speakers
S. Anand (Navayana, India)
S. Anand is a writer, and publisher of Navayana, an independent imprint he cofounded in 2003. Navayana focuses on issues of caste and inequality. He has published a range of authors including B.R. Ambedkar, Arundhati Roy, Slavoj Zizek, Namdeo Dhasal and Jeremy Seabrook. In 2011, he curated and co-wrote Bhimayana, a graphic biography of India’s leading civil rights activist B.R. Ambedkar, which has been published in ten languages. Prior to turning to full-time publishing in 2007, he was a print journalist for ten years working for Outlook, The Hindu, Indian Express and Tehelka. more...
Neil Belton heads up a new non-fiction and literary list as editorial director and publisher at Head of Zeus. He previously worked for Jonathan Cape, Granta and Faber & Faber. In the course of his career he has published Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Will Hutton, Brian Keenan, Eric Lomax, John Gray, James Hamilton-Paterson, Matthew Hollis and Orlando Figes. He has written two books, a biography and a novel, and was awarded the Irish Times Non-Fiction Prize for The Good Listener. more...
Lieve Joris is one of Europe’s leading travel writers. She has written an award-winning book on Hungary, The Melancholy Revolution (1990), and has published widely acclaimed reports of her journeys in the Middle East and Africa, notably DR Congo. Her books about the Middle East include The Gates of Damascus (1993). About Congo she wrote Back to the Congo (1987), Dance of the Leopard (2001), The Rebels’ Hour (2006) and The High Plains (2008). The account of her travels through Senegal, Mauretania and Mali, Mali Blues (1996), gained her the Belgian triennial award for Flemish prose (1999) and the French Prix de l’Astrolabe. For Les Hauts Plateaux (2008) she was awarded the Prix Nicolas Bouvier. In her newest book On The Wings of The Dragon (2013), she journeys between Africa and China. Her books have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Norwegian, Hungarian and Polish. more...
Jannah Loontjens is a writer of prose, poetry and essays. She has published four volumes of poetry, of which the latest is That’s You, Isn’t It (2013). Her novel Lots of Luck, about her childhood in Sweden, was publishedin 2007, followed by the novel What Time Actually (2011). In 2014 her novel Or Maybe Not appeared, a portrait of contemporary life in Amsterdam. For the University of Amsterdam she wrote a dissertation on the representation of modernist literature in popular culture, resulting in a book of essays on writing and reading, titled My Life is Better than Literature (2013). She teaches philosophy and literature at ArtEZ. This year her newest non-fiction book will appear, in which she explores how her itinerary in philosophical thought was influenced by personal experiences. more...
Gregory Martin (La Librairie Vuibert, France)
Gregory Martin is the editorial director of La Librairie Vuibert, an imprint of the Albin Michel Group. Previously he worked as a non-fiction publisher at Denoel (part of the Gallimard Group) where he published several books of narrative non-fiction among which were Baltic Souls by Dutch author Jan Brokken and Molotov’s Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky. He is also a professional translator from English to French, his latest work being The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown which he also published at La Librairie Vuibert. He has a post graduate diploma in book publishing and a master’s degree in contemporary French history. more...
Richard Nash is a strategist and serial entrepreneur in digital media. Currently founder and Executive Producer of Sirens, a global media organization reporting the news from the future, he previously led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the story app/aggregator start-up Byliner. For a decade he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. He left in 2009 to found Cursor, now an open-source community publishing project, and to run Red Lemonade as a pilot for the Cursor project. In 2010 the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and in 2013 the UK’s Bookseller magazine picked him as one of the Five Most Inspiring People in Digital Publishing. He spent the 1990s as an experimental theatre director and producer. more...
Nina Sillem (S. Fischer Verlag, Germany)
Nina Sillem studied history and politics. After working for several German publishing houses (Links Verlag, C.H. Beck, Hanser) she has been with S. Fischer Verlag since 1999, since 2013 as Editor-in-Chief Non-fiction. more...
Samuel Titan Jr. studied philosophy and literature in São Paulo, Brazil, where he teaches Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo. Besides working as a literary translator into Portuguese, he directs Fabula, a literary imprint at Editora 34, and co-edits Serrote, a quarterly review of essays. At Fabula he published classics such as Voltaire and Mérimée, and the contemporary list includes Ferrari’s Sermon sur la chute de Rome and Jean Echenoz’s 14 - a novel inspired by a real journal kept by a WW I soldier. more...