Robert Littell was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. The grandson of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants, he studied at Alfred University in western New York State. After graduating in 1956 he spent four years in the U.S. Navy, serving on a destroyer as communications and anti-submarine warfare officer and ship’s navigator.
Rita Dahl, born in Finland in 1971, is a writer and freelance journalist. She attained a Masters degree in politics and comparative literature, studied Portuguese (2001-2002) and worked as an editor for several well-known literary magazines. Her first collection of poems, »Kun luulet olevasi yksin«, was published in 2004, followed
The poet Robert Gray was born in Port Macquarie, Australia, in 1945 and grew up on the coast of New South Wales. Due to the diagnosis of a life-threatening heart condition, which turned out to be mistaken, he stopped going to school. He became a journalist and began writing poems.
Richard David Precht was born in Solingen in 1964 and studied philosophy, German Language and Literature and Art History in Cologne. He obtained his doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on Robert Musil’s »The Man Without Qualities«. Precht worked for German magazines, newspapers and radio stations. His greatest publication success
Rehab Bassam was born in Cairo in 1977. She studied English at the Ain Shams University in Cairo. In 2004 she began blogging, mainly in English, and then in Arabic ( hadouta.blogspot.com). She reached a wide audience with the publication of a selection of her blog entries in book for,
Randa Jarrar, the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Greek-Egyptian mother, was born in Kuwait in 1978. After the first Gulf War the family moved to the USA where Randa studied Oriental Studies and literature. Today she teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan and is a columnist
Raja Alem was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. She studied English Literature at the University of King Abdulaziz, Jeddah. She first began writing in the cultural supplement of Riyadh newspaper, but became widely known after the publication of her novel »Tariq al-Harir’« (Beirut, 1995; tr. The Silk Road). Raja has
Raffaele Cantone was born in Naples in 1963 and grew up in Giugliano, a small village that was under the influence of the criminal organisation known as Camorra. Endowed with a strong »love of the law« (Roberto Saviana, LA REPUBBLICA), he studied law and eventually became the leading state attorney
Rachid Boudjedra was born in Aïn Béïda, in eastern Algeria in 1941. He went to school in Tunis, where he studied at the élite Lycée Saddiki and became familiar with the basics of both Arab, and western culture. In 1962 he began studying philosophy in Algiers, in which subject he
is a spoken word artist with a background in theatre. She has been involved in the slam poetry scene in Montreal since the beginning and – in 2008 – was a guest artist at the Montreal show of Grand Corps Malade. For the last few years she’s been working on
Philippe Djian was born in Paris in 1949 and grew up there. As a young man he worked for Gallimard Publishing House, which now publishes his books. He studied literature and attended journalism school but quit both after a few months. Afterward, he eked out a living working odd jobs.
Petra Kasch was born in 1964 in Königs Wusterhausen, in Brandenburg. She has been writing since childhood. She studied literature and library and information science in Berlin and Leipzig. She has written short stories, collected in various anthologies, radio plays (for the programme »Ohrenbär« among others), as well as scripts
