Max Besora is a writer and a Doctor in Linguistics, Literature and Culture from the University of Barcelona. In 2008 he won the Benet Ribes prize for his poetry book Electromagnetic Spectrum (Pagès editors, Barcelona, Spain). His first novel, Vulcano, a free reinterpretation of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, was published in 2011 (Labreu editions, Barcelona). In 2014 his second novel was released, an academic fiction titled The Marvelous Technique (Males Herbes, Barcelona). In 2017 he published the historical novel The Adventures and Misadventures of Joan Orpí, a postmodern reinterpretation of historical novels and the Hispanic Conquest in America (Males Herbes, Barcelona). It quickly became one of the favorite books of the year of the press and the critics, and won the Barcelona City Award in 2018. It’s now being translated into English, soon to be published in the US by Open Letter. That same year Besora, in collaboration with another writer, published Trapology (Ara Books, Barcelona), a fiction essay on the new genre of urban music called “trap music”. Besora’s new fiction novel will appear next March under the title The Fake Muse and will be published by two different publishing houses, Males Herbes in Catalan and Orciny Press in Spanish.
Monika Zgustova won the Calamo and the Amat-Piniella Awards for the best novel of the year, as well as the Mercè Rodoreda award for short stories.Her literary works (eight books of fcition, three of non-fiction, and a play) have been published in ten languages. Four of her books have been translated into English: Dressed for a Dance in the Snow (Other Press, 2020), The Silent Woman and Goya's Glass (Feminist Press, 2014 and 2012), and Fresh Mint with Lemon (Open Road, 2013). Zgustova was born in Prague and studied comparative literature in the United States (University of Illinois and University of Chicago). She then moved to Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), where she writes for El País, The Nation, and CounterPunch, among others. As a translator of Czech and Russian literature into Spanish and Catalan—including the writing of Havel, Kundera, Hrabal, Hašek, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Babel—Zgustova is credited with bringing major twentieth-century writers to Spain.
Monika Zgustova, Dressed for a Dance in the Snow book tour:
March 14 Washington, DC, Politics & Prose
March 17 Princeton Public Library - CANCELED
March 18 Virginia Festival of Book - CANCELED
March 19 Georgia Center for the Book - CANCELED
March 23 Seattle Public Library - CANCELED
