Paul French

Paul French is a writer, and the co-founder and director of market research firm Access Asia. An eclectic researcher – to say the least – his various titles include ‘One Billion Shoppers’,  ‘North Korea: the Paranoid Peninsula’, and ‘Carl Crow – a Tough Old China Hand’  as well as three new titles forthcoming in 2008 including ‘A Peking Murder’. Paul has appeared at The Bookworm on numerous previously memorable occasions, most notably perhaps when he outlined to adolescents the benefits of opium smoking in 18th century London.

Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight. A talented musician, he was working as a singing waiter when he wrote his first novel, The Aerodynamics of Pork, on the back of his order pad. The author of fourteen books, Patrick’s latest novel, Notes from an Exhibition, tells the story of artist Rachel Kelly, whose life has been a sacrifice to both her art and her debilitating manic depression. Patrick Gale is also a biographer, a writer for television, and a contributor to numerous anthologies. He lives with his partner, a farmer, in Cornwall, England.

Image copyright John Foley

Rob Gifford

Rob Gifford has an undergraduate in Chinese Studies from Durham University, an MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard, and has been traveling back and forth between China, the US and the UK for the last twenty years. From 1999 to 2005, he was based in Beijing as China correspondent for America’s National Public Radio network. He has traveled widely throughout China and across Asia, reporting for the BBC, and for NPR.

Rob’s fascinating account of his journey across China, from Shanghai to the Khazak border, China Road, was published in 2007.

Justin Hill

Justin Hill is a novelist and poet originally from the UK and now resident in Hong Kong. His first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and a Betty Trask Award. His subsequent novel, Passing Under Heaven, gained him the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award, with his third book, a factual account of his time in Eritrea short listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Justin’s writing reflects his long term interests in travel and more specifically in China, having spent many years in rural China and Africa as a volunteer with the VSO.

Justin Hill is brought to the Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival with the support of Harrow International School.

Chris Kremmer

Christopher Kremmer is one of Australia's most respected and popular writers of narrative non-fiction, whose work has been compared favourably with that of VS Naipaul and William Dalrymple. Educated at the University of Canberra, he spent a decade in Asia working as a foreign correspondent, producing a series of award-winning bestsellers, including The Carpet Wars, Bamboo Palace and his latest book, Inhaling the Mahatma, a personal history of India. Born in Sydney he divides his time between homes in India and Australia's Southern Highlands.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru received one of the highest advances in publishing history for his first novel, ‘The Impressionist’, which won the Betty Trask Award in 2002, and was shortlisted simultaneously for the Guardian and Whitbread First Book Awards. He was selected as one of the Best Young British Writers of 2003. Hari is also the author of the short story collection ‘Noise´ and the 2007 novel, ‘Transmission’.  He now sits on the Executive Council of the UK chapter of writers’ organization PEN and lives in London.

John Man

John Man is a British historian and writer, educated at Oxford University, and at SOAS in London. After training in journalism with Reuters, he became European Editor of Time-Life Books. In the mid-1970s, he turned to writing full-time, with occasional forays into film, TV and radio.

Amongst other titles, John is the author of three biographies on Asian leaders - Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, Attila the Hun, and Kublai Khan. His new book, The Terracotta Army has just been published to coincide with the current British Museum exhibition and is soon to be followed by The Great Wall of China.

Miles Merrill

Born in Chicago, Miles Merrill is the son of a Black Panther father and a mother whose family tree dates back to British-American Colonialism. Now resident in Australia, Miles’ performances are a spoken word tour de force. Combining elements of theatre, hip-hop, slam poetry and music, he ‘flings words in a rapid fire onslaught of versified emotion’, and is certainly not to be missed.

Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong is the author of the award-winning Inspector Chen series of mystery novels, featuring Death of a Red Heroine , A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006), and his latest installment, set in Beijing,  Red Mandarin Dress. He is also the author of two books of poetry translations, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems (2003) and Evoking T'ang (2007), and a poetry collection, Lines Around China (2003). Death of a Red Heroine was voted among the top five political novels of all time in the Wall Street Journal.

Anne Warr

Australian author Anne Warr arrived in Shanghai in 2003, not sure what she would be doing in this rapidly changing city. An architect by training, Anne fell in love with Shanghai's historic buildings and started to write about them for local magazines. Then followed a commission from Australian publishing house Watermark Press to write the Shanghai Architecture Guide. Three years later, Shanghai Architecture was born. Don’t miss this presentation, in words and pictures, of a fascinating city.

Adam Williams

Adam Williams is a businessman and novelist based in Beijing. His historical fiction trilogy, comprising The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, The Emperor’s Bones and The Dragon’s Tail follows the fortunes of three generations of an English family, spanning China’s tumultuous last century from the Boxer rebellion until the summer of 1989.

Having completed his China trilogy, and by way of contrast, Adam is currently working on a novel set in 12th Century Andaluz.

Kerry Brown is the author of Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (2007), and The Rise of the Dragon – Chinese Investment Flows in the Reform Period (2008). He is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House, on the Asia Programme. Educated at Cambridge, London and Leeds Universities, receiving a PhD in Modern Chinese Language and Politics from the latter. He worked in Japan, Australia, and the Inner Mongolian region of China, before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, where he worked in the China Section and then served as First Secretary, Beijing, from 2000 to 2003.

Dr Anita Heiss is a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales and is one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known Indigenous authors. In 2007 Anita released three titles Not Meeting Mr Right, for which she won the Deadly Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature; her poetry collection I’m not Racist, But…, which won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry and the kids novel Yirra and her deadly dog Demon, written with the students from La Perouse Public School. In recognition of her literary achievements Anita was awarded the 2003 ASA Medal for Under 35s for her contribution to Australian community and public life. In 2004 she was awarded the NSW Indigenous Arts Fellowship and was listed in the Bulletin/Microsoft “Smart 100.” In 2004, she also wrote and directed her first short-film “Checkerboard Love.”

One of Australia’s most beloved and revered novelists, Lily Brett was born in Germany in 1946. Her parents were married just before they were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto and were on the last transport to Auschwitz, where they were separated. It took six months for them to find each other after the war. Brett was two when her parents were at last able to leave Germany and immigrate to Melbourne, Australia. At 19, Lily began writing for Go Set, the very hip Australian rock newspaper. She traveled all over the world, interviewing Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones, and was a featured guest on a popular Australian music television program. Brett then went on to publish four novels, three collections of essays, seven collections of poetry, and one collection of short stories.

Gail Jones is one of the few contemporary Australian novelists to combine a grasp of recent cultural theories and to have developed a unique style of fiction that draws upon these ideas. The author of four novels and two collections of short stories, including Black Mirror and Sixty Lights, she was shortlisted for the Nita B Kibble Fiction award. She is Professor of Writing at the Writing and Society Research School, University of Western Sydney. Her latest book, Sorry, has been shortlisted for the 2008 Festival Awards in Adelaide.

Nury Vittachi 

Born in Sri Lanka, Nury now lives with his English wife and three Chinese children in Hong Kong. For many years, he wrote the popular Traveller’s Tales page in the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, and has worked for the South China Morning Post. Nury is also well known as a stand-up comedian.

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine was born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father. The fourth of eight siblings, she was raised in South London, and originally trained as an actress and worked in theater. She is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels-in-verse: Lara (1997), which traces the roots of a mixed-race English-Nigerian-Brazilian-Irish family over 150 years, three continents and seven generations; and The Emperor's Babe (2001), the ground-breaking tragi-comic story of Zuleika, a girl of Sudanese parents, who grows up in Roman London and has an affair with Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Her latest novel-in-verse, Soul Tourists (2005), is about a car journey across Europe starring a mismatched couple, Stanley and Jessie, with cameo appearances en route from ghosts of color from European history such as Pushkin, Alessandro de Medici and Mary Seacole.

Bernardine's work has often invited comparison with the new generation of British-born, black British writers. Her writing is energised by her own plural, diasporic heritage which marks her as both a British and a post-colonial writer. Her narratives produce post-national landscapes in which Britain appears as the crossroads for a series of global movements and migrations. She has often been described as a writer who is pushing not just the boundaries of contemporary British writing, but of what it means to be British. Her first fully-prose novel Blond Roots will be published by Penguin late Spring 2008. It's a slavery story with a difference: Africans enslave Europeans over a four hundred year period. The protagonist is a white woman from Europa who lives out her adult life as a slave in the New World.