Speakers

As a humourist, writer and teacher of narration technique, he has been active since the 1990s. He took part in the Maurizio Costanzo TV Show, he writes for the magazines Comix, L’Apodittico and Giuda, and since 2003, he has also written noir fiction. 

A music and film enthusiast, he contributes to the film and TV dictionary Dizionario Morandini and directs the gLam series for the publisher Pendragon in collaboration with Gianluca Morozzi.

As well as a number of short stories, his bibliography includes the following novels: Io non sono come voi (Pendragon, 2007), Cattivo (Perdisa Pop 2009), Non fare la cosa giusta (Perdisa Pop 2010), Anche le scimmie cadono dagli alberi (Piemme 2014), Kamasutra Kevin (Pendragon gLam 2016), Le Siamesi (Elliot 2017), La dottrina del male (Elliot 2019), Il liceo (Elliot 2021).

Javier de la Rosa is a Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the National Library of Norway, and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at UNED Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. He holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities by the University of Western Ontario, and a Masters in Artificial Intelligence by the University of Seville. Javier has previously worked as a Research Engineer at the Stanford University Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, and as the Technical Lead at the University of Western Ontario CulturePlex Lab for Cultural Complexity. He is interested in Natural Language Processing applied to historical and literary text, with a special focus on large language models.

Laura Imai Messina is an Italian writer based in Japan. At the age of 23, she moved to Tōkyō, where she obtained a Master's degree and a PhD in Literature. She is a best-selling author of novels, essays and stories for children, most of her works were translated in many different languages. In 2020, the book Quel che affidiamo al vento (Piemme) was published and immediately became a best-seller with translations in progress in 30 countries. She also published with Einaudi Tokyo tutto l'anno. Viaggio sentimentale nella grande metropoli (2020). In 2021, she published for Salani Goro goro. La pesca della stella, il viaggio di Daruma e altre storie giapponesi, winning the Laura Orvieto Prize for Young Adult Literature. She collaborates with several Italian newspapers and magazines, and with the Japanese radio and television channel NHK. She teaches Italian at some of the most prestigious universities in Tōkyō and writing at the Holden School in Turin. Her latest novel is Le vite nascoste dei colori (Einaudi, 2021).

Michaela Mahlberg is Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK, where she is also the Director of the Centre for Corpus Research. Her publications include Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction (Routledge, 2013), English General Nouns: a Corpus Theoretical Approach (John Benjamins, 2005) and Text, Discourse and Corpora. Theory and Analysis (Continuum, 2007, co-authored with M. Hoey, M. Stubbs & W. Teubert). She is the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins) and co-editor (together with Gaving Brookes) of the book series Corpus and Discourse (Bloomsbury). Michaela has been leading the development of the CLiC web application as part of the AHRC-funded CLiC Dickens project.

Kirsten Malmkjær is emeritus professor of translation studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She is especially interested in translation theory – that is, in understanding the phenomenon that is translation, an interest that she has pursued throughout her academic career. She has focused on the translations into English of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, in particular on the extent to which Andersen’s linguistic artistry is represented in the translations, and in the effect this may have on the reception of the oeuvre. In addition to teaching at Leicester, Kirsten Malmkjær has taught at the universities of Birmingham, Cambridge and Middlesex. Recent publications include the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics (2018), the collection of articles, Key Cultural Texts in Translation, co-edited with Adriana Şerban and Fransiska Louwagie (John Benjamins 2018), Translation and Creativity (Routledge 2020) and The Cambridge Handbook of Translation (Cambridge University Press 2022). Forthcoming is Introducing Translation for Cambridge University Press.

Chantal Wright is Reader in Translation as a Literary Practice at the University of Warwick in the UK. She is the author of Literary Translation (Routledge, 2016), the author-translator of Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation (UOttawa Press, 2013) and the translator of Antoine Berman's The Age of Translation (Routledge, 2018). She was the recipient of the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for her translation of Tzveta Sofronieva's poetry collection A Hand Full of Water, which also received a PEN/Heim translation grant. She has twice been shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation. Her current research focusses on social mobility as a form of translational activity. Chantal Wright translates from both German and French into English. Her website can be found at chantalwright.org.