Panel discussion: Stranger Than Fiction, Part 2

Terézia Mora is an author, born in 1971 in Sopron, Hungary, and living in Berlin since 1990. Mora has been awarded numerous prizes for her stories and novels, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, the Kunstpreis Berlin, the Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse, the Deutsche Buchpreis and, in 2018, the Georg Büchner Prize. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Moreover, Mora is one of the most distinguished translators from Hungarian.

The Japanese translation of Love among Aliens (translated by Hitoko Suzuki), a collection of short stories, was published in 2020 by Hakusuisha.

Anna Cima (1991) is a Czech novelist, translator and ilustrator. She graduated in Japanese studies from the Arts Faculty of Charles University. In 2019 her literary debut Probudím se na Šibuji (I Wake Up in Shibuya) was awarded by Magnesia Litera – Discovery of the year prize, Jiří Orten prize and The Czech book prize. She currently lives in Japan.

Dragomán György is a Hungarian writer and literary translator. He was born in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely), Transylvania, Romania in 1973. In 1988, his family moved to Hungary. He attended high school in the western Hungarian city of Szombathely, where he met Anna T. Szabó, poet and writer, whom he later married. He started writing in the age of 13, now he mainly writes short stories and novels. He studied in Budapest (ELTE), getting a degree in English and Philosophy.

His best-known work, The White King (2005) has been translated to more than 30 languages, and is planned to be published in Japanese as well.Dragomán also writes for Hungarian and foreign magazines, like Paris Review, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Monde, The New York Times. He has received various literary awards for his writings, such as the Attila József Prize sent to writers in Hungary, the Culture Prize of the Romanian Cultural Center in Budapest, and the Jan Michalski Prize for The White King. His hobby is cooking, shares his recipes regularly on his homepage. His cookbook is to be published soon in Hungary.

Works available in English: The White King, The Bonfire (expected in 2021)

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories and Postcard Stories 2 (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland in 2019 and the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction in 2020. It was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize in 2020. The Last Resort, a ten part BBC Radio 4 short story series and accompanying short story collection is forthcoming from Doubleday in early 2021. In 2018 Jan was the inaugural Translink/Irish Rail Roaming Writer in Residence on the Trains of Ireland. She was the Open Book Scotland Writer in Lockdown 2020.

Keiichiro Hirano was born in Gamagori City, Aichi Prefecture, and raised in Kitakyushu City. He graduated from the Law department of Kyoto University. In 1999, while still a student at the university, he contributed the novel Eclipse to a literary magazine, Shincho, and the novel received the 120th Akutagawa Prize and became a bestseller, selling 400,000 copies.

Since then, he has published various works, delighting readers with his verstatility, changing his style of writing each time. His works have been translated and published in many languages. In 2004, he lived at Paris for one year as a Japan Cultural Envoy of the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.

Hirano has profound knowledge of art and music, and has written reviews in wide range of genres. From 2009 to 2016, he was in charge of the art review of the newspaper Nikkei. He also served as guest curator for an exhibition “Calls from Extraordinary – The Masterpieces of Western Art Selected by Keiichiro Hirano” at The National Museum of Western Art in 2014. In the same year, he received  the Chevalier of the Order of French Arts and Culture.

His novel At The End of the Matinee, made into a film in 2019, is a long seller which has sold over than 580,000 copies.