International Program Participants

Our online programming will take place during the early morning of each day of the convention, starting at 8 AM Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7). The timing will be convenient for the east coast of the Americas as well as people in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The online progamme will be streamed live, and will also be available to view on a large screen in one of the rooms of the convention center.

All members, including Supporting members will be able to watch the online programme. Details on how to access the online programme will be distributed to members closer to the convention date.

Please welcome our international program participants.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series, and other novels, novellas and short stories including Children of Time (which won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2016), and its sequel, Children of Ruin (which won the British Science Fiction Award in 2020). He lives in Leeds in the UK and his hobbies include entomology and board and role-playing games.


Photo credit: Musleh Jameel
Ashraf Fagih is a Saudi writer and novelist. He is one of the notable science fiction authors in the Arab Gulf states.

Ashraf began writing fiction early and published his first of three science fiction anthologies at age of twenty. In 2012, he ventured into historical fiction with his first novel “The Impaler”, investigating the Eastern origins of Count Vlad Dracula and his struggle against the Ottomans in the 15th century.

Ashraf holds a PhD in Computing from Queen’s University in Kingston. His familiarity with numerical sequences, and passion of multifaceted history, led him to his second novel “A Portrait of the Void”, which explores the backstory of the introduction of Zero and the Arabic Numerals to Europe in the 13th century by Arab-taught Pisan mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.

Ashraf’s co-translation works include the Arabic translation of George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards #1, published by Yatakhayaloon in 2021.

Ashraf is a veteran pop-science buff. He was the Chief Science Editor of Al-Qafilah magazine. In 2013, he became the first Arab ever to deliver a MOOC course via the Rwaq platform. His course “How Machines Think?” was attended by more than 15,000 online students worldwide.

Ashraf has been an invitee to numerous events on creative writing and the literature of science, including Ithra’s Tanween Creativity Season and the World Science Fiction Convention (DisCon III).

Basma Ghalayini Basma Ghalayini is a literary translator from Palestine. She has previously translated short stories for the Commonwealth Writers, Deep Vellum Press, and Comma Press (Banthology, The Book of Cairo).

She was born in Khan Younis, and spent her early childhood in the UK until the age of five, before returning to the Gaza Strip. Basma has edited the short story collection Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba.

Cheryl Morgan

Photo credit: Lou Abercrombie
Cheryl Morgan is a writer, editor, and publisher. She is the winner of four Hugo Awards and is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press. Her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of venues including Locus, the SFWA Bulletin, the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia, Vector and Strange Horizons. Her fiction has appeared in a number of small press magazines and anthologies. Cheryl was a Guest of Honour at the 2012 Eurocon in Zagreb and the 2019 Finncon in Jyväskylä. She was a keynote speaker at the Worlding SF academic conference at the University of Graz in 2018.
Cristina Jurado @dnazproject is a bilingual author, editor and translator of speculative fiction. In 2019 she became the first female writer to win the Best Novel Ignotus Award (Spain’s Hugo) for Bionautas. Since 2015 she runs the Spanish multi-awarded magazine SuperSonic. In 2020 she was distinguished as Europe’s Best SF Promoter Award and started to work as a contributor of the bilingual quarterly Constelación magazine. Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Best of World SF (Head of Zeus).
Fábio Fernandes Fábio Fernandes is a Brazilian writer currently based in Italy. He has published several books, among which the novels Os Dias da Peste and Back in the USSR (in Portuguese) and the collection L’Imitatore (in Italian). Also a translator, he is responsible for the translation to Brazilian Portuguese of several SF novels, including Neuromancer and A Clockwork Orange. Co-edited (with Djibril al-Ayad) the postcon anthology We See a Different Frontier, and, with Francesco Verso, the anthology Solarpunk – Come ho imparato ad amare il futuro. Graduate of Clarion West, class of 2013. Formerly reviewer for SF Signal and slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine. His first book in English, the collection Love. An Archaeology, was published in March 2021 by Luna Press Publishing.
Gareth L. Powell Gareth L. Powell writes science fiction about extraordinary characters wrestling with the question of what it means to be human. He has won and been shortlisted for several major awards, and his Embers of War novels are currently being adapted for television. He can be found on Twitter/Instagram @garethlpowell
Juliet E McKenna Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels since her debut, The Thief’s Gamble, was published in 1999. She is currently writing a contemporary fantasy series rooted in the myths and folklore of the British Isles, starting with The Green Man’s Heir from Wizard’s Tower Press. She writes diverse shorter stories, enjoying forays into dark fantasy, steampunk and SF. She has also written historical murder mysteries set in classical Greece as JM Alvey.
Ken MacLeod lives in Gourock on the west coast of Scotland. He has degrees in biological sciences, worked in IT, and is now a full-time writer. He is the author of eighteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Beyond the Hallowed Sky (2021) and many articles and short stories. He can be found at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @amendlocke.
Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of six novels, a collection of short stories, a pop history about South African women, and New York Times best-selling comics. Her work has been translated into 26 languages and won prizes across genres from the Arthur C Clarke Award to the Strand Critic’s Choice award and the University of Johannesburg Prize. Her novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around is now a major AppleTV series with Elisabeth Moss. She lives in London with her daughter, two trouble cats and a lot of plants.
Lucy Holland Lucy Holland is the author of The Times bestselling SisterSong, a reimagining of the folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters.’ As Lucy Hounsom, she wrote The Worldmaker Trilogy. Her first book, Starborn, was shortlisted in the 2016 Gemmell Awards for Best Fantasy Debut. She works for Waterstones Booksellers and co-hosts the intersectional feminist podcast Breaking the Glass Slipper, which won Best Audio in the 2019 British Fantasy Awards. Lucy lives in Devon, UK.
Mike Carey is a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter, novelist and comic book writer. Born in Liverpool, he worked as a teacher for fifteen years before resigning to write full-time.

He wrote the movie adaptation for his 2014 novel The Girl With All the Gifts. Distributed in the UK by Warners, the movie opened the Locarno festival in 2016 and subsequently went on international release. Mike received a British Screenwriters Award for his screenplay (as best newcomer, ironically – he was 59 at the time).

Mike has worked extensively in the field of comic books, completing long and critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. His comic book series The Unwritten has featured repeatedly in the New York Times‘ graphic novel bestseller list. His latest comics work was The Dollhouse Family, for Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics imprint.

He is also the writer of the Felix Castor novels, and (along with his wife Linda and their daughter Louise) of two fantasy novels, The Steel Seraglio (published in the UK as The City Of Silk and Steel) and The House Of War and Witness. His most recent novels are The Book of Koli, The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli, collectively known as the Rampart trilogy and published by Orbit Books.

Born in Sharjah, cultural capital of the UAE, Noura Al Noman became a writer at 45 years of age. With a Bachelor in English Literature (1986) and a Masters in Translation Studies (2004). Noura Al Noman never expected to become a writer, let alone an author of books for Arab children. In 2010, Kalimat Group published her first two picture books for toddlers “Cotton the Kitten” and “Kiwi the Hedgehog”. Noting the huge deficit in books for young Arabs (aged 15+), she wrote her first novel, “Ajwan”, published by Nahdet Misr (Egypt), which won the Etisalat Children Literature Award, as Best Young Adult Novel, 2013. Books 2 & 3 in the Ajwan series were published in 2014 & 2016. Currently she is working on book 4 the last in the series.

In 2015, Al Noman also launched her small publishing business, “Makhtoota5229” which aims to focus on publishing the rarer genres in Arabic like Science fiction, fantasy, supernatural and horror.

Stark Holborn Stark Holborn is the author of Ten Low, the British Fantasy Award nominated novella series Triggernometry and Nunslinger. As well as writing about film for Pornokitsch and Screen Queens, Stark works as a games writer for clients like the BBC, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. Stark is currently a lead writer on the SF-noir detective game Shadows of Doubt.
Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, F&SF, Clarkesworld and several other places. He has edited three anthologies: Africanfuturism (2020) which was nominated for the Locus Award in 2021, Lights Out: Resurrection (2016) and These Words Expose Us (2014). His fiction has been a finalist for multiple awards including the prestigious Caine Prize (2018), the Locus Award (2022), and the Nommo Award which he won in 2018 and 2020. His work has also been translated into Spanish, Norwegian, Chinese, Italian, Bengali, and French. His collection Incomplete Solutions (2019), is published by Luna Press. He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives in Malaysia.