Blake Morrison

Born in Skipton, Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is the author of bestselling memoirs, When Did You Last See Your Father? (winner of the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Esquire Award for Non-Fiction) and Things My Mother Never Told Me, the novel South of the River and a nonfiction study, As If.

Blake Morrison was educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake is also a critic, journalist, librettist and poet. He teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, and lives in South London with his family.

Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger is a prominent contemporary American writer, essayist, editor and translator. Weinberger is the recipient of the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle (2000), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals. This citation was in recognition of his translations into English of the work of Octavio Páz, the noted Mexican and Nobel Prize winning poet. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”, Weinberger is also the translator of “Unlock” by the exiled poet Bei Dao, and the editor of “The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry”. He has also written numerous books of literary essays, and political articles. He currently lives in New York City.

Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Dunlop is an internationally-renowned food writer specialising in Chinese culinary culture. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has published three Chinese cookery books and a recent memoir; Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China.

Fuchsia grew up in Oxford, studied at Cambridge, and took a masters degree in Chinese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Her articles about Chinese food have been published in The New Yorker, The Financial Times, Gourmet and Saveur, and her writing has won three awards, and been shortlisted for many others. She is currently based in London, where she is consultant to the popular Bar Shu Sichuanese restaurant.

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma is an internationally renowned author and political commentator, and Asia specialist. He has written numerous groundbreaking novels, including God’s Dust, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania, Bad Elements and Murder in Amsterdam, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Current Interest Book and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He was recipient of the 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award, which honoured him for his distinguished body of work, and the 2008 Erasmus Prize.

Buruma is a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Le Monde and The Guardian. He is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in New York State.

Julia Leigh

Australian writer, Julia Leigh’s debut novel, The Hunter won international critical acclaim and was translated into six languages. It also secured her a spot on the London Observer's list, 21 writers to watch in the 21st century. The debut novel also won her a Rolex Mentor and Protégée Arts Initiative scholarship that included a year of mentoring with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who was an advocate for Leigh's novella.

Her second work, the novella DISQUIET, was first published in 2008 with translations pending in 2009. In the US it was named in the Top Ten Fiction of 2008 list by Entertainment Weekly, was an LA Times Favourite Book of Year, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. In France it is shortlisted for the Prix France Culture/Télérama 2009.

In Australia she was named co-winner of the 2000 Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year and won the Kathleen Mitchell Award. In the UK she won a Betty Trask Award, an Authors Foundation Award and was shortlisted for the John Lwellellyn Rhys Prize. In the US the novel was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. In France she is the laureate of the 2001 Prix de L'Astrolabe.

Jacob Ross

Jacob Ross was born in Grenada, and has lived in Britain since 1984. He is a poet, playwright, journalist, novelist and a tutor of Narrative Craft. He is the author of acclaimed short story collections, Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999); co-editor with Joan Anim-Addo of Voice, Memory, Ashes (1998); co-author with Kwesi Owusu of Behind the Masquerade: The Story of Notting Hill Carnival (1986); Ridin’ n Risin and Turf - Anthologies of Short Stories with Andrea Enisuoh.

He edited Artrage, Britain's leading Intercultural Arts magazine. He currently lectures in creative writing and international literature in England and abroad. Hailed as 'a writer of formidable technical range and emotional depth', Ross's work has been critically acclaimed internationally.

In 2006 Jacob Ross was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was one of the judges of the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize in 2008. His first novel, Pynter Bender, is due out in September 2008. He recently won an Arts Council of England Award for his current novel in progress, The Village Above the Wind.

Liu Hong

Liu Hong is the best selling author of four novels including the recent Wives of the East Wind. Liu was born in 1965 and grew up in Liaoning, near the Chinese-North Korean border. She studied English, before going to Beijing, to work as a teacher and translator. She came to Britain in 1989, and took an MA in social anthropology at Oxford. Since then she has worked as a Chinese teacher, and as a translator. Liu Hong now lives in Wiltshire with her husband and their young daughter.

Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of World War II, and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) was published when she was 57 years old, and went on to sell a million copies in more than thirty languages. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit and the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Marina’s second novel Two Caravans (2007) (published in the US as Strawberry Fields) was short-listed for the George Orwell prize for political writing. She is currently working on her third novel, We Are All Made of Glue, due to be published in July 2009.

Mara Moustafine

Mara Moustafine was born in Harbin, China into a family with Jewish, Russian and Tatar roots and moved to Australia in 1959. Bilingual in Russian and English, she graduated with an MA in International Relations from the Australian National University and has worked as a diplomat, intelligence analyst, journalist and business executive as well as national director of the global human rights organization, Amnesty International. Her book, Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files tells the story of her family’s life over 50 turbulent years in China and her quest to uncover the fate of family members who fled the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, only to be caught in Stalin’s purges. The book was awarded a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 2003 and shortlisted in 2004 for the Kiriyama Prize and Australia’s National Biography Award. “A Chinese translation of the book by Li Yao - Harbin Dang’an - was published in 2008 by the Zonghua Book Company.”

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer, who has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. Her award winning books include The Neverfield, The Lives of Rain, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, co-edited with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar.

Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine is a writer and painter born in Amman, Jordan to Lebanese parents, who grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon. Widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices writing in English from the Middle East, he is the author of three novels including I the Divine and Koolaids, and the story collection The Perv. In 2002, Alameddine was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. The author now divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.

“If any work of fiction might be powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul, it’s this wonder of a book…”

The New York Times

Susanne Gervay

Susanne is an award winning Australian author of children’s and young adult fiction. Her works I Am Jack and Super Jack are rite-of-passage books on school bullying and family relationships. Her young adult novel Butterflies is recognized as Outstanding Youth Literature on Disability while The Cave confronts youth male culture today.

Susanne’s recent breakthrough young adult novel, That’s Why I Wrote This Song, combines text, music and film, and is a collaboration with her daughter Tory, who wrote the lyrics, music and sings her rock songs. She currently co-heads the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, Australia and New Zealand and is chair of the Sydney Children’s Writers & Illustrators Network at The Hughenden. She was also recently awarded The Lady Cutler Award for Distinguished Services to Children’s Literature.

Tina Chang

Tina Chang is a critically acclaimed young Chinese American poet. Ms Chang is the author of Half-Lit Houses (finalist for the Asian American Literary Award) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, along with Nathalie Handel and Ravi Shankar. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and she has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poets and Writers among others. Pleiades Literary Journal describes Tina Chang’s work as leaving you ‘Haunted, transformed, satisfied.’

Zachary Mexico

Zachary Mexico is a young American writer and the author of China Underground, an engaging, first-hand account of his encounter with the new China and the young people who are pursuing their future here. He has studied at Columbia University in New York and Tsing Hua University in Beijing. He plays in the rock group The Octagon and the electric duo Gates of Heaven. Mexico takes a ‘bottoms up, subcultural approach’ to writing about China. He lives in New York City’s Chinatown.