2022 Edition - Pilot program

RESIDENTS OF THE PILOT PROGRAM IN VIL·LA JOANA

Ronnie Scott (Australia). Ronnie Scott is an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He made his narrative debut with The Adversary (Hamish Hamilton, 2020), a finalist for several awards in Australia, and is also the author of the essay Salad Days (2014), which is part of the Penguin Specials collection of monographs. He is a professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University in Melbourne, where he also conducts research on the history of Australian comics. His second novel will be published in 2023.

Miglė Anušauskaitė (Lithuania). Miglė Anušauskaitė is an author of graphic novels and a researcher at the Judaica Research Center of the National Library of Lithuania, where she studies Idic manuscripts from the interwar period. After a long and award-winning career as a graphic artist, she made his debut in the noir novel with a radio novel that was broadcast on the National Radio of Lithuania.

Viola Di Grado (Italy, 1987). Viola Di Grado made her debut with Settanta acrilico trenta lana (2011) and became the youngest winner of the prestigious Campiello Opera Prima Award and the youngest finalist of the Strega Award. With Fuoco al cielo (2019) she won the Jury's Viareggio Award. She has just published Fam Blava (Angle Editorial, 2022).

Carla Maliandi (Argentina, 1976). Carla Maliandi is a playwright, writer, researcher, theatre director, and teacher. Her first novel, La habitación alemana (Mardulce, 2017) has been translated into English, German, French, and Portuguese, and the film rights have been sold. Her second novel, La Estirpe (Penguin Random House, 2021), will also be translated into several languages and will be published in Spain in 2022. Aside from creation, she is also a writing professor at the National University of the Arts of Buenos Aires.

Sophie Collins (UK, 1989). Sophie Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018) and small white monkeys (Book Works, 2017), a fragmentary poetic essay on the self, self-help, and shame. As an editor, she has published Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of translations of contemporary poetry into English. She is a professor at the University of Glasgow and is working on her first novel.

Alys Conran (Wales, 1980). Alys Conran is a writer and professor of creative writing at Bangor University (Wales). Her first novel, Pigeon (Parthian Books), won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017 and was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Award. She has also won the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, The Wales Arts Review People's Choice Award. In 2019 she published Dignity (Orion Publishing), a novel about the past, the memory, and the weight of family history which was also critically acclaimed and nominated for Wales Book of the Year.

Julia Malye (France, 1994). Julia Malye is a writer and teacher of creative writing at the Centre for Writing Rhetoric at Science Po in Paris. She made her debut at just sixteen with the historical novel La fiancée de Tocqueville (Ed. Balland, 2010), which was followed by Themoé (Balland, 2013) and Les phantomômes de Christopher D. (Fayard, 2016). After graduating in France, she went to the USA to do a master's in creative writing at the University of Oregon, a discipline she has been teaching for years in France, at the university and in various writing workshops. She is currently preparing her fourth novel, written in English.

Lana Bastašić (Bosnia, 1986). Lana Bastašić is a writer of Yugoslav origin and Serbian culture. She was born in Croatia and immigrated to Bosnia as a child. She has published fiction, poetry, essays, and plays, and has received numerous awards in the Balkans, including the Ulaznica Award, the Zija Dizdarevic Award and the Kamerni Theatre Award. With her first novel, Atrapa la llebre (Edicions del Periscopi / Navona, 2018), which has been translated into twenty languages, she won the 2020 European Union Literature Award and was a finalist for the NIN award, the most prestigious of ex-Yugoslav literature. Her latest book, Milk Teeth, is a collection of short stories about childhood trauma. She is also one of the co-founders of the Bloom School in Barcelona, where she was co-editor of the first two editions of the literary magazine Carn de cap.

Irenosen Okojie (Nigeria). Irenosen Okojie is a British and Nigerian writer and poet. Her debut, Butterfly Fish (Jacaranda Books, 2014), a novel about family secrets, won a Betty Trask Award. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, The Observer, and The Guardian, and compiled in the collection Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch (2016), a work nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, among others. She is vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2020 she won the AKO Caine Award for the story Grace Jones. In addition to writing, she co-presents the BBC podcast Turn Up For The Books.

Pau Sanchis i Ferrer (Valencian Country, 1978). Pau Sanchis Ferrer is a translator, editor, and poet. He studied Catalan and Hispanic philology and comparative literature. He has been a secondary language and literature teacher at the University of Zadar (Croatia) and at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón. He has translated Serbian, Croatian and Italian poets, playwriters, and narrators to Catalan and Spanish (such as Lana Bastašić, Marko Pogačar, Tanja Stupar-Trifunović, Janko Polić-Kamov, Cesare Pavese or Giorgio Faletti). He has also translated Catalan literatura to Spanish (Ferran Torrent). Under the pseudonym Pau Sif, he has published six books of poetry, the latest of which are Arnes (2017) and Veles (2018). In addition, he co-directs Edicions del Buc, an independent publishing house specialising in poetry. He writes about literature in Caràcters and other magazines.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan (Singapore). Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a Singaporean novelist and writer based in New York. As a journalist, she has collaborated in media such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, or Bon Appetit, among others. In 2011, she published the memoir A Tiger In The Kitchen: A Memoir of Food & Family, and in 2016 the novel Sarong Party Girls (William Morrow, 2016), an international bestseller about the clash between tradition and modernity in Singapore. She has also edited the anthologies Anonymous Sex (Scribner Books, 2022) and Singapore Noir (Akashic Books, 2014).

Tony Eprile (South Africa, 1955). Tony Eprile is a South African novelist interested in the impact of political and racial tensions on everyday life. He is the author of The Persistence of Memory (published in Spanish by Velecio editores), a novel selected on the "Notable Book of the Year" list by The New York Times and granted the Koret International Jewish Book Award for fiction. His short story anthology, Temporary Sojourner, was also selected by the NY Times and she has published stories in Plowshares, Agni, Story Quarterly, GlimmerTrain, and Post Road magazines. He is currently completing a new novel (The War Artist) and a memoir about his family's migration from South Africa to England (God Save Your Bloody Queen).

Paulina del Collado (Mexico).