in 1982, is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and awarded numerous prizes. 

In Late Summer, winner of the 2022/2023 Tportal Award for Best Croatian Novel, is her debut novel.

Praise for In Late Summer:

A shockingly powerful and authentic voice dominates, a poetic howl stronger than any brutal and naturalistic representation of war. —Elizabeta Hrstić

An outstanding anti-war novel, in which war is scarcely mentioned.—Josip Mlakić

A beautiful and terrifying book about a female world, consistently told until the end from the women’s perspective. —Miljenko Jergović

Photo - Marijana Baskarad

Author of Milk and Blood

Agnès de Clairville was born in Normandy and now lives in Marseille. A scientist by profession, she worked in photography before devoting herself to writing. Milk and Blood is her second novel.

Photo - Melania Avanzoto

Translator of Ilaria, or The Conquest Of Disobedience

Since ‘discovering’ the first book she was to translate, award-winning translator Adriana Hunter has brought more than 100 books to English-language readers and still enjoys the buzz of finding promising new francophone authors. Her recent work includes the international bestseller The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier and three volumes of Sapiens: A Graphic History based on Yuval Noah Harari’s global phenomenon, Sapiens. She relishes the challenges of translating anything from intricate literary fiction to the goofy antics and word games of Asterix and Obelix. 

She won the 2011 Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi (Peirene Press, 2010) and the 2013 French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Hervé Le Tellier’s Electrico W, and her translations have been shortlisted twice for the International Booker Prize.

Author of Voracious

Małgorzata Lebda is well-known as a poet with nine collections to her name. Queen Cells was published in 2025 in the UK by Broken Sleep Books. Among other major accolades, she won the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Award in 2022. Voracious, her debut novel, is the winner of Empik’s Best Newcomer in Poland and is shortlisted for the Angelus Prize, the Conrad Prize and the NIKE Award. Małgorzata Lebda is also a photographer and marathon runner - she ran a distance of 1,113 kilometres along the Vistula River as part of her activism/poetry project Reading Water.

Praise for Voracious:

Lebda’s prose is exceptional - she has successfully created a microcosmos where everything is interconnected, dying and full of life at the same time.—Polityka

Lebda has a rare and fabulous sense of language, of the meaning of words, a way of anchoring and transforming them. —Gazeta Wyborcza

Photo - Rafal Siderski

Translator of Voracious and Not There

Antonia Lloyd-Jones translates fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s books from Polish. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Photo - Mikołaj Starzyński

Translator of In Late Summer

Anđelka Raguž migrated to Australia with her parents at the end of the 1960s and moved back to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990. She has been teaching English Literature at the University of Mostar for the past twenty years. In Late Summer is her first literary translation.

Author of Not There

Mariusz Szczygieł is one of Europe’s most celebrated journalists. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of a number of books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His books have been published in twenty-one countries and have been awarded the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi, among other honours. From 1995–2001, he hosted a popular talk show on Polish television. Szczygieł runs the Institute of Reportage in Warsaw, a creative writing reportage school, and Dowody na Isnienie, an independent publishing house. Not There won the Nike Award and Nike Readers' Award in Poland on publication in 2019.

Praise for Gottland:

One of those delightfully unclassifiable books... Szczygieł is strange and funny, constantly off at jaunty tangents. —Julian Barnes, Book of the Year, The Guardian

Extraordinary... Gottland is one of the funniest books I have read and one of the shrewdest about what it was like to live under fascism and communism, the experience of so much of Europe in the last century. It is not about Czechoslovakia or Poland or even limited to Mitteleuropa, but about how one copes with tyranny and corruption and preserves a conscience... Important and enjoyable. —The Spectator

Many of the stories in Mariusz Szczygieł's portrait of Czechoslovakia could have come from the pages of Kafka... Absorbing, offbeat history. —The Financial Times

Non-fiction stories from Czechoslovakia, which show a country more fantastical than even its wildest literature led us to believe. —The Guardian

Gottland offers an indelible account of the ravages of 20th-century totalitarianism and the way it continues to pollute human thought and behavior in the 21st century. —New York Times

Photo - Hubert Gostomski

Translator of Struck

Georgia Wall is a translator and creative workshop facilitator. She also works part-time as publishing manager for a small independent press. She was awarded the 2020-2021 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentorship in Italian and, as part of ‘Transnationalising Modern Languages, a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick. She lives in Birmingham, UK.

Translator of Milk and Blood

Frank Wynne is a literary translator. Born in Ireland, he moved to France  in 1984 where he discovered a passion for language. He began translating literature in the late 1990s, and in 2001 decided to devote himself to this full time. He has translated works by, among others, Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, Tómas Eloy Martínez and Almudena Grandes.  His work has earned him a number of awards, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize  and the Premio Valle Inclán. Most recently, his translation of Vernon Subutex was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize. He was the Chair of the judges for Booker International in 2022.

Photo - Nick Bradshaw

Author of Ilaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience

Winner of the Prix Femina des Lycéens 2024, Prix Millepages 2024 and Prix Blù Jean-Marc Roberts 2024.

The artist and writer Gabriella Zalapì was born (1972) to an English-Italian-Swiss family in Milan, and now lives in Paris. Her previous novel Antonia (2019) received the Grand Prix de l’héroïne Madame Figaro, and the Prix Biblomedia. Zalapì uses her own family history as the basis for her work, taking photographs, archive material, and memoirs and composing them into a disquieting play of history and fiction.

Adriana Hunter said: "I so loved translating Ilaria that I was tempted to slow down towards the end – I just didn’t want to be parted from this endearing, bewildered child. I really admire Gabriella Zalapi’s restrained storytelling: the book is a masterclass in ‘show don’t tell’."

Photo - Francesco Acerbis