Ghayath Almadhoun was born in the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Damascus to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother. He studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus and has worked as a cultural journalist. Together with Lukman Derky, he founded the Poetry House in 2006, and published two anthology of poems. Since 2008, Almadhoun has lived in Stockholm. There he wrote poems in Arabic, which have been published in Swedish in two collections. The second collection, Till Damascus, was written with the Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg. Many of Almadhoun's poems have been translated into German, Italian, Greek and Slovenian. His last bundle, La Astatee Alhoudour (I can not be present), came out in Beirut in 2014 and also contains poems from Weg van Damascus.
Alhakam Shaar is a Fellow in The Aleppo Project at the Centre for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery (CCNR), Hungary. Before joining the Aleppo Project, he was a lecturer at Isik University in Istanbul, where he lived for three years. Alhakam Shaar witnessed the Syrian peaceful protest movement as it spiraled into a war that has claimed thousands of lives, displaced half the population, and devastated many cities, including his home city of Aleppo. As a child, he assisted his family in the intricate process of renovating a traditional house in Old Aleppo, and he became an active member of the Aleppo Citadel Friends Society and the al-Adiyat Archaeological Society, with whom he worked on projects that included the Digitizing of the Comparative Encyclopedia of Aleppo.
Lina Issa is a Lebanese artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. A graduate of the Graphic Design programme at the American University of Beirut (2002), Lina left Lebanon for a postgraduate research fellowship in Fine Arts at the Jan van Eyke Academy, Maastricht. She then earned a Masters in Visual Arts from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Since then she has worked alone and in collaboration with others, in a range of media, to explore the tensions between the personal and universal. As a immigrant to the Netherlands, her performative works is inspired by issues of place, otherness and cultural identity. Using ideas of physical displacement, Lina puts herself in situations that create the condition for the unfolding of new relationships.
