Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), she is the author of numerous novels, including Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her collection of short stories Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year. Leila’s work has been translated into fifteen languages, and her plays The Insider, The Mystic Life and others were broadcast on BBC Radio. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents. He spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance. His two memoirs are: The Return, which was the recipient of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, France’s Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche and Germany's Geschwister Scholl Prize, and A Month in Siena, a meditation on grief, art and human intimacy. His most recent book, published in January 2024, is the novel My Friends, which has recently won an Orwell Prize and been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Alina is the author of several publications, including a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com. We discussed how Alina started writing creatively to bridge the gap between her Romanian and American identities, the self-censorship she feels as an immigrant writer and how her voice changes when switching between Romanian and English. 

Ana Maria Caballero is a Colombian-American literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She's the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Arts Writer Award, a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for numerous other literary and arts prizes. We discussed how her themes and writing style have evolved with each language, the growing presence of digital and crypto poetry, and her use of AI in poetry and art, highlighting the different interpretations of prose and poetry, in Spanish and English. 

Caballero is the author of Mammal (forthcoming via Steel Tool Books, 2024); Cortadas (forthcoming from S/W Ediciones, 2025); A Petit Mal (Black Spring Press, 2023); Tryst (Alexandria Publishing, 2022); mid-life (Finishing Line Press, 2016); Reverse Commute (Silver Birch Press, 2014); Entre domingo y domingo (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2023 and 2014).  

She lives in Madrid with her husband and children. 

Alison Mooney is a poet, storyteller and dancer who has lived in France, the US, Ireland, Germany, and now lives in Brussels.  For many years she worked across Europe in the private sector, before joining the European Parliament 10 years ago. In 2020, Alison won the Cicero Speechwriting Award, from the US Professional Speechwriters Association, for a poetic motivational speech. In 2022, she was appointed speechwriter to the President of the European Parliament. In 2023, Alison self-published a collection of multilingual poetry: Balance – in mind, in body, in soul. The first edition was sold out within weeks and Alison has been giving poetry readings in Brussels, Dublin, Connemara, and France.

Her multilingual poetry collection is a journey on a tight-rope in search of balance: in mind, in body, in soul. Accompanyied by photography from award-winning photographer Sean Hayes, Alison Mooney’s book is graphically built like an art triptych. On one side, poems of grief, on the other poems of healing and suspended in the centre a speech on finding balance. 

You can listen to Alison's prize-winning motivational speech here.

Here, you can listen to Alison reading her poem Beyond You, from her collection. 

Mordecai Martin is an Ashkenazi Jewish writer, a Bisexual Psychiatric Survivor, an aspiring translator of Yiddish and Spanish, and a fifth generation New Yorker. He lives in Washington Heights, Manhattan with his wife, son, and cat. He is an MFA candidate at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. In his non-fiction he writes to explore family, history, place, and mental illness. In his fiction, he strives to chronicle and capture the peculiarities of voice, the miraculous nature of event, and the depths and edges of Jewish humanity. Using his translation skills, he hopes to create hybridized texts that make personal essays out of translator notes and prefaces, to confound the traditional separation between translator, translated, reader, writer, narrator and self. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Honey Literary, Catapult Magazine, Longleaf Review, Peach Magazine, Autofocus Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine and The Hypocrite Reader. His fiction has been featured in Identity Theory, Timber Journal, X-Ray Lit, Gone Lawn, Knight’s Library Magazine, Funicular, and Sortes.