Rajko Grlic
Rajko Grlic was born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated in feature film directing from the FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic. His films have been distributed all around the world and shown incompetition at many major film festivals. They have received more then fifty international awards including the Tokyo International Film Festival "Grand Prix" and "Best Director." Rajko has also written nine produced feature screenplays and two television serials. He has received numerous awards for writing including a UNESCO award, FIPRESCI award and "Peter Kastner" award. Rajko is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens, OH and Artistic Director of Motovun Film Festival, Croatia.
http://www.rajkogrlic.com/



Igor Stiks
Igor Stiks was born in 1977 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His fiction, literary criticism, and essays have appeared widely in journals and reviews of the former Yugoslavia. His novel A Castle in Romagna received the Award “Slavic" for Best First Book in 2000. To date it has been translated into German (Folio Verlag, Vienna, 2002), English (Autumn Hill Books, Iowa City, 2005) and Spanish (Funambulista, Madrid, 2006). The American edition of this novel was nominated for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2006). His second novel Elijah’s Chair (2006) received the Award “Gjalski” for Best Fiction Book of the Year in Croatia. Other works by him (short fiction and essays) have appeared also in English, French, German, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, Macedonian, and Slovene translations. He is a doctoral candidate at Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Northwestern University, and currently lives in Chicago.



Ales Debeljak
Aleš Debeljak (1961) holds a Ph.D. in Social Thought from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California Berkeley, a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study-Collegium Budapest, a writing fellow at Civitella Ranieri Center and a fellow of Bogliasco Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanitites. Debeljak published books on cultural criticism and has written several volumes of poetry in his native Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Anxious Moments (1994), Dictionary of Silence (1999) and The City and the Child (1999). His non-fiction books in English include The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in a Post-Communist World (2004), Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms(1998), Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia(1994), and a comprehensive anthology The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (1997) which he edited. Professor Debeljak has won several awards, including the Slovenian National Book Award and the Chiqyu Poetry Prize (Tokyo), while he was named Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia. His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Finish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Catalan, Macedonian, and Italian translation. Debeljak is currently Director of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana. While at CICS, Debeljak will teach courses in the European Union, the Balkans, modernity and the arts, and on East European poetry and politics in 20th century. His research plans include a book on the narratives of the modern Western cities and a book of poetry.