William Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours List.
Jon Olav Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."
Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
Lars Saabye Christensen is a Norwegian / Danish author.
Tommaso Landolfi was an Italian writer, translator and literary critic. His numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism, place him in a unique and unorthodox position among Italian writers. He won a number of awards, including the prestigious Strega Prize.
António Emílio Leite Couto, better known as Mia Couto, is a Mozambican writer. He won the Camões Prize in 2013, the most important literary award in the Portuguese language, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014.
Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter and film director.
Sir Simon Russell Beale is an English actor. He has been described by The Independent as "the greatest stage actor of his generation". He has received two BAFTA Awards, three Olivier Awards, and a Tony Award. For his services to drama, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019.
Alexander McPhee Miller is an Australian novelist. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He won the overall award for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for The Ancestor Game in 1993. He is twice winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and for Lovesong in 2011. In recognition of his impressive body of work and in particular for his novel Autumn Laing he was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012.
Stefano Bollani is an Italian composer, pianist and singer, also active as a writer and a television presenter.
Benjamin Charles Miles is an English actor, best known for his starring role as Patrick Maitland in the television comedy Coupling, from 2000 to 2004, as Montague Dartie in The Forsyte Saga, from 2002 to 2003, as propagandist and television executive Roger Dascombe in 2005 film V for Vendetta, as Peter Townsend in the Netflix drama The Crown (2016–2017) and George in episode 8 "The One That Holds Everything" in the TV drama The Romanoffs (2018).
Oleg Pavlov was a prominent Russian writer and winner of the Russian Booker Prize.
Thomas Sigismund Stribling was an American writer. Although he passed the bar and practiced law for a few years, he quickly began to focus on writing. First known for adventure stories published in pulp fiction magazines, he enlarged his reach with novels of social satire set in Middle Tennessee and other parts of the South. His best-known work is the Vaiden trilogy, set in Florence, Alabama. The first volume is The Forge (1931). He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933 for the second novel of this series, The Store. The last, set in the 1920s, is The Unfinished Cathedral (1934). Both the second and third novels were chosen as selections by the Literary Guild.
Roger Jon Ellory is an English thriller writer.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were evicted from their land in Al-Burayj, Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 22 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 13 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, nine in Persian, four works in Italian, two in Spanish, and one novel in Danish and Turkish.
The Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger is a French literary prize created in 1948. It is awarded yearly in two categories: Novel and Essay for books translated into French.
Johan Harstad is a Norwegian novelist, short story writer, playwright and graphic designer. He lives in Oslo.
Richard Dixon is an English translator of Italian literature. He translated the last works of Umberto Eco, including his novels The Prague Cemetery, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012, and Numero Zero, commended by the judges of the John Florio Prize, 2016. He has also translated works by Giacomo Leopardi, Roberto Calasso and Antonio Moresco.
The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrived in America and founded an investment firm through the collapse of the company in 2008. It has been translated into 24 languages, staged by such directors as Luca Ronconi and Sam Mendes, and was later published as a novel in English. An English translation of the play by Mirella Cheeseman was produced in the West End in 2018 by the National Theatre. The production was directed by Sam Mendes and included the cast of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles. It earned five Laurence Olivier Award nominations.
