Chryso Haralambous
Chryso Haralambous was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. She studied illustration in London and New York. She currently lives and works in Nicosia, Cyprus. She was awarded the State Literary Award for Best Illustrated Children’s Literature in Greece for her first book The Pullover written by Dimitris Baslam in 2020 and the State Illustrated Literature Award for Children and Teenagers in Cyprus in 2021 and 2023 for the books We All Have the Same Mother: Tales from Gatouhan written by Stella Michailidou and 1000 Ways to Squeeze a Lemon by Danai Daska. Her books were included in the IBBY Honor list in 2022, the White Ravens catalogue in 2020 and 2022, and the Braw Amazing Bookshelf in 2023.
Petros Panaou
Petros Panaou is a children's and young adult literature author and scholar. He is a professor of Children's Literature at the University of Georgia, where he chairs the annual Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature. He served as a primary school teacher in Cyprus and taught Children’s Literature at the University of Nicosia, Illinois State University, Central Michigan University, and Boise State University. His academic work focuses on international literature for children and young people, the social imagination, and creative reading and writing. He has coordinated European projects focusing on children's literature. He is a board member of the Cyprus IBBY section and was a member of the executive board of USBBY. He has served on various literary award committees, including the Newbery award, and has also edited the international journal Bookbird from 2019 to 2022. In 2022, his first young adult novel, entitled Operation LOGOS – The Mobile Mystery, was published by Teleia Publications and received the Cyprus National Book Award for Literature Addressed to Children and Adolescents. It was also included in the international White Ravens list. Panaou has since authored two other novels, within the LOGOS Trilogy. His first illustrated book, Dora Mouse, Curiosity, and the Cat, was released in spring 2025.
Mateusz Świetlicki
Mateusz Świetlicki is Associate Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture, and Director of the Center for Young People's Literature and Culture (Institute of English Studies), as well as Vice-Dean for Student Affairs and Extramural Teaching at the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University of Wrocław, Poland). He is the author of more than 100 publications, including Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children's Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory (Routledge, 2023), which won the 2025 International Research Society for Children's Literature Book Award, and articles published in such journals as Children's Literature in Education, Children's Literature Quarterly, and Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature. He has recently co-edited Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children's Literature (with Anastasia Ulanowicz, Routledge, 2025) and Navigating Children's Literature through Controversy: Global and Transnational Perspectives (with Elżbieta Jamróz-Stolarska and Agata Zarzycka, Brill, 2023). His research interests include historical fiction, memory and trauma studies, liminality, Ukrainian and Polish diasporas, and intersections of popular culture and literature. He is currently working on a book project focused on liminal identities in Polish-themed North American YA historical fiction. Świetlicki was a Research Scholar at the University of Florida's Department of English (Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship), a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2018), a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (2022), and has held multiple other fellowships (Munich, Kyiv, Harvard). He is the deputy editor-in-chief of Filoteknos and a member of the editorial boardof John Benjamins Publishing's "Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition" series. Świetlicki is a member of various organizations, including IRSCL, and a co-officer of the Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia Working Group of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.