TEN YEARS READ MY WORLD!

Poet, performer, and journalist based in Haifa. In 2010, Asmaa received the Debutant Writer Award from Al Qattan Foundation for her volume of poetry “Liwa”, (2011, Alahlia). She has published three other volumes of poetry. Among them “Don’t believe me if I talk of war” which was translated into Dutch and Swedish. Asmaa has also published a bilingual poetry anthology in German and Arabic “Unturned stone” (2017, Alahlia). Her memoir “my dead father’s celebration” will be published by next year. She has contributed to and participated in various journals, anthologies and poetry festivals around the world. Her poems have been translated to English, German, French, Persian, Swedish, Spanish, Greek, and more.

In 2012 she was the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah. She has worked as a cultural editor in several newspapers, a presenter on TV and radio stations, and as the director of the Fattoush bookstore and book fair in Haifa.

Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He has released four poetry books (including Killernova), four hip-hop records, and received a standing ovation at TEDx Sydney at the Sydney Opera House. His debut novel “Here Come the Dogs” was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and Miles Franklin Award and he was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015. His one-man play, “Since Ali Died”, won Best Cabaret Show at the Sydney Theatre Awards in 2018. He has had several solo exhibitions of his woodcut prints.

Fedwa Misk is a Moroccan author, playwright and screenwriter.

Trained as a doctor, Fedwa Misk began collaborating on a freelance basis with several Moroccan and foreign newspapers in 2010. During the Arab Spring, Fedwa Misk noted the absence of an audible female voice in the Moroccan media. She then launched the feminist webzine Qandisha, which became the voice of Moroccan women from various backgrounds. Among the contributors, writers, journalists, students and women from all walks of life.

From 2015 to 2018, she hosts, on the airwaves of radio 2M, a weekly literary program: Diwane, a magazine devoted to literary releases.

Her first play, “Our mothers”, is a work that tries to explain how the relationship to the mother, can prevent a woman from emancipating herself. Published by Éditions de La croisée des chemins, in March 2021, the book was a great success and was nominated for the Prix Ivoire de la littérature francophone. The production is planned for 2022.

In 2021, she finishes writing her first script for a series, dedicated to divorced women fighting for their guardianship rights.

In 2022, she is working on a comic book project, with French comic artist Aude Massot, about abortion.

Her first novel is currently being written.

Karin Karakaşlı (1972) is geboren in Istanbul. Ze studeerde Translation and Interpreting Studies. Van 1996 tot 2006 werkte ze als redacteur (voor zowel de Turkse als de Armeense editie) bij de Turks-Armeense krant Agos. Ze behaalde een M.A. in Comparative Literature, is als vertaalster verbonden aan universiteiten en doceert Armeense taal en Literatuur.  Momenteel is ze columnist bij de kranten Agos en Radikal en schrijft ze fictie en poëzie., dichter en essayist uit Istanbul.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice that was also longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020 2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Grace Ly is a writer, director and podcaster based in Paris, France. Her debut novel “Jeune fille modèle” (Model Teenager) (2018) follows the quest of a young French woman of Chinese-Cambodian heritage for a sense of being and belonging in the so-called Chinatown in Paris. The webseries “Ça reste entre nous” (« Just between us ») focuses on the plurality of paths and choices of French East and South-East Asians along 6 episodes. For the 4th year, she co-hosts the podcast “Kiffe ta race” which explores how race affects everyday life in France.

Lütfiye Güzel, born 1972 in Duisburg is a poet and since 2014 has been publishing poems, novellas, cut-ups, and poetry-clips under her own label go-güzel-publishing. In 2017 she received the award “Literaturpreis Ruhr” for her literature.

Dalilla Hermans is geboren in Rwanda en geadopteerd. Ze groeide op in de Kempen, woonde in Antwerpen en is ondertussen neergestreken in Brugge. Dalilla heeft er haar missie van gemaakt om racisme en discriminatie bespreekbaar te maken en aan te pakken. Ze werkte als redactrice bij Charlie, maakt de interviewreeks The Race Files, en schreef een boek over haar levenspad dat in mei 2017 uitkwam bij Manteau: Brief aan Cooper en de wereld. Dat jaar haalde ze de finaleweken in ‘De slimste mens ter wereld’ en was ze de meest gegoogelde persoon in België.

Vladimir Lucien is a writer, actor and critic from St. Lucia. His writing has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, Small Axe journal, the PN Review, BIM magazine, Caribbean Beat, the Washington Square Review, Poetry International, VOGUE and other journals. He was awarded the first prize in the poetry category of the Small Axe prize 2013 and is the winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for his debut collection Sounding Ground, published by Peepal Tree Press in May, 2014, the youngest to ever win the prize. Renowned poet, historian and cultural critic, Kamau Brathwaite proclaimed Sounding Ground “…the sign of the at last starat of a new tradition (in the anglopho Caribb)..” While eminent poet and literary critic Mervyn Morris hailed Lucien as “a fertile maker of metaphors.”

Several of Lucien’s poems have been translated into Dutch, Italian, French and Mandarin. He is co-editor of the anthology, Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia which was published in November 2014 and the screenwriter of the documentary The Merikins which premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2013. Lucien has been featured at several international literary festivals such as the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Read My World Festival in Amsterdam, Calabash International Literary Festival and Miami Book Fair. He has also served as Writer-In-Residence at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Currently based in New York City where he is a PhD candidate at New York University, Lucien remains one of the most important voices in Caribbean letters today.