Paolo Flores D’Arcais was born in Cervignano del Friuli, Italy, in 1944. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and is now a researcher in the philosophical faculty of La Sapienza University in Rome. He is editor of the magazine ‘MicroMega’ and has also written for
Oskar Pastior was born in Sibiu in the Transylvanian region of Romania in 1927. A member of the minority ethnic German community, he spent five years in a Soviet forced-labour camp after the Second World War before being allowed to return home. From 1955 he studied German Language and Literature
Oscar van den Boogaard was born in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, in 1964. He grew up in the former Dutch colony of Surinam and in the Netherlands. After studying French and Law in Montpellier, Amsterdam, and Brussels, he embarked on a career as lawyer at an international law firm in Brussels.
Olga Schamborant was born in Moscow in 1945. Since completing her studies in Biology at the state university in Moscow in 1969, she has worked at the Institute for Bioorganic Chemistry (RAN). She began writing her first poems in early adolescence, an endeavour that her family did not praise, but
© international literature festival berlin
Guest at the ilb 2003 O. V. Vijayan was born in Palakkad in the southern Indian state of Kerala in 1930. His father was a senior police officer in the Malabar special forces and he grew up in several barracks. Because of his weak health, he did not start school
Notaila Ibrahim Rashed , known as Mama Lobna, was born in 1934 in Cairo, Egypt, and is known as the pioneer of Egyptian children’s literature. She has not only written numerous children’s books and books for young adults, short stories and contributions for diverse children’s magazines, radio and television shows
The Greek author Nikos Panajotopoulos was born in Athens in 1963. While studying Engineering, he was also involved in the theater. After a brief phase as a culture journalist, he started to work as a screenplay writer for television and feature films; he also teaches at a film school in
Nedim Gürsel was born in Gaziantep, Turkey, in 1951. He published his first novellas and essays in Turkish literary magazines in the late 60s. After the coup d’état in 1971, he had to testify in court for one of his articles. This led to his decision to temporarily reside in
Mohammed Benniswas born in Fés, Morocco in 1948. His interest in literature, in particular for lyric, developed already at an early age. During his studies at the Department of Philosophy in Fés he began corresponding with the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) who published Bennis’ first poems in 1969.
Miro Gavran was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1961 and is one of the most prolific authors of his generation. After completing his degree at the Academy for Theatre, Film and Television, he at first worked as a dramatist between 1986 and 1992, and later as artistic director at the
The poet and translator Mila Haugová was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1942 and raised in Slovakia. Daughter of a Hungarian mother and Slovakian father, she grew up speaking two languages. Her father, a qualified farmer, was imprisoned as a so-called “class enemy” and consquently the author was prevented from
