Kader Abdolah (1954), born Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani, is an Iranian-born Dutch prose writer, poet and columnist. He left his native country as a political exile in 1985 and reached the Netherlands three years later. Hi...

David Ambrose (1950) is a Welsh storyteller and one of the best known promoters of storytelling, a constant and eagerly anticipated performer in the theatres, castles, parks, libraries and schools of his home country, but also at ...

Margaret Atwood (1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist and essayist, one of the best known and recognized Canadian authors. Just as it is difficult to list all of her achievements, it is also almost impossible to give a concise overv...

Karen Connelly (1969) is a Canadian prose writer and poet, one of the most celebrated authors of Canada’s younger generation. Connelly started out as a poet in early 1990s but her breakthrough came with her biographical travel b...

Mik Davis is a singer and musician who released the record The Black Dahlia with Joolz Denby in 2012. Denby and Davis will perform at the festival together on Saturday, 30 May at 4 pm in Kloostri Ait.

Joolz Denby (1955) is a British poet, novelist, and artist who became known as a punk poet, and continues to be a popular performing poet. She often performs at great music festivals, not to mention international literary festival...

Mats Strandberg (1976) is a Swedish writer and journalist, a columnist with the Aftonbladet newspaper. Sara Bergmark Elfgren (1980) is a Swedish science fiction writer. In 2011, they published the...

Juri Tsvetkov (1969) and Danil Faizov (1978) are Russian poets whose common literary passion has taken them to the centre of Russian literary life. They met at the Moscow Litarary Institute, where...

Jason Goodwin (1964) is an English writer and historian and also the member of the organizing team of the festival. In Estonia, he is mostly known for his series of historical crime novels about the Istanbul detective Yaşim, five...

David Grossman (1954) is an Israeli writer. His novel To the End of the Land can be considered one of the most significant events in translated fiction in Estonia last year (translated by Kalle Kasemaa). The novel was published in...

Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg (1948) is a Swedish author and journalist. Having studied history and archaeology, specializing in marine archaeology, Ingelman-Sundberg became known with her books on Viking culture. In her fiction wor...

Sarah Kay (1988) is an American poet from New York, mostly known as a spoken word poet. In 2004, when the first Poetry Slam was held in Estonia, Kay became the co-founder of Project V.O.I.C.E. that aims to use spoken word poetry f...

The pseudonym Lars Kepler actually unites two writers – the married couple Alexander Ahndoril (1967) and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril (1966). The first part of their pseudonym refers to Stieg Larsson and the second pa...

Tommi Kinnunen (1973) is a writer and teacher of Finnish and literature, living in Turku. His first novel Where Four Roads Meet (2014) is considered one of the most remarkable prose debuts in Finland in recent years. The novel was...

The Soviet Union has not left the world with too many wonderful things. However, one of them was born as a counter-reaction to the the Soviet fake pathos and formality that was divorced from reality - namely, a great amount of lit...

Heidi Köngäs (1954) is a Finnish television director and writer. She has published three children's books and five novels. Her debut novel Luvattu about forbidden and suppressed love was published in 2000. Her latest work...

Jean-Claude Mourlevat (1952) is a French author. French and Estonian readers know him mostly as a children’s author - his story The Pull of the Ocean (Estonian translation by Indrek Koff) places the story of Tom Thumb in quite r...

Ulf Nilsson (1948) is a Swedish writer, who has written more than a hundred books for children and young adults. Since 1992, Nilsson has studied the Bible as the mental source text of Western culture and he uses stories and plotli...

Michael North (1954) is a German historian. He was the prorector of the University of Greifswald from 2007-2010 and in 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu. One of North's favourite subjects is the ...

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, Mr Fox, which won a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and most recently Boy, Snow, Bird. In 2013, Oyeyemi was na...

Philip Parker (1965) is a British historian, who specializes in ancient and medieval political and military systems. At HeadRead, Parker will talk about his book The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World (2014), which d...

Edvard Radzinsky (1936) is a renowned Russian playwright, screenwriter and biographer. Estonian readers are well acquainted with several of his biographies on people who stood at the centre of political upheavals of Russia and the...

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (1963) is an Icelandic crime and children's author. She is one of the most successful Icelandic writers and her work has been published in thirty languages. Her crime debut Last Rituals was published in 2005....

Ulf Stark (1944) is a Swedish prose writer and screenwriter who has written more than thirty books and whose works have been translated into 25 languages. Stark is a highly recognized children's and young adult author in Sweden, a...

Mats Strandberg (1976) is a Swedish writer and journalist, a columnist with the Aftonbladet newspaper. Sara Bergmark Elfgren (1980) is a Swedish science fiction writer. In 2011, they published the young adult novel Cirkeln togethe...

Juri Tsvetkov (1969) and Danil Faizov (1978) are Russian poets whose common literary passion has taken them to the centre of Russian literary life. They met at the Moscow Litarary Institute, where...

Edward van de Vendel (1964) is a Dutch children’s and young adult writer. His breakthrough came in 1999, when he published Gijsbrecht, a new version of a play by the 17th century poet Joost van den Vondel. Initially, the play th...

Māra Zālīte (1952) is a Latvian poet, playwright and one of the most important figures on the Latvian literary scene. From 1989 to 2000 she was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Karogs and a publishing house of the s...