The thirty-year-old journalist from Minsk saw her magazine closed down by the regime. We talk press freedom, the political engagement of young Belarusians and elections on 28 September

The forty-year-old British-born architect, ranked one of the world’s top forty, on working under Jean Nouvel, ‘airport architects’ and why European cities should ditch their showcase images

The Paris-based colourful comic book artist, 54, has been published in many of Europe's national papers. Italian view on comics today

The 25-year-old Italian debuted her first book last year, having gone from Udine to the RAI in Milan, via Paris and Alessandro Baricco's ‘Holden’ school of writing

The East German-born canoer, 42, and sporty mum-of-two won for Italy at the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008, after a string of international successes in LA, Seoul, Atlanta, Sydney and Athens

As ‘The Big Issue’ street magazine for the homeless turns seventeen this September, its co-founder and social entrepreneur, 62, on racist London-Irish upbringings, crime, Paris 1968 and poverty in Britain

Born in Buenos Aires and a German resident for three decades, the cellist adds a ‘Spanish influence’ to an ‘unusual’ ensemble, revolutionising European chamber music

The Turin-born sports journalist at national daily 'La Repubblica', 46, on how Europe has changed Italian journalism and a ‘provincial’ tendency to use so many English terms

The forty-something winemaker from the Pic St. Loup commune in France’s Langeudoc region on love, green fingers and the increasing role of women in wine-making

The Belgrade-born journalist and author of ‘Chernobyl’s Strawberries’, 47, on fighting cancer, the traumas of war, her eccentric grandmother and her war criminal cousin

The Spanish DJ, musician and composer from Malaga teaches in a music academy in Fuengirola. A successful remix has helped him hit the top of the world house music charts, in a genre becoming ever-popular in Europe

Riot is a self-proclaimed pest. Having fallen for Europe as a young boy, he is a regular critic of both politicians and journalists and tries to join the European debate whenever possible

He stood on the barricades of Paris and Prague in 1968 and later produced the Charter 77 civic initiative. The man who once smoked cigarettes in prison with former president Václav Havel looks back over his sixty-six years, but also to Europe and the future

Whether connected to a computer or a piano, Balázs Zságer, 36, has the tired look of a nocturnal bird. With one foot in Hungary’s electro rock scene and another abroad, he speaks about the melancholy that underpins eastern European pop music, as well as his difficulties to get his album sold outside of his native land

The Cornwall-born writer, politician and father of London's new conservative mayor Boris Johnson, 59, on why his great-grandfather Ali Kemal Bey would have supported Turkish accession to the EU

The 93-year-old Italian director and father of the ‘commedia all’Italiana’ film genre, on the power of cinema, which ‘acts like a mirror, tells a story, but doesn’t preach’

The Spanish sex, drugs and rock’n’roll writer, 41, juggles motherhood and feminist ideals in her literature, and explains why she is sometimes categorised as a lesbian or 'at best, emasculator'

The Grammy-nominated British RnB artist, 26, helped make garage music mainstream in the UK in 2000. Eight years wiser, he talks his fourth album, grime music and bulking up

The British psychotherapist from Sussex, 63, brings together Jung theory and eastern philosophy in his 'deep memory process'. His theory on reincarnation: our past lives help us resolve our present neuroses

A linguist and voyager, the Italian painter transported her Jewish origins from the United States to Portugal, where her multiple identities are exhibited by a flourishing brushstroke

The German mother-of-six, 50, is a woman of superlatives: as one of three women in an eight-man advocate general team at the ECJ, she most famously helped put Berlusconi on trial

The British short-story writer, 41, cites Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau as his influences, discusses literature, lipograms and Iberia - and why the boy from Wales only publishes in certain languages

Why the British rapper, hip hop singer and producer, 28, swapped London, its boys and the UK music industry for Brooklyn's cabbies, leading to ‘an unexpected duet’ with American rapper Kanye West

At 28, the prodigious composer and late-night jam-session organiser is the only Russian alto-sax player active on the London scene. We catch him at the launch of his new fusion set ‘Findamorale’ at the London jazz festival

Ten years since the release of Air's first album 'Moon Safari', one half of the French duo, 38, talks Czech audiences, being a vanguard of the European electronic scene and why Air are not like Radiohead

The Dutch compared her to Tori Amos. In fact, the 33-year-old Belgian connoisseur of ‘kitsch’ French songs and pop is a theatrical musician who plays the piano sat on a big transparent ball, jumping about whilst tightly clutching her accordion

Sent to the Chechen front at 18, the Russian ‘Novaya Gazeta’ columnist and colleague of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, 31, lays bare the nightmares he endured in his semi-autobiographical 'One Soldier's War in Chechnya'

The historical memory of the European commission is pleasantly transformed in the hands of an Italian, 64, who has seen so much and met so many, including Aldo Moro and Jacques Delors

At 28, the author of comic series 'Marzi' – about a little girl living in the Polish People’s Republic - on her own story as a Pole between France and Belgium

The Senegalese hip hop pioneer, 38, invites his fellow rappers to speak out and campaign for a harmonious continent with his latest album 'Presidents of Africa'. Plus an exclusive video interview from Dakar

The Italian-writing, Paris-dwelling, prize-winning Albanian writer, painter and photographer, 39, describes beauty as disturbing, discusses her inspirations and is hopeful for Kosovo

30-year-old author of the book ‘New Romantic’, the journalist and editor of gay magazine ‘Dik Fagazine’ talks politics, left-wing politics and emotion-drained religion

We tag along with the Spanish artist, 31. A product of the Erasmus experience, he prepares his pictures for an exhibition gracing the Andalucian Centre of Flamenco in Jerez, Cadiz

Playwright, journalist and Kosovo's answer to Jeremy Paxman - the ‘pushy, irritating’ TV presenter as she describes herself, 29, exposes local politicians in a society she vouches is 'fed-up'

The self-taught guitarist is coy about his age and anti-internet-overload. The Yugoslav 'ghost' has lived his dream in London since the early nineties, his folk and jazz music celebrating the sun and the Balkans

The London-born Canadian graphic novelist, 38, is relaxed and frank as he discusses being chosen as the only black cartoonist to portray Martin Luther King, a series which took him ten long years to complete

A very personal journey through a Europe of five (or six) senses with the French anthropologist and sociology professor

The Paris-born Japanese-German slam poet, 30, lives in Mainz, is married to a Colombian and has more than plenty to recite on what Europe means to him

Based in Paris for the past 35 years, the 64 year old musician son of folklore icon Violeta Parra on Chilean Septembers, exiles and his dead mother's legacy

The award-winning British historical and comedy detective novelist, 58, on 'being like most English people' and her original brand of writing

The French journalist and long time foreign correspondent of the daily 'Le Monde', 64, evokes the subjectivity and relativity of the job, insisting on the importance of an identifiable Europe

The French singer of Dutch origin, 33, was born in Caesarea, Israel. She lived in the Netherlands until the age of 11 and sings in English. Now, she moves between Iceland, France and New York

Over the last 50 years, the 77-year-old has witnessed the initial stages of the evolution of a Union undergoing total transformation. Editor and columnist for daily bulletin Agence Europe, the EU's press agency, this Italian in love with Brussels is still an unwavering federalist

The British science fiction author, 82, on working with Hollywood greats, being caned for 'telling stories' at school and Europe being a 'wonderful idea'

The Czech-Bosnian cartoonist, 55, weaves between cartoons, cinema and geopolitics, taking his readers on a trip into a futuristic universe where political commitment is key

The Benedictine monk and author, 62, on splits within the Catholic Church, Islam plus dialogue and a humane globalisation

The Transylvania-born Hungarian author, 34, uses an unconventional narrator to express the horrors of a totalitarian system

He was one of the best Spanish bullfighters, until he ended his career in autumn 2006. The 33-year-old talks about the loneliness of the arena and bullfighting as an art form

The former Soviet soldier, 40, has spent half his life sculpting in Lithuania’s evolving public spaces, prodding the West into understanding what the face of Communism once looked like, and fighting privatisation

The 45–year-old writer and TV journalist from Ljubliana has lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Chicago and London, and published widely

The Somali writer, 62, is an important figure in African literature. A committed defender of women’s rights, he chronicles Somalia’s trip to chaos and back

Visionary film director Yuri Khashchevatsky, 60, is a principal figure of Belarusian dissent. He criticises ineffective opposition, and talks up the new role the Internet plays in the resistance

The politically engaged sculptor, 40, has been labelled by many as 'the scandal maker'

The Congolese writer and storyteller, 55, in exile in Belgium, feels that Europeans 'don’t want to take a long hard look at themselves'

One night in Barcelona's famous 'Apolo' club, where the 'international master of turntablism' divides clubgoers with his mellow electronic strains

Her reports on dwarfism and the mass tide of immigrants to the Canaries are gracing German screens - the Catalan journalist gives a voice to those without

As Estonia prepares to celebrate independence from the USSR, poet and intellectual Hasso Krull explains why Russian will never be an official language

The Parisian architect mixes architecture with ecology: a fashionable fifty-year-old with a diverse background and designer of the offbeat Tower Flower in Paris

Winner of the 2002 Prix Fémina for Foreign Writers for his splendid Montedidio – written in 'very Neapolitan Italian' – Erri de Luca reflects on Europe, the Mediterranean and the passing of generations

The Czech stage director explains why 'European theatre' doesn't fit snugly into one box

Jorge Sampaio, former President of Portugal, on the European dream, a constitution revival and feeling Portugese

He wrote Danube in a café, and it's in a café that we meet the Triestine novelist, translator and very European intellectual

Terry Gilliam spent half his life in London, where he created Monty Python with a group of like-minded comedians. At 65, the actor-director’s spirits remain as imaginative and animated as ever