Masters
Héctor Feliciano
Héctor Feliciano currently writes for the Spanish newspaper El País. He has been a cultural correspondent for the American papers the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In Paris, he was the editor in chief of World Media Network—a press syndicate gathering European newspapers—and the artistic director of the Paris City Hall’s Cultural Affairs Office.
His book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art shows the breadth and depth of his investigative journalism, reason for which he was awarded the prestigious National Arts Journalism Fellowship Program (NAJP) by the University of Columbia, in New York. Feliciano has also been part of a working group at the Columbia University School of Journalism to develop the journalism curriculum. He has a bachelor’s degree in history and art history from the Brandeis University, a masters from the Columbia University School of Journalism, and a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris.
Jonathan Levi
Following graduation at Yale University, Jonathan Levi received a Mellon Fellowship to study at Cambridge University, where in 1985 he cofounded the literary magazine Granta and served as U.S. editor for the journal called “quite simply, the most impressive magazine of its time” by the Daily Telegraph.
After leaving Granta, Levi divided his time between writing and producing. His 1992 novel, A Guide for the Perplexed, has been reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and Newsday, among other international publications.
Levi’s short stories and articles have appeared in many magazines, including Granta, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Terra Nova, the Nation, and the New York Times. Since 1997, Levi has served as a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Levi currently divides his time between New York and Rome, where he writes on arts and travel for the International Herald Tribune and Condé Nast Traveler. He serves an advisor for the Cartagena Music Festival and the Zaubersee Festival in Luzern, Switzerland.
Guest masters
Luis Rafael Sánchez
Luis Rafael Sánchez is, without doubt, the most important contemporary writer in Puerto Rico. He is well known for his work in theater and fiction in which he examines society and the culture of Puerto Rico and other parts of the world. Sánchez has published a large variety of works in various genres such as The Passion According to Antígona Pérez (drama, 1968), Macho Camacho’s Beat (novel, 1976), Fabulación e ideología en la cuentística de Emilio S. BelAval (literary criticism, 1979), The Importance of being called Daniel Santos (novel, 1988), The Flying Bus (essay, 1994), among others.
He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico in Arts, with a Master’s in Dramaturgy and Creative Writing from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Literature from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
He received a Guggenheim in 1979 and was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berlin in 1985. The Puerto Rican Foundation of the Humanities named him Humanist of the Year in 1996 and in the same year, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez invited him take the Julio Cortázar Chair at the University of Guadalajara. In 2012 he received the Eugenio María de Hostos medal in New York City.
Sánchez is Emeritus Professor at the University of Puerto Rico and at City College of New York, and an honorary member of the Puerto Rican Academy of Spanish Language.
In 2016, Sánchez coined the Word “puertorriqueñidad”, at the VII Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española (CILE), which was immediately added to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Is a London-based editor and critic. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, was senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and assistant editor at Penguin. She served as a judge for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. She sits on the selection panel for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and served as a literature selector for the Rolex 2014-15 Mentor & Protégée Initiative. Ellah Wakatama Allfrey is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of Africa39 (Bloomsbury, 2014) and the anthology, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic, 2016). She has also served as chair of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was on the judging panel of the 2011 David Cohen Prize and Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2012 she was chair of the fiction panel for the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature. Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer and she has been a regular contributor to the book pages of NPR. Her broadcasting includes reviews for NPR’s All Things Considered and BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review. She has presented BBC Radio 4’s Archive on Four and Open Book as well as commissioning short stories for broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She sits on the boards of Art for Amnesty, the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Jalada Collective (Kenya) and the Writers Centre Norwich and is a patron of the Etisalat Literature Prize. Her introduction to Woman of the Aeroplanes by Kojo Laing was published by Pearson in 2012. In 2011 she was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for services to the publishing industry.