Seyward Goodhand‘s stories have been shortlisted for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award, and longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her first collection of stories, Even That Wildest Hope (Invisible Publishing), was a finalist for the Manitoba Book Awards’ Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, and longlisted for the 2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

Kat Hutchson was born in Kislovodsk, a spa city located between the Black and Caspian Seas. As a child she fell into the fountain of the Narzan Gallery (which you can admire on the Wikipedia page of the city) and started writing shortly after. The magic powers of the Narzan contributed to her trying various forms of writing including slam poetry, academic publishing and poetry, and led to her finally finding her current home in the weird and the fantastic. Kat holds two master’s degrees (in Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Studies) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, where she currently lives.

Lynn Hardaker is a Canadian writer and visual artist currently living in Regensburg, Germany. Short stories and poems of hers can be found in journals including Mythic Delirium, Not One of Us, and in Rhonda Parrish’s continuing Alphabet Anthologies.

Marianne Kirby writes about bodies real and imagined. She plays with the liminal space between vanishing and visibility. She authored Dust Bath Revival and its sequel Hogtown Market; she co-authored Lessons from the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body. A long-time writer, editor, and activist, Marianne has contributed to women’s interest publications, news outlets, and TV shows that require people to have opinions. She has been published by The Guardian, xoJane, The Daily Dot, Bitch Magazine, Time, and others. She has appeared on TV and radio programs ranging from the Dr. Phil Show to Radio New Zealand.

Julie C. Day’s novella The Rampant is a 2019 Lambda Award finalist. She is also the author of the genre-bending collection Uncommon Miracles (2018). Her numerous short stories can be found in publications such as The Dark, Podcastle, Necessary Fiction, and the Cincinnati Review. Wearing another, related hat, Julie is Editor-in-Chief of the charity anthology Weird Dream Society (2020). Proceeds of the book go to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES). Julie lives in New England with her family and a menagerie of variously sized creatures.

Inês Simão is a Portuguese translator-turned-marketer currently living in Munich, Germany. She’s a part-time writer, a full-time reader, and a coffee enthusiast. She once spent a summer in high school cleaning 13th-century human bones with a toothbrush for far too little money. Having decided archaeology was entirely too dusty a career path, she turned to words instead. She writes mostly fantasy and romance. Her short stories are sometimes dark, often funny and very seldom short. When she’s not busy peopling imaginary worlds with characters you might not want to encounter down a dark alley, she makes a living writing copy and herding cats.

Born in Mauritius, Priya Hein is the author of several popular children’s books published in English, French, Creole, and German. She was selected for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program – Women’s Mentorship Pilot Project – as one of two female emerging writers from Mauritius. Priya has been published in anthologies, literary journals, magazines, and school textbooks. She has participated in book fairs and programs for Mauritian radio and television, was shortlisted for the Outstanding Young Person’s Award and Mauritian Achievers Award, and was nominated by the National Library of Mauritius for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She is an elected member of the Integration Advisory Council for the City of Garching near Munich, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is represented by Pontas Literary Agency.

Diana Radovan PhD ELS is the curator and editor of the writing section of Arcana 2020. She is a Romanian-born, multilingual, cross- and multigenre, award-winning writer living in Munich, Germany. She is a regular contributor at Headline Poetry and Press, a Best of the Net award nominee for her hybrid essay On the Way, and the founder of the multicultural writing group Creative Writing in Munich. Most recently, her story Dreaming of Whales has been long-listed in LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Fiction contest. She has been publishing her writing around the globe since 2004, in Wild Roof Journal, The Poetry Question, World’s Best Poems Vol. 1, Hypnopomp Magazine, The Ravens Perch, Flash Frontier, Quail Bell Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, Text+Bild, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her multigenerational hybrid memoir Our Voices is currently looking for a publisher.

Susannah Violette lives in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Germany with her husband and two daughters and before that she lived on Dartmoor, England. Nature is the blood of her work. The animals both within us and outside of us fascinate her and her poems become liminal spaces where the edges of these worlds blur. Susannah is a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems placed or commended in the Plough Prize, Westival International Poetry Prize, the Frogmore poetry prize, CoasttoCoasttoCoast Pamphlet Competition and appears in various publications worldwide including; well Dam! Pale Fire, For the Silent, You Are Not Your Rape, Cordite, Channel and Strix.

Sarah Read is a dark fiction writer in the frozen north of Wisconsin, US. Her short stories can be found in various places, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volumes 10 and 12. A collection of her short fiction called Out of Water is available now from Trepidatio Publishing, as is her debut novel The Bone Weaver’s Orchard, both nominated for the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror awards. The Bone Weaver’s Orchard won the Stoker for Superior Achievement in a First Novel as well as the This Is Horror award. When she’s not staring into the abyss, she knits.

Sruthy Sasi is a Munich-based writer and illustrator interested in exploring the intersections of science, literature, and the visual arts.

You can reach her at sruthy.sasi@tum.de.

Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and Western Technical College. She serves as the Assistant Editor of the Pseudopod Horror Podcast Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, debuted from Dreamspinner Press in 2017.

Sonia Focke is an Egyptologist by profession and a teller of tales by trade. She spins tales of times long gone for curious visitors and of times that never were for anyone who will join her on the journey. She is also the curator of the Museum of Lost Things, a piece published by the Australian magazine Overland. She lives in Munich, Germany, although in her head she can be found anywhere from Middle Earth to Coruscant. She has showered with a scorpion, married a blacksmith, moved house in a VW Polo, learnt the whole of the Mikado by heart, and won first prize in the oral storytelling competition of the Turmhügelburg Lütjenburg.

Pung Worathiti Manosroi is a Thai award-winning writer. He won the Young Thai Artist Award (First Prize) for his debut novel Good Morning, Sunshine when he was 24. He co-wrote the screenplay for the Thai full-featured film Last Summer, which received rave critics reviews and reached the top 10 Thailand Box Office. His short story Cliff has been adapted for a screenplay and theatre. Pung lives in Munich, Germany, where he is building his second company, Betterfront Technologies.

Simone Heller lives on an island on the river Danube in Regensburg, Germany. She has been working as a literary translator for 13 years and given her voice to fabulous science fiction and fantasy authors. Her first steps in writing in English were taken in 2016, after workshopping with a group of international writers in Munich, and her award-winning short fiction (including the Eugie Foster Memorial Award) has since appeared in several Year’s Best volumes. She loves learning all kinds of things: words most of all, but also history, science, and everything about all the strange creatures of Earth. As a reader and a writer, she frequently explores the borderlands between fantasy and science fiction.

Kristín Ragna Gunnarsdóttir is an Icelandic author, illustrator and curator. She studied graphic design and painting at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts. She then completed her BA studies in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Iceland, during which she was an exchange student at the University of Copenhagen for one semester. She finished her MA degree in Creative Writing at the University of Iceland 2016. Kristín Ragna is the author and illustrator of many children’s books. Her books have been nominated for the following literary prizes:

The Icelandic Literature Prize, 2009.
The Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize, 2017.
The Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, 2017.
In Other Words prize, 2018.
The West Nordic Council’s Children and Youth Literature Prize, 2018.

luvan is a European writer, poet, translator, and radio artist. She lived in Africa, Scandinavia, France, China, Belgium and a few islands in the Pacific before settling down in Germany. Her work has been labelled weird, slipstream, science-fiction, or plain crazy. Some of her texts were shortlisted and/or awarded in France. In French, she published four novels (Yama, 2013; Le Chevalier rouge, 2015; Susto, 2018; Agrapha, 2020), two poetry books (Koímêsis, 2016; Troie, 2019), two short story collections (Cru, 2013; Few Of Us, 2017), one novella (Walvis Blues, 2013), and many short stories in journals and anthologies. Her next novel, TysT, will be released in the summer of 2021. Her first published story in English, Growing Up, has been recently published in the Epoque Press ezine.

Karen Bayly is a writer, software tester, and the author of the steampunk novel Fortitude. Her PhD in biology and love of mythology both inform her writing, a fusion of science fiction, horror and traditional fantasy. She has published short stories and poems in a variety of journals including Skive Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Toasted Cheese, Scruffy Dog Review and Overland. A devotee of nature, Karen is often found lying on the grass in her backyard, watching birds or staring at the stars. She lives in Sydney, Australia with two cats, a guitar, and a ukulele.

Kirti Bhadresa is a writer living in inner city Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  She has been most recently published in the Short Edition Short Story Dispenser and YYC Portraits Of People.  Kirti is also a mother, partner, baker, impatient gardener, and aspiring minimalist who can frequently be found out on long walks with her two favourite dogs.

Sabine Magnet is a writer, poet, and journalist writing in German and English. Her poetry collection Poesía Clandestina was published in 2012 accompanying an exhibition of her poems. The same year, she launched Magnet Verlag, an Indie press based in Munich, Germany. In 2017, she started POETRY TO GO, a poetry performance that sees her sitting in public spaces with her typewriter and writing impromptu poems on demand. Her non-fiction book Und was, wenn alle merken, dass ich gar nichts kann? about the impostor phenomenon came out in 2018. In 2019, she co-founded the female interdisciplinary artist collective THE VILLA which had its last exhibition in early March 2020 at Fraunberg Ateliers, Munich. Sabine divides her time between Munich and London.

Steve Toase was born in North Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Munich, Germany. He writes regularly for Fortean Times and Folklore Thursday. His fiction has appeared in Shadows & Tall Trees 8, Nox Pareidolia Three Lobed Burning Eye, Shimmer, and Lackington’s. In 2014, Call Out (first published in Innsmouth Magazine) was reprinted in The Best Horror Of The Year 6, and two of his stories have just been published in Best Horror of the Year 11. His first short story collection To Drown In Dark Water is due out from Undertow Publications in 2021. He likes old motorbikes and vintage cocktails.