Claire Mercier holds a Bachelor’s degree in Arts, Literatures and Languages, with a focus on Modern Literatures, and a Master’s degree in French, Foreign, and Comparative Literature, both from the Université Savoie Mont Blanc (France). She earned her PhD in Literature, with a specialization in Chilean and Latin American Literature, from the Universidad de Chile. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is currently an Associate Professor – tenured in the Institute of Humanistic Studies at the Universidad de Talca (Chile) and the Coordinator of the José Donoso Ibero-American Literary Prize. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American speculative fiction. She is the director of several competitive academic projects, a member of international research groups and associations, and the author of books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed papers.
Born in Edinburgh and raised in the Scottish Borders, Ali Millar is the critically acclaimed author of Ava Anna Ada (SUR) and The Last Days (PRH). She has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier University; her work uses the uncanny as a lens into possible futures, narratives of apocalypse and the interplay of both on origin stories. Her journalism has appeared in The Sunday Times,The Guardian,The Independent and The Stylist among others. She works across books and screen.
Kazue Harada is an Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of German, Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (GRAMELAC) at Miami University, Ohio, USA. Her research focus is contemporary Japanese speculative and science fiction with particular attention to gender and sexuality. She is the author of Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures: Women’s Speculative Fiction in Contemporary Japan (Brill 2021) along with several journal articles. Currently, she is working on environmental activist writings in Japan and East Asia in contemporary literature and media, especially post-Fukushima Japan, while she is also interested in working on the reception of female Korean speculative fiction and feminism in Japan.
Mirko Lino is Associate Professor in Cinema, Photography, and Television at the Department of Human Studies of the University of L’Aquila. His research focuses on apocalyptic, horror, science fiction and erotic cinema; the relationship between cinema and other media from an intermedial and transmedial perspective; the spectral dimension of media from the perspective of the spectral turn and the comparison between pre- and post-cinematic forms (phantasmagoria and extended reality).He is coordinator of the University of L’Aquila research unit of the PRIN 2022 PNRR “CineAb: Rediscovering and Promoting the Film and Audiovisual Heritage in the Abruzzo Region”, as well as member of the board of the PhD programme in Literatures, Arts, Media: Transcodification.Furthermore, he is member of ICLA Research Committee on Literature, Arts and Media (CLAM); CIRQUE (Interdepartmental centre of studies on queer); co-founder of the OICA (Osservatorio interuniversitario sul cinema e sugli audiovisivi in Abruzzo).He has published numerous essays and articles on the mythography of zombies and vampires, Werner Herzog's cinema and his authorial identity, the aesthetic construction of gynoids and artificial intelligence; and the volumes L'Apocalisse postmoderna tra letteratura e cinema. Catastrofi, oggetti, metropoli, corpi (The Postmodern Apocalypse in Literature and Cinema. Catastrophes, Objects, Metropolises, Bodies - 2014), Oltre l'adattamento? Narrazioni espanse: intermedialità, transmedialità, virtualità (with Massimo Fusillo, Lucia Faienza, Lorenzo Marchese - Beyond Adaptation? Expanded Narratives: Intermediality, Transmediality, Virtuality - 2021), New Approaches to Transcodification Literature, Arts, and Media (with Massimo Fusillo, Doriana Legge, Mattia Petricola, Gianluigi Rossini 2024).
Ayase Maru is a Japanese writer. After spending part of her childhood in Sudan and the United States, she graduated in literature from Sophia University in Tokyo. She has published numerous books, many of which have been finalists for important Japanese awards. La foresta trabocca (The Forest Overflows) is her first book to be translated into Italian.
