Ivo van Hove is an award-winning theatre director who has served as the General Director of the prestigious Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam) since 2001. His acclaimed productions, including A View From the Bridge, Network and All About Eve, have earned him many international accolades, including a Tony Award, an Olivier Award and two Obie Awards.

Lope Félix de Vega y Carpio (1562–1635) was a Spanish playwright, poet, novelist and marine. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature.

Lot Vekemans (born 1965) studied social geography at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and trained at the Schrijversvakschool ’t Colofon in Amsterdam, graduating in 1993. Since 1995 she has written numerous plays. In 2005 she received the prestigious Van der Vies Prijs for Truckstop and Zus van. Her play Gif (Poison) was awarded the 2010 Taalunie Toneelschrijfprijs for the best Dutch play staged that year. In 2012 her first novel Een bruidsjurk uit Warschau (A Bridal Gown from Warsaw) was published and nominated for the 2012 Anton Wachterprijs for the best Dutch/Flemish debut. The novel has been translated into Norwegian and German. In 2016 she received Germany’s Ludwig Müllheims Theaterpreis, the first time the prize has gone to a foreign playwright. Her plays have been translated into fifteen languages and have been staged successfully in more than twenty countries around the world.

Marie-Claude Verdier is a Canadian playwright. Her first play, Je n’y suis plus, was produced at the National Arts Centre's French Theatre. Her play Nous autres antipodes received an honourable mention by the Prix Gratien-Gélinas from the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD). In 2018, Marie-Claude became the first playwright-in-residence at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), where she worked on her play Apparitions. She is also a dramaturg and has worked with many distinguished directors, including Marc Beaupré, Christian Lapointe, and Benoît Vermeulen.

Rina Vergano is a leading translator of Dutch and Flemish plays, as well as poetry, libretti and films, and specialises in work for younger audiences and musical theatre. She has translated around seventy plays by leading Dutch and Flemish playwrights (many award-winning in their country of origin) for performance and publication. She is also a theatre journalist and playwright.

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, playwright and poet. His most famous works are Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869).

Katharine Viner is a British journalist and playwright. She has been the editor-in-chief at the Guardian and The Observer since 2015, having worked at the Guardian since 1997. She was appointed deputy editor of the Guardian in 2008; launched the award-winning Guardian Australia in 2013; and was also editor of Guardian US, based in New York. She was the winner of the 2017 Diario Madrid prize for her essay How Technology Disrupted the Truth. She co-edited the play My Name is Rachel Corrie with Alan Rickman, first seen at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2005.