Zaza Burchuladze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1973. He studied painting at the Tbilisi State Academy of the Arts and has worked as a writer, translator and journalist. Burchuladze has translated works by Dostoyevski, Kharms and Sorokin from Russian into Georgian and has himself written numerous novels, stories, essays
The Chinese-American author Ying Chang Compestine was born in 1963 in Wuhan in the People’s Republic of China and grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her family was considered »bourgeois«, a socio-economic class shunned by the new government, so the Red Guard seized her family’s belongings and jailed her
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Luoyang, Henan, China. His parents were farmers. During his time in the People’s Liberation Army, he wrote propaganda texts. Due to their often grotesque-satirical nature and subversive undertones, some of his novels have been banned in China. He often comments on the process
Will Self was born in 1961 in London. From age 10, he was an avid reader of science fiction (Frank Herbert, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick). At Exeter College, Oxford, he studied philosophy, politics, and economics and was the editor of a left-wing student paper. He later worked as
Wiebke Helm born in 1978 in Torgau, studied German literature, education, and psychology in Jena. After several years of working in publishing, she is now researching iconography in 19th-century children’s and young adult literature. She is a first-time guest of the ilb and will speak on the topic »To the
Wanda Marasco was born in Naples in 1953. She studied philosophy and took courses in directing at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio D’Amico in Rome. After publishing her first poetry collection »Gli strumenti scordati« (tr: Out of tune Instruments) in 1977, she was celebrated as an interesting new voice
Vivek Shanbhag was born in 1962 in a small coastal city in the Indian state of Karnataka. He trained to be an engineer and became a manager at a consumer goods company. His work for this international company took him on extensive travels throughout his country, from which he gained
Varujan Vosganian was born in Craiova, Romania in 1958. He studied commerce at the Academy of Economic Studies and mathematics at the University of Bucharest, earning his doctorate in economics from the latter in 1998. He is a conservative politician, has been president of the Union of Armenians in Romania
studied politics, history and economics. She has worked with various European think tanks. In 2013, she founded the European Democracy Lab. The central idea of the Lab is to constitute Europa as Republic, based on the principle of political equality for all European citizens. Ulrike Guérot is further Head of
Urs Jaeggi, born in 1931 in Solothurn, was a sociologist, writer, and visual artist. In 1981 he was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. In the 1960s he began publishing work on political sociology and was a professor at the Institute for Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1972 to
Tomasz Różycki was born in Opole, Upper Silesia in 1970. He was already singled out for his poetry at school, with an early poem was published in the journal »Polska Miedź«. Różycki studied Romance Languages at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He then worked as a French teacher at the
is an Associate Professor of South Asian History at Purdue University in the US. She is the author of »The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal« (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of a volume of essays on gender and labor, »Mapping Social Reproduction
