Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Alice Ann Munro was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work is said to have revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Patti Stiles is an actress, director, author, playwright, teacher and improvisation artist living in Australia.
Saint James Cavalier is a 16th-century cavalier in Valletta, Malta, which was built by the Order of St John. It overlooks St James' Bastion, a large obtuse-angled bastion forming part of the Valletta Land Front. St James was one of nine planned cavaliers in the city, although eventually only two were built, the other one being the identical Saint John's Cavalier. It was designed by the Italian military engineer Francesco Laparelli, while its construction was overseen by his Maltese assistant Girolamo Cassar. St James Cavalier never saw use in any military conflict, but it played a role during the Rising of the Priests in 1775.
Joseph Calleja is a Maltese operatic tenor.
Trezza Azzopardi is a Welsh writer, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won several other literary prizes.
Maltese literature is any literature originating from Malta or by Maltese writers or literature written in the Maltese language.
Toni Sant is a Maltese academic and former radio and television presenter, producer and music journalist. He is Director of Digital Media & Film Production at Salford University and was formerly Reader in Digital Curation at the University of Hull's School of Arts & New Media on the Scarborough campus, England.
Tiphanie Yanique from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Caribbean American fiction writer, poet and essayist who lives in New York. In 2010 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 Under 35" honoree. She also teaches creative writing, currently based at Emory University.
Donal Ryan is an Irish writer. He has published six novels and one short story collection. In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers". All of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland.
Ioana Pârvulescu is a Romanian writer. She was born in Brașov and studied at the University of Bucharest. She graduated in 1983, and went on to complete a PhD in literature in 1999. She teaches modern literature at the same university.
Manorama Jafa is an Indian author of more than 100 books for children, as well as feminist novels for adults, and academic research and writing on children's literature. She has served as Secretary General of the Association of Writers and Illustrators for Children and as the Secretary General of the Indian National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014, and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2016.
Oreste Calleja is a Maltese playwright.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her work, most notably including her 2016 novel Homegoing and 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Homegoing won Gyasi the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn.
Elizabeth Reapy is an Irish writer. She won the 2017 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Jen Calleja is a British writer and literary translator.
Loranne Vella is a Maltese writer, translator and performer based in Brussels. She has won the Malta National Book Council's National Book Prize several times, including Best Novel in Maltese or English for Rokit (2018) and Marta Marta (2023). She is co-editor of the Maltese-language literary journal Aphroconfuso.
Sigrún Pálsdóttir is an Icelandic writer and historian. She was born in Reykjavík in 1967. She obtained her doctorate from Oxford University in 2001, and then taught and researched at the University of Iceland. A prominent Icelandic historian, she served as the editor of Saga, the premier scholarly journal of the discipline, from 2009 to 2016. She has written a number of acclaimed historical narratives, among them Þóra biskups and Ferðasaga.
