Carlos Castresana was born in Madrid in 1957. He completed his law studies there in 1979 at the Universidad Complutense. He worked among other things as a lawyer, judge, public pr osecutor against corruption, and as pr ofessor of criminal law at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. He was
Zhai Yongming, born in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1955, has been awarded the Pamir International Poetry Prize as the best literary voice in the People’s Republic of China. She has also emerged as an essayist and art critic, and besides was named one of the fifty most beautiful women in by
Zheng Chouyu was born in Jinan in Shandong Province in 1933 and grew up in Beijing. He is the son of a high-ranking military officer, a background that deeply influences his work which only on first sight seems to be of a purely lyrical nature; neither are his political leanings
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. She wrote her first novel, which she also photocopied and distributed, when she was 12. She studied literature with a major in Russian literature, and from 1982 studied modern German literature in Hamburg. She completed her doctoral thesis on »Toys and Linguistic
Xabier Puente Docampo , born in Spanish Rábade in 1946, is one of Galicia’s leading writers of children’s and young adults’ literature. After finishing his studies he worked as teacher, columnist, scriptwriter, editor for Radio Nacional de España, actor and director for theatre and television. Furthermore, in 1989 he was
born in Esslingen in 1936, taught philosophy at FU Berlin until 2001. He has published the journal »Das Argument« since 1959. In the early 1970s, he coined the term product aesthetics; for him, today’s consumerism carries the »appearance of classlessness«. He was founding chairman of the Institute for Critical Theory
William Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924. He grew up in Ohio and served in the Marines during World War II. In 1954 he completed his degree in Philosophy at Kenyon College and at Cornell University with a doctorate on metaphor. Ever since, language, style and the
Wanda Coleman was born in Watts in 1946. This Southern Californian community became known in 1965 for a six-day riot, triggered by an assault by white policemen on Marcus Frye, a black man. The »Watts Riots« prompted Coleman to turn to writing as her preferred means of artistic expression, and
Vyvyane Loh was born in Ipoh in Malaysia. She grew up in Singapore and completed a degree in Biology and Classics at Boston University in the US. She then went on to study at the medical school at Boston University and a undertook residency in Internal Medicine in the Boston area.
Vénus Khoury-Ghata was born in Bcharré in northern Lebanon in 1937. She grew up with three siblings in a Christian quarter of Beirut. Her mother tongue is Arabic, whereas her father preferred the French culture and language. Thus, her first attempts at writing were »in French from left to right
Ulrich Woelk was born in 1960 in Bonn and grew up in Cologne. From 1980 to 1987 he studied physics and philosophy in Tübingen, earned his PhD in 1991 with a dissertation on »White Dwarfs in Close Binary Star Systems«, and worked until 1995 as an astrophysicist at TU Berlin
Tomas Lieske was born in The Hague in 1943. Initially, he worked as a teacher, publishing his texts at the age of 38 in the literary magazines »De Revisor« and »Tirade«, the latter of which he later became editor. A selection of his poetical essays from this period appeared in
