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
born in 1978 in Port Elizabeth (South Africa), is a documentary filmmaker and sociologist researching at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town. She was a visiting professor at Yale University and has received many grants, inter alia from the African Humanities Program, the
born in Guiyang, China, researches feminism, queer theories, and comparative literature as part of the DFG Research Training Group »Minor Cosmopolitanisms« at Universität Potsdam. After earning his PhD, he was a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI-Berlin from 2014 to 2016. In »Queer Ancient Ways« (2018) he examines
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
is a stylist, author, and model. They completed a course in makeup after their studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Based on their understanding of the portrayal of different people in art and media, they ascribes a special responsibility to stylists. Umber works as a stylist for theater, film,
