Masudul Alam Choudhury is a Bangladeshi-Canadian economist and International Chair in Islamic Economics and Finance at the Faculty of Economics, Trisakti University in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Béla Frankl, known by the name Máté Zalka, was a Hungarian writer, soldier, and revolutionary. He fought in the Royal Hungarian Army during the First World War and was captured by the Imperial Russian Army. Subsequently, while a Russian prisoner of war, he came under the influence of Bolshevism and fought during the Russian Civil War. After participating in various other conflicts for the Soviet Union, Zalka moved to Spain and fought in the Spanish Civil War as a general for the International Brigades. He was killed on June 22, 1937, near Huesca when his car was hit by artillery fire. His remains were brought back to Hungary, where he was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest.
Matéo Maximoff was a French writer and Evangelical pastor of Romani ethnicity. His eleven books have been translated into fourteen languages. Born in Spain, he had parents who had migrated from Russia and France. His family sought shelter in France with relatives during the Spanish Civil War. After the outbreak of World War II, they were arrested as foreign nationals and interned for years, along with many other foreign refugees. He settled in France after the war and made his literary career there.
Mathias Énard is a French novelist. He studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Prix Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, and the Prix du Roman-News for Rue des Voleurs. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Boussole (Compass). In 2020 he was Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor for World Literature at the University of Bern.
