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Donatella Della Ratta is a professor at John Cabot University in Rome. She is also a journalist, writer, curator and founder of the web platform ‘syria untold’, a platform for stories from Syria.

She specializes in media and culture from the Arabic-speaking world, but also focuses on Arabic cultures in Europe. Della Ratta obtained her PhD at the University of Copenhagen on the politics of Syrian TV drama. She has curated several international art exhibitions and film programmes, including “Syria off frame” with 140 Syrian artists (Fondazione Cini, Venice, 2015) and “Syrian New Waves” on contemporary visual culture in Syria (Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, 2017). In 2015 she published the collection of essays Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Pluto Press, 2018).

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Syria Untold

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Sulaiman Addonia (1972) is an Eritrean-British writer. His first book, The Consequences of Love, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been translated into more than 20 languages.

His second novel Silence is my Mother Tongue was nominated for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Sulaiman Addonia is also the initiator of the Creative Writing – Academy for refugees, a project in which people with a refugee background follow a writing course. He also organises literary public events. Last year, the first edition of the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile), which he founded, focused on pan-African literature. At that time the central themes were African feminism, migration experiences in Europe, free love and radical ideas. Sulaiman is also co-founder of a new literature prize: Specimen Press and To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and collective writing competition.

Sulaiman was born to an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. In 1976, he fled with his family to a refugee camp in Sudan, where his father was murdered. Together with his mother and younger brother, moved to Saudi Arabia, where he spent his childhood and studied development cooperation and economics. He now lives with his family in Ixelles, Brussels.

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Specimen Press

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Max Czollek (1987, Berlin) is a poet, writer, performer, curator, publisher, researcher and initiator of various social and literary projects.

He lives and works in Berlin where he is co-founder of the international project Babelsprech which aims to create a network of young contemporary German-speaking poets through joint performances, anthologies and an online platform.

Max is also involved in ‘Yalta – Positions on the Jewish Present’. He writes engaging essays on anti-Semitism and investigates the position of Jews in German society. With Sasha Marianna Salzmann he curated “De-integration Congress” in 2016 and “die Radikalen Jüdischen Kulturtage” in the Maxim Gorki Theatre in 2017. His poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, in German but also in translation. In the autumn his second collection of essays will be published and his new large-scale project, ‘Tage der Jüdisch-Muslimischen Leitkultur’, which is concerned with formulating a new narrative for a Judeo-Muslim culture in Germany and other related socio-political debates, will start in major German-speaking theatres.

Photo: Andreas Hassiepen

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Rokhaya Diallo is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, podcaster and activist for ethnical, gender and religious equality. She lives and works in Paris.

In 2013 she was named one of the 100 most influential French women by Slate Magazine, and Britain’s Powerful Media Ranking named her of the 30 most influential black thinkers in Europe. She has received much praise for her fight against racism and discrimination. She has published a variety of works and research on racism and has hosted and directed several TV shows. She has written many books including: Racism: a guide, France Belongs to Us, France: One and Multicultural and How to talk to kids about racism, as well as graphic novels Pari(s) d’Amies, and Afro! She co-hosts the podcast “Kiffe ta Race” with Grace Ly. Her latest book is Ne reste pas à ta place.

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