Julia Kolesova was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1967. She graduated from St. Petersburg University (Swedish language and literature) in 1988. Since then, she has been working in the three major fields: teaching Swedish to Russian students; acting as interpreter in various Swedish-Russian joint humanitarian and educational projects, and translating Swedish literature, both fiction and non-fiction, into Russian.

Among several dozens of books translated, the most important to mention are Alfred Nobel’s Biography by Ingrid Carlberg, Stieg Larsson’s Biography by Jan-Erik Petterson, The Gospel of Eels by Patrik Svensson, book series for children by Maria Engstrand and a great number of crime novels by Liza Marklund, Åsa Larsson and others.

She attended the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators Visby in 1995, 1999 and 2005 and International Conferences for Translators arranged by the Swedish Culture Council 2018 and 2019. Since 2007, she was a member of Anna Savitskaya's Seminar on Translation of Swedish Literature and Fiction.

Coauthor in several translators' projects – important non-fiction books translated from Swedish to Russian by the members of the seminar. Participant of a number of conferences and workshops on Swedish literature in Russia and abroad.

Julia Kolesova was awarded with the SWEA price 2012 for the promotion of Swedish Culture and Tradition outside Sweden.

Natalia Press, PhD, is a Russian translator and interpreter from Swedish and English. She holds degrees in linguistics and psychology.
Based in Saint-Petersburg, Natalia has been teaching Swedish and Swedish literature for almost 20 years at Saint-Petersburg State University. Her most valuable work as a translator so far is the Russian translation of Gunnar Ekelöf's “Trilogy” (Diwan över Fursten av Emgion, 1965, Sagan om Fatumeh, 1966 and Vägvisare till underjorden, 1967) followed by “The Island of Doomed” (De dömdas ö) and “German Autumn” (Tysk höst) by Stig Dagerman.



Nataliya Zlydneva was born in 1952 in Russia. She is a professor, PhD (hab.) in Art History, head of the culture history department at the Institute for Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences and Leading research fellow at the State Institute for Art Studies (Moscow).
She graduated from the Moscow State University 1974, and took her post-graduate study at the State Institute for Art Studies 1979, Moscow. Obtained scholarships at the Belgrade (1976-1977) and the Toronto (1996) universities. Lectured at the Washington& Lee University, Lexington (VA, USA); the Estonian Academy of Art (Tallinn); the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland); the Moscow State conservatory P. I. Tchaikovsky.
Nataliya Zlydneva served as an editor of non-fiction and a translator from English, Serbian/Croatian, Polish. Published around 300 research publications on visual semiotics, Russian avant-garde in art and literature, the Balkan culture. Her latest monograph was Visual Narrative: the Mythopoetic Approach (Moscow: Indrik, 2013, 362 pp., in Russian).
Nikolai Kharuzin was an ethnographer, archaeologist and historian. Born into a merchant family in Moscow in 1865, Nikolai Kharuzin, like his siblings Mikhail, Alexei and Vera, devoted himself to ethnography at an early age. He undertook research trips to the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Baltic States, Siberia and the Altai. On most of these trips he was accompanied by his sister.
He was a member and, from 1889 to 1893, secretary of the Imperial Society for Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography.
Together with Alexander Miller, he enforced the establishment of an institute of ethnology at Moscow University, where he gave the first lecture in ethnography in 1896. Not least because of this, Kharuzin is considered one of the founders of Russian ethnography.
He was also involved in the founding of the first professional journal for ethnography (Etnografitscheskoje Obosrenije), the first issues of which he financed himself. He died in Moscow in 1900.
Born in 1958 in Tsarskoe Selo / Pushkin, Leningrad region, Sergey Zavyalov graduated from the Department of Classical Philology at Leningrad University. He was a member of Club 81, an oppositional writers' organisation in the 1980s, and was published in the magazines of the Leningrad samizdat.
In the 1990s, he taught Latin, Ancient Greek and Classical literature at St. Petersburg universities, gave special courses on the history of unofficial literature at the university.
Between 2004 and 2011 he lived in Finland, from 2011 onwards in Switzerland, where he gives lecture courses on the history of Soviet poetry at the University of Zurich.
He is the author of six poetry books in Russian, most recently Stihotvoreniya i poemy 1993–2017 (Collected Poems 1993-2017). Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye / New Literary Observer, 2018, published several books of essays and has eight books translated into foreign languages.
He is the winner of the Andrey Bely Prize (2015) and Premio Ceppo Internazionale Piero Bigongiari (2016).

Oleg Borisovich Glushkin was born in Velikie Luki in 1937. He graduated from Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and worked in the fishing industry.
In the years after 1990 he was the editor-in-chief of the culture magazines «Запад России» и «Параллели» ("West of Russia" and "Parallels").
He is the author of seventeen books of prose and was awarded the Kant diploma (in the year 2000) for his contribution to the development of culture in the Kaliningrad region and expansion of contacts between Russian and European culture. He was awarded the Inspiration Prize for the book of short stories «Пути паромов» ("The Ferry Roads") and the Recognition Prize for the novel «Саул и Давид» ("Saul and David"). Winner of the "Artiada of the Peoples of Russia".
He is a member of the Regional organization of writers of the Kaliningrad oblast and the executive committee of the Kaliningrad branch of the PEN-Center. And he was elected as a co-chairman of the Union of Russian Writers.