Bruce Sterling
Trustee Nexa Center, Author, Journalist, Editor and Critic
Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003), and Shaping Things (2005).
He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine and writes a weblog. During 2005, he was the “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2011 he returned to Art Center as “Visionary in Residence” to run a special project on Augmented Reality.
He has appeared in ABC’s Nightline, BBC’s The Late Show, CBC’s Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and many other venues.
Davide Monopoli
Director of MUFANT – Museo del Fantastico e della Fantascienza di Torino
Davide Monopoli is the director of MUFANT – Museo del Fantastico e della Fantascienza di Torino. After graduating in Clinical Psychology with a psychoanalytic orientation from the University of Turin, he conducted research at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in the field of Psychology of Language and Perception. From a constant passion for the fantastic imaginary he founded the Cultural Association Immagina in 2002, with which he carries out research and training activities.
As an expert and collector of science fiction imagery, in 2016 he founded MUFANT, the first museum in Italy dedicated to the Fantastic and Science Fiction. Since the early 2000s, he has worked as a designer in the cultural and social field.
Xie Yunning
Science Fiction Writer
Xie Yunning studied electronic engineering in his early years and started writing since 2004. His first novel Deep Collision (《深度撞击》) won him the Galaxy Award for New Outstanding. His works draw inspiration from astrology, computer science, bio-engineering, etc., with vast world-settings and delicate touch of humanity. His other works include Overclock Trader（《超频交易商》) and Children in the Ripple of the Universe（《宇宙涟漪中的孩子》). In 2021, his latest novel Through the Ring of Saturn （《穿越土星环》）won both the Galaxy Award and the Chinese Nebula Award for best novel – the two most important awards for Chinese Sci-fi literature.
Ilaria Peretti
Editor for the Asia collection by the Italian publishing house Add editore
Ilaria Peretti is editor for the Asia collection by the Italian publishing house Add editore. She studied Japanese language and culture at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice before obtaining a Master’s degree in History of Art. Over the years she worked as curator and collaborated with festivals between Italy and France.
Chi Ta-Wei
Science Fiction Writer
Chi Ta-wei is a renowned queer writer and associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University. His scholarly work focuses on LGBTQ+ studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science-fiction to queer short stories. He is well-known for his science fiction novel The Membranes (膜) first published in Chinese in 1995, and which became an important text in Taiwan’s queer literary scene. He also published various short collections and volumes of critical essays in queer and science-fiction literature, and translated several foreign works into Chinese, including a series of novels by Italian author Italo Calvino.
Giorgio Raffaelli
Editor Zona 42
Giorgio Raffaelli was born in 1966 and grew up in Bolzano, he lives in Modena. In all these years in Emilia he has studied and started a family. Officially he works as a graphic designer for a company in the ceramic district, but since 2014 he has finally managed to give substance to his passion for reading in general and for science fiction in particular, inventing the Zona 42 project with Marco Scarabelli.
After decades of frequenting the Italian science fiction environment, he is trying to give back to the community of readers what good he has learned in all those years.
Martín Felipe Castagnet
Science Fiction Writer
Martín Felipe Castagnet (1986) was born in La Plata, Argentina. He is the author of the novels Los cuerpos del verano (translated into English by Frances Riddle and into Italian by Francesca Signorello) and Los mantras modernos. In 2021 he was selected by Granta as one of the best young Spanish-language writers.
In 2012 he was awarded the Prize for Young Latinamerican Literature and was fellow at the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs de Saint-Nazaire and the Villa des projets d’auteurs de Marseille. A selection of his stories has been published by the short story project Maaboret.
In 2017 he was a fellow at the Ledig-Rowohlt-House in New York and was selected as a part of Bogotá39, a selection of the most promissing 39 latin american writers under 40. Castagnet lives in Buenos Aires.
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Science Fiction Writer
Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana author. Tlotlo’s debut adult novel, Womb City, comes out in fall 2023 from Erewhon Books. Tlotlo is a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative finalist for literature, 2023. Her novella, The Silence of the Wilting Skin, is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist and was shortlisted for a 2021 Nommo Award. Her story Behind Our Irises is the joint winner of the Nommo Award for Best Short Story (2021), the first Motswana to win the award.
Tsamaase is a 2017 Rhysling Award nominee and a 2011 Bessie Head Short Story Award winner. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Botswana and won an award for design architecture. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University.
Tlotlo Tsamaase is a member of PEN America, the African Speculative Fiction Society, SFWA, and Codex Writers Group.
Alessandro Vietti
Engineer and Science Fiction Writer
Alessandro Vietti, an engineer, was born just in time to witness the conquest of the Moon. He lives and works in Genoa in the energy sector and is involved in popularising science and writing. His articles have appeared in Robot magazine and in the monthly magazines Coelum, Le Stelle, L’Astronomia. The author of several short stories that have appeared in various anthologies, he has published the novels Cyberworld (1996 Editrice Nord; 2015 Delos Digital), Il codice dell’invasore (1999 Editrice Nord; 2015 Delos Digital), Real Mars (2016, Zona 42) which won the 2017 Premio Italia 2017 as best Italian science fiction novel and Il Potere (2018, Zona 42).