photo: Paweł Mossakowski
Krystyna Dąbrowska (born 1979) – a Polish poet, essayist and translator.
She is the author of five poetry books: “Miasto z indu” (“City of Indium”, 2022), “Ścieżki dźwiękowe” (“Soundtracks”, 2018), “Czas i przesłona” (“Time and Aperture”, 2014), “Białe krzesła” (“White Chairs”, 2012) and “Biuro podróży” (“Travel Agency”, 2006). In 2013 she won for her poetry the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Kościelski Award, and in 2019 – the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. Her poems have been translated into twenty languages. In the US they have appeared, among others, in “Harper’s Magazine”, “The Threepenny Review”, “Washington Square Review”, “Ploughshares” and “POETRY”. Book-length collections of her poems have been published in Italian, German, Swedish, Portuguese and English (Tideline, Zephyr Press, 2022).
Her translations include the poetry of W. C. Williams, Thom Gunn, Charles Simic, Kim Moore, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Louise Glück.
She lives and works in Warsaw.
Edward Hirsch (born 1950) – American poet, essayist and literary critic.
A MacArthur Fellow, Hirsch has published Gabriel: A Poem (2014) and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), (Pieśń trubadura in Polish, which brings together 35 years of poetry from seven previous collections, including For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and Special Orders (2008).
He has also written five books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, and Poet’s Choice (2006). He edited the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press). He has edited Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-edited The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for 17 years and now serves as President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Michael Krüger (born 1943) – German publisher, writer, editor, translator, critic and connoisseur of contemporary literature.
While starting his professional career in publishing at Herbig Verlag Berlin, he also studied philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 1968 Krüger became editor at the independent Publishing House Carl Hanser and has been its Executive Director from 1985 until 2013.
Michael Krüger writes short stories and novellas, novels and essays but is best known in Germany as a poet. For over three decades, he has also been the editor of the literary journal Akzente. He made his literary debut in 1976 with a poetry collection Reginapoly. His most recent collection of poems At Night beneath Trees – Selected Poems and Das Elfte Gebot – The Eleventh Commandment are also available in English language.
Michael Krüger received numerous awards and honours both for his own work as well for his role as pathfinder and enthusiastic go-between for international literature in Germany. Krüger lives in Munich.
Mercedes Monmany (born 1957) – Spanish literary scholar, writer, critic, translator, editor and juror of various literary awards.
Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia, Mercedes is a regular contributor to many literary journals, among them Revista de Libros, La Vanguardia Dossier, GRANTA (Spanish Edition, member of the editorial board), Cahiers de l’Herne (France), as well as a literary supplement to daily ABC. Mercedes Monmany has been the curator of anthological exhibitions about great international writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jules Verne or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and jury member in several important Spanish literary prizes.
She is the editor of poetry and essay series “La Rama Dorada” (The Golden Bough) at Huerga & Fierro Publishing House, and the director of the collection “Los Papeles de Sefarad” (The Papers of Sefarad), edited in collaboration with Centro Sefarad-Israel and the Publishing House Errata Naturae.
Mercedes is the author of several collections of essays and books on literary history and criticism: Una infancia de escritor, Don Quijote en los Cárpatos, Vidas de mujer, Spains’s Great Untranslated. Anthology, Juan Perucho: De lo maravilloso y lo real. Her most important essay is Along European Borderlands. A Travel Through the 20th and 21st Century Writing (Por las fronteras de Europa. Un viaje por la narrativa de los siglos XX y XXI, Galaxia Gutenberg Publishing House, Barcelona, 2015).
Recently she has publish the essay Ya sabes que volveré (You know that I’ll be back, Galaxia Gutenberg Publishing House, 2017) about three women writers dead in Auschwitz: Etty Hillesum, Gertrud Kolmar and Irène Némirovsky.
photo: (c) Beletrina/Mankica Kranjec
Aleš Šteger (born 1973) – a poet and prose writer from Ljubljana, Slovenia.
He worked extensively interdisciplinary with composers, musicians, visual artists and filmmakers. Štegers books of poems and novels have been translated into over 20 languages. Aleš is the program director of Beletrina Academic Press that he co-funded 25 years ago. He has initiated and led European-wide art projects, most notably Versopolis – a European platform for emerging poets and international poetry festivals.
Among other prizes and honours his book “The Book of Things” won two major U.S. translation awards (BTBA award and AATSEL). In 2016 he was awarded the International Bienek Prize for poetry by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2021 he received the Alfred Kolleritsch Prize of the city Graz, Austria. In 2022 his novel “Neverend” received the International Spycher Prize for literature in Leuk, Switzerland.
He received the title Chevalier des Artes et Lettres from the French state and is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and of the German Academy for Language and Literature.
Jury secretary:
Mikołaj Nowak-Rogoziński (born 1987) – editor and art historian.
He received MA in History of Art at Warsaw University. For many years, he served as the executive editor of “Zeszyty Literackie”, he also co-founded the Próby Publishing House in Poland. He is responsible for the literary estate of Polish essayist and intellectual Wojciech Karpiński. He is in charge of the largest existing collection of paintings by Józef Czapski. He edited Czapski’s “War Diary” as well as correspondences with Witold Gombrowicz, Leszek Kołakowski, and Paweł Hertz. He curated an exhibition of Czapski’s paintings in Montricher, Switzerland, and is co-author of the permanent exhibition scenario of The Józef Czapski Pavilion in Cracow.