Sherif Bakr is an Egyptian publisher who has headed Al Arabi Publishing and Distributing since 1997. A 40-year-old family business, its list of publications ranges from biographies and academic work...

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the most important poets of the 20th century, one of the few who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1923) before he had published his seminal works. His symbolist poetry was inspired by I...

Peter V. Brett (1973) is a New York based American science fiction author, whose appearance at the festival is wonderful news for all sci-fi enthusiasts, and a...

TJ Dema (1981) is a poet from Botswana, one of the initiators and central figures of spoken poetry in Botswana. Despite her rather young age, TJ Dema plays a significant role in the literary life of...

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (1952) is a UK-born Irish poet, one of the best known poets writing in Irish. Her first collection of poems An Dealg Droighin was publishe...

Erika Fatland (1983) is a Norwegian writer and anthropologist. Despite her youth, Fatland has led a fascinating life involving lots of travel. Before completing her MA thesis in 2008, Fatland lived ...

Annie Freud (1948) is a London-born poet. She comes from an eminent family of intellectuals; her father was the famous painter Lucien Freud and her great grandfather was one of the greats of psychoa...

A link circulated around the internet recently, comparing the English original of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Sign of the Four and its Estonian translation from 1973. As we all know, the book e...

Margot Henderson is a Scottish-Irish storyteller. In her work, she cherishes the natural environment and sense of community, but also openness and responsibility in a society - according to her, cre...

Dave Hutchinson (1960) is an English author. He began writing early; his debut collection of short stories titled Thumbprints was published already in 1978. Three more collections of stories followe...

Carl Jóhan Jensen (1957) is a Faroese prose writer, poet and critic. Jensen has served two terms as the president of the Faroese Writers’ Union and he is also active in the archipelago’s politi...

Katja Kettu (1978) is a Finnish writer and columnist. With her most successful novel to date, The Midwife (Kätilö, 2011), Kettu is a perfect representative of that rising generation of Finnish aut...

Andrey Kurkov (1961) is a Ukrainian novelist and journalist writing in Russian, one of the best known Ukrainian authors today, and his works have been translated into more than 30 languages. He has ...

Heli Laaksonen (1972) is a Finnish poet writing in southwestern Finnish dialect. As a wonderful performer, Laaksonen has succeeded in promoting fiction written in dialect, and her popularity in her ...

One of the traditions of HeadRead, the poetry and music evening Crazed Tallinn orchestrated by Jaan Malin is a little different this year. Even the title is different, as the programme will include a performance by the Finnish fem...

Donna Leon (1942) is an American crime writer who has lived in Venice for more than a quarter of a century. Leon’s fiction is also connected to Venice - she created the detective Guido Brunetti wh...

The pseudonym Michael Mortimer denotes the literary duo Daniel Sjölin (1977) and Jerker Virdborg (1971). Both have also gained recognition in their own right. Daniel Sjölin’s novel Världens sis...

Claire North and Kate Griffin are the pseudonyms of a fascinating author named Catherine Webb (1986). Webb began her journey as a writer very early; she wrote her debut, the novel Mirror Dreams (200...

Sofi Oksanen (1977), who is Estonian on her mother’s side, is one of the few internationally known contemporary authors who need no further introduction to Estonian audiences. This is largely than...

Orbita, founded in 1999 in Riga as a group of Latvian Russian poets and artists, is dedicated to a dialogue between creative practices. The group is known for their exciting literary performances, w...

Peter Pomerantsev is a British journalist and broadcaster, born in the UK to Russian émigré parents. Pomerantsev’s autobiographical account Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surrea...

One of the traditions of HeadRead, the poetry and music evening Crazed Tallinn orchestrated by Jaan Malin is a little different this year. Even the title is different, as the programme will include a performance by the Finnish fem...

Pavel Sanayev (1969) is a Russian author, actor, film director and screenwriter. Estonian readers know him thanks to his cult work Bury Me Behind the Baseboard (1996). With a generous dose of black ...

Mikhail Shishkin (1961) is a Russian writer. He is one of the most esteemed contemporary Russian authors who has won all the major literary prizes in his home country - even though he is one of the ...

Jacques Tornay (1950) is a French-speaking Swiss writer, journalist and translator. His fiction output includes poetry, short stories, aphorisms as well as biographies. Tornay is part of the generat...

Dmitry Vodennikov (1968) is a Russian poet and essayist who was voted among the best ten living Russian poets in 2002 by Russian poets and critics. Vodennikov has published seven collections and he ...

Kārlis Vērdiņš (1979) is a Latvian poet, critic and literary theoretician and well known to Estonian audiences. His prose poetry, translated into Estonian by the poet Contra, is characterised by...

Andrew Norman Wilson (1950) is a British writer and newspaper columnist. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Observer and the Evening Standard and he his currently a columnist f...