JURORS
Fabio Geda is an esteemed writer. He has worked for many years as an educator. He made his debut in 2007 with Per il resto del viaggio ho fotografato gli indiani about a Romanian boy travelling through Europe in search of his grandfather. Nel mare ci sono i coccodrilli, based on the true story of an Afghan refugee, Enaiatollah Akbari, has sold over 500,000 copies in Italy, has been translated into twenty-seven languages and was a finalist for the Premio Strega. He is a consultant to the Turin Book Fair and the Premio Strega Ragazze e Ragazzi [Photo by Mauro Raffini].
Besnik Mustafaj is one of the most important contemporary Albanian authors of prose and poetry, who was also Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2007. He has written numerous novels, books of poetry, non-fiction, collections and translations. In 1997 he won the “Méditerranée” award for the novel Daullja prejre letre (Paper Drum). He was named Author of the Year at the 2017 Pristina Book Fair and Best Author at the 2019 Tirana Book Fair. He was also among the first 80 signatories of the 2019 Maydan Appeal “Embracing the Mediterranean Means Saving Europe” before the European elections.
Elettra Stamboulis is an art curator, writer, and school principal. She coined the term “Reality Comics” and was the artistic director of the International Reality Comics Festival Komikazen. She has curated exhibitions of numerous Italian and international authors including Satrapi and Sacco. She wrote the Graphic Novels: Piccola Gerusalemme, Officina del macello, L’ammaestratore di Istanbul, Cena con Gramsci, Arrivederci Berlinguer, Pertini tra le nuvole, Diario segreto di Pasolini. She has collaborated with many Italian and international newspapers. As an art curator, she has recently presented the Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan, with the exhibition Avremo anche giorni migliori at Brescia’s Santa Giulia Museum.
Ilham Zenid is a Moroccan writer and teacher. She was runner-up in last year’s Floating Voices competition and participated in the award ceremony in Genoa, reading excerpts from her short story La Fiesta. She has received several national, international and Arab awards, including: the El Sharjah Prize for Literary Creativity (United Arab Emirates) in the novel category for her first novel Smells; and the second prize in the 11th edition of the literary competition A Sea of Words, organized by IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation, for her short story Dancing with the Past.
CO-CHAIRS
Mike Baynham is emeritus professor at the University of Leeds and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His academic field is sociolinguistics, particularly multilingualism, language and migration, literacy studies, language learning in migration contexts. Since 2015 he has been involved in organizing a number of seminars on Language and Migration across the Mediterranean, firstly in Tunis, Paris, Palermo, most recently in Barcelona in 2019 [ Program and abstracts] As well as English Mike speaks French, Spanish, Italian and has been studying Arabic for many years. He therefore appreciates the saying: [Arabic is an ocean without a shore]. He is also a poet and translator of poetry, mainly from Spanish but more recently from Arabic. His poems and translations from Spanish have been published in the Ártemis database Mike Baynham – Poesía Ártemis. He has translated poems by the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika and is working with the zajal poet Adil Latefi on a translation of his diwan [Thirst Tells the Story of its Life]. He is a member of Qisetna.
Francesco Nacinovich was born in 1980, to an Italian speaking family, in the city of Rijeka/Fiume, then belonging to Yugoslavia, now Croatia. He grew up as an Italian-Croatian bilingual, attending Italian schools, in the typical multi-cultural context of an area that has been, for centuries, a melting pot for the Latin, the Slavic, the Mittle-European, the Jewish and the Turkish cultures. He owes his current love and curiosity for the Mediterranean to that upbringing. After a obtaining a Masters in Computer Science in Udine, Italy and a few years working in northeastern Italy, he settled in Switzerland, with periodical long breaks devoted to discovering the Mediterranean region on board of the Mediterranea. He speaks fluent Italian, Croatian, English and French and is learning Arabic.
