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Juraj Kušnierik is an editor with the Slovak weekly .týždeň. He helped found the independent bookshop Artfórum in Bratislava, hosts regular programmes on Radio FM and is involved with the Pohoda, Wilsonic and Waves music festivals. In 2007, he fell in love with Iceland and wrote a book about it, entitled, Hudba ostrova [Music of an Island]. Information valid as…

Artemy Troitsky is a celebrated Russian activist, culture critic, university lecturer and journalist. In the eighties, Troitsky played a significant role in the anti-Soviet cultural revolution of the Soviet youth. Troitsky is the author of Back in the U.S.S.R.: The True Story of Rock in Russia (British edition 1987) and Tusovka: Who’s Who in New Soviet Rock Culture (British edition 1990).…

Michal Havran is a writer and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Slovak online current-affairs website Jetotak.sk. Having studied Protestant theology in Strasbourg and political theology at the École pratique de hautes études in Paris, he now lives and works in Bratislava. A feature-length film, based on his bestselling novel Kandidát (The Candidate), co-written with Maroš Hečko, was released in 2013,…

Haris Pašović is a Bosnian theatre and film director based in Sarajevo. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has worked as a playwright, producer, choreographer, performer, designer and documentary filmmaker. The recipient of numerous awards, he has participated in many festivals worldwide. He is the artistic director of the East West Theatre Company in Sarajevo, which he founded…

Patrik Ouředník is a Czech writer and translator. In 1984, he emigrated to Paris and, from 1986 to 1998, he served as the editor and head of the literature section of the quarterly publication L’autre Europe. In 1992, he was instrumental in founding the Free University of Nouallaguet, where he has lectured since 1995. He translates both from French into…

Viktor Yerofeyev is a Russian writer based in Moscow. He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers as an organiser of the samizdat literary magazine Metropol and banned from publishing until 1988. He is a regular TV and radio host and contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The International…

Oksana Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian poet, writer and critic based in Kyiv. She made her poetry debut at the age of twelve, however, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika period that her first book was published. She is a graduate of Kyiv’s Shevchenko University, with a PhD…

Siobhan Kattago is an American, who emigrated from New York to Estonia with her husband and children in 2001. She is a senior research fellow in philosophy at the University of Tartu and received her doctorate from New York’s New School for Social Research. She is the editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies (2014) and the author…

Bernhard Schlink is a German writer and a former professor of public law and the philosophy of law at Berlin’s Humboldt University. He also used to work as a judge at the constitutional court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia and in his writing he continues to look at our conceptions of justice. His books often analyse how we…

Eva Hoffman is a Polish-American writer and academic, based in London. She was born in Kraków to a family of Holocaust survivors and emigrated to Canada when she was 13, later moving to New York, where she was an editor of The New York Times. She has taught creative writing at a number of US universities and is currently a…

Pavel Tychtl is a policy officer at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communication, where he manages the Remembrance Action of the Europe for Citizens programme and has been responsible for the remembrance activities organised by the Commission since 2005. Previously, Mr Tychtl was a director of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and worked with the Czech…

Robin Gosejohann is a project manager on the Erste Foundation’s Europe programme. Robin used to work for a think tank in Berlin and then in Istanbul, before moving to work on the ERSTE Foundation’s European programme in 2007. In 2014, he graduated from Heidelberg University with a Master’s degree in Non-profit Management & Governance. Originally educated as an economic historian,…