ADAM WILLIAMS

Adam Williams is a businessman and writer living in Beijing. He has published three historical novels about China in the Twentieth Century (The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, The Emperor’s Bones and The Dragon’s Tail) drawing partly on his own and his family’s experience living in North China for four generations. A fourth novel, set against a background of the Spanish Civil War and 11th Century Andaluz, will be published in the summer. Information about Adam Williams and his books can be found on his website: http://www.adam-williams.net

Alon Hilu

Alon Hilu is an Israeli writer and playwright. His new book, The House of Dajani, was published in 2008. A historical novel set in Jaffa in 1895, it describes the fascinating relations between Jewish and Palestinian characters locked in a struggle for land and power. It is based upon actual letters from the period and historical characters.

In 2004, Alon Hilu published his first book, Death of the Monk, a historical novel based on the blood libel against the Damascus Jews, which took place in 1840. The book was translated into five languages, was among the five finalists for the prestigious Sapir prize in 2005, and won the Israeli Presidential prize for a debut novel in 2006.

Alon Hilu worked as a journalist and editor for several years. He is currently a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property and works as a General Counsel in Voltaire Ltd., a hi-tech company.

ANDREW LIH

Andrew Lih is a new media researcher, consultant and technology author. After a decade in academia as a professor of journalism and media studies, he has spent two years researching and writing the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia, (Hyperion 2009) the only narrative account about the online community that created one of the most influential Web sites in the world.

After founding one of the first dot-com companies in New York in 1994, from 1995 to 2000, he created the new media program at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where he served as adjunct professor and director of technology for their Center for New Media. He also developed the first guidelines for the Pulitzer Prizes to accept digital multimedia submissions, starting in 1999.

Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick is Beijing correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. She has spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent, posted in Seoul, Jerusalem, Sarajevo and Berlin. Her reporting has won the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism, the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting, the Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy award, among other honors. Demick is the author of “Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.” Her second book, “Nothing to Envy,” about North Korea will be published in autumn 2009.

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.

CATHERINE SAMPSON

Catherine Sampson is a crime writer originally from England and now based in Beijing. Previously a journalist, Catherine reported for the BBC and London’s The Times before turning to fiction full time. The third of her novels featuring single mother and investigative journalist Robin Ballantyne, Pool of Unease, after Falling Off Air and Out of Mind, was published in 2007 and is set largely in Beijing. She lives in the city with her husband, Economist correspondent James Miles, and her three children.

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.

Helene Uri

Helene Uri, was a doctor of linguistics until she left her position at the University of Oslo in 2005, to become a full time writer.

She has since written 12 books including novels, children's books, and books about language and linguistics. Her work has been translated into twelve languages.

Her latest novel, The Best Among Us (Norway's first campus novel) has sold more than 70,000 copies in Norway alone, and was on the national bestselling lists for more than a year.

HENRY REYNOLDS

Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's most influential and widely read historians. Since the publication of The Other Side of the Frontier in 1981 he has profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. He is the author of fifteen books, including the award-winning Why Weren’t We Told? and most recently, Drawing the Global Colour Line, a co-authored study and gripping story of Australia’s emerging role as pace-setter in the global politics of whiteness. Henry taught in secondary schools in Australia and England and after teaching in the history department of James Cook University, Townsville for many years, he now holds a Personal Chair in History and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania.

Howard Goldblatt

Howard Goldblatt has taught modern Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. The foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the West, he has published English translations of more than thirty novels and story collections by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His translation (with Sylvia Li-chun Lin) of Notes of a Desolate Man by the Taiwanese novelist Chu T'ien-wen won the 1999 "Translation of the Year" award given by the American Translators Association. He has also authored and edited half a dozen books on Chinese literature. The founding editor of the scholarly journal Modern Chinese Literature, he serves on the boards of many scholarly and literary magazines, and has contributed essays and articles to The Washington Post, The Times of London, TIME Magazine, World Literature Today, and The Los Angeles Times, as well as scholarly books and journals.

HS LIU

Liu Heung Shing, is a former foreign correspondent and photojournalist who has been posted to China, the US, India, South Korea, and the former Soviet Union over a span of 20 years. In 1992, Liu shared a Pulitzer Prize and Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Liu is the author of the widely acclaimed China After Mao and Soviet Union: Collapse of an Empire. He is also editor of the best selling China, Portrait of a Country, which was selected by the Sunday Times, London, as the Best Picture Book of 2008. He graduated from Hunter College, New York City University and is now based in Beijing, where he works as Group Editorial Director of Modern Media Group.

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.

James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and has worked for the magazine for more than 25 years. His writing covers a wide range of topics, including national security policy, American politics, the development and impact of technology, economic trends and patterns, and U.S. relations with the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world.

Fallows grew up in Redlands, California and then attended Harvard, where he was president of the newspaper The Crimson. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1970 and then studied economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has been an editor of The Washington Monthly and of Texas Monthly, and from 1977 to 1979 he served as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. His first book, National Defense, won the American Book Award in 1981; Postcards from Tomorrow’s Square, Fallows’ latest book, is a collection of essays on China.

James West

James West is a young Australian writer and radio broadcaster who worked as a 'Foreign Expert' in Beijing from 2005 to 2006. After completing a Masters degree in journalism at New York University, he returned to Australia, where he is now executive producer of current affairs program, Hack, on the radio station Triple J. He lives in Sydney. Beijing Blur is James' first book.

JAN LATTA

Jan Latta is an Australian writer, photographer and publisher. 14 years ago, in Rwanda, she came face to face with a mountain Gorilla, and the experience changed her life. When she heard there were only 600 mountain gorillas left in the world, she decided to publish books for children on endangered animals. She has travelled to Africa (five times) for the cheetah, lion, elephant, chimpanzee and rhino books, and China, India and Australia for pandas, tigers and koalas! Jan gets up close and personal with the animals, following them for weeks and taking thousands of photographs of their subjects in their natural habitat.

Her novel Diary of a Wildlife Photographer, commissioned by the ABC, is a record of some of her closest encounters with dangerous animals in the wild.

Jane Godwin

Jane Godwin is a publisher, of books for children and young adults, at Penguin Books Australia. She is also the highly acclaimed author of many books for children and young people. Her work is published internationally and she has received several commendations. Jane’s most recent novel is Falling from Grace, and her most recent picture book is the charming story of a little girl’s big adventure, Little Cat and the Big Red Bus, illustrated by Anna Walker and published in 2008. Jane is currently working on a novel called Minnie and the Shoes of Little Happiness, part of which is set in Harbin and a second picture book with Anna Walker titled All Through the Year.

Jasper Becker

Jasper Becker has worked as a correspondent for over 21 years.

He has written six books, the most recent being City Of Tranquility, which was released in June 2008. His work has been translated into seven languages.

Becker reported for The Guardian from Beijing 1985 to 1989. After the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations for which the paper nominated him as Foreign Correspondent of the Year, he returned to London. Several years later he left The Guardian and joined the BBC World Service as the Asian Affairs Analyst. Until May 2002, he was Beijing Bureau Chief of Hong Kong's English-language South China Morning Post.

Becker is now the managing director of Legend Strategic Consultancy, which provides international companies with information on China.

Jen Hyde

Jen Hyde is a poet and multidisciplinary artist, and the founder and co-editor of Small Anchor Press, which publishes books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in handmade, limited edition. She is also the former co-curator of the Karaoke+Poetry=Fun Reading Series in New York City. Her poems have been published in Unpleasant Event Schedule and The Agriculture Reader, Volume III. Her artist books and drawings have shown at the Altered Esthetics Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA) and The Artist Co-Op in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). She has previously taught bookmaking and chapbook editioning workshops at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (USA) and at Pitzer Collee in Claremont, California (USA). Jen holds a B.F.A. in writing and drawing from The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (USA). She currently lives in Sichuan Province, where she teaches ESL and writes.

Jeremy Goldkorn

Jeremy Goldkorn founded the popular China media website Danwei.org, and acts as editor and publisher. The site has tracked the changes in China's media and internet on an almost daily basis since 2003. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, he has lived in Beijing since 1995. He has lived in a workers dormitory, ridden a bicycle across Xinjiang and Tibet, and spent the last decade working in the Chinese media, advertising and internet industries. His writing has appeared in many Chinese and foreign publications including Cosmopolitan's China edition and The New York Times.

Jonathan Fenby

Jonathan Fenby has written 13 books, six of them on China. His most recent, the Penguin History of Modern China, was listed among books of the year for 2008 by both the Economist and the Financial Times. He also covers the country’s politics and economy for the research service, Trusted Sources, as well as contributing to a wide range of publications and broadcasting stations. He worked as a journalist in Britain, France, Germany and Vietnam for 30 years, with Reuters, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and The Observer, which he edited, before becoming Editor of the South China Morning Post from 1995 to 1999. Now based in London, he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and a knight of the French Order of Merit for services to journalism.

Justin Hill

Justin Hill's first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse was listed by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2001, and earned him a place on the Independent on Sunday’s top 20 young British Authors. His following novels, including the critically acclaimed Passing Under Heaven and Ciao Asmara, have also won a number of prizes. The South China Morning Post wrote; 'If you saw him coming down the street, you might cross to avoid him. With his shaved head and bulging biceps, Yorkshireman, Justin Hill looks more like a boxer than a writer,' while the Big Issue described him as 'one of our most readable, humane authors'. He is an assistant-professor at Hong Kong University, as well as being Contributing Editor to the Asian Literary Review. Justin's work has been translated into 14 languages.

Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville’s bestselling novel The Secret River has been published in more than twenty countries and received numerous awards, including the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It deals with European and Aboriginal first-contact, interrogating Australia’s colonial past and taking cues from research into Kate’s own ancestors. Long interested in the stories we tell, Kate’s earlier novels Lilian’s Story, Dark Places and Joan Makes History, have come to be revered as modern classics - and aim to ‘put women back in’ Australian history. Kate is also the recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her 2004 novel The Idea of Perfection. The Secret River is soon to be published in Chinese by Yilin.

LIJIA ZHANG

Originally from Nanjing, Lijia was plucked out of school and placed in a rocket factory for ten years at the tender age of 17, where she taught herself English. In 1990, Lijia went to England where she pursued her childhood dream of studying journalism. Her features have appeared in many international publications, and she is a regular contributor to the BBC, Channel 4 and NPR. She is the co-author of China Remembers. Her memoir Socialism is Great! has just been published by Atlas Books in New York.

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.

LIZ NIVEN

Liz Niven is an award-winning poet and writer based in Scotland. She has published 5 poetry collections and been anthologized in books such as Modern Scottish Women Poets, 100 Favorite Scottish Love Poems and Scots Poems to be Read Aloud. She is currently co-editor of New Writing Scotland for the Association of Scottish Literary Studies. She has held residencies for a wide range of Arts bodies including the London Poetry Society, Scottish Poetry Library and Live Literature Scotland. She has collaborated on poetry projects with artists, sculptors and designers. She is one of Scotland's most popular school poetry facilitators and has worked on projects with young people to put poetry into unusual locations. These include gardens, classrooms and the fabric of new school buildings. Her own poetry is installed in a variety of public spaces in Scotland.

Lucinda Holdforth

Lucinda Holdforth is interested in the civilised life and how to achieve it. Her first book, True Pleasures: A Memoir of Women in Paris takes readers on a personal and inspiring journey through the lives of the extraordinary women who have shaped Paris into the world’s most civilised city. Her second book, Why Manners Matter: The Case for Civilised Behaviour in a Barbarous World is a witty and erudite essay exploring the vital role that manners have always played in shaping society. Lucinda draws on history’s great writers and thinkers to argue that manners are essential in preserving our rights and freedoms and expanding the social space. Lucinda has been a career diplomat with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade including a posting to the Balkans; an adviser in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and a speechwriter and consultant.

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.”

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.

Mark Cousins

Mark Cousins has a first class degree in Film and Media Studies and Fine Art from the University of Stirling. He has since lectured on film history, been published internationally and made documentary films on arts and political themes. A former Director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, he now presents Scene-by-Scene on BBC television, conducting career interviews with actors and directors including Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Shohei Imamura, Jack Lemmon, Sean Connery, Tom Hanks, Dennis Hopper, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, the Coen Brothers, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Donald Sutherland, Ewan McGregor and Jayne Russell. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. As well as participating in our festival, Mark is currently in Beijing to host the city’s first festival of Scottish film, co-directed by Tilda Swinton.

MARK KITTO

Mark Kitto was a successful magazine publisher in China. He built one of the best-known English language titles in the country, until things went drastically awry in 2004. He lost his business, and repeated court battles to recover it. To make matters worse, the initially enthusiastic book publishers of his business story backed out just before they went to print. Now, at last, Kitto tells his story ? the happier one, of picking himself up again and getting on with life ? in his book China Cuckoo: How I lost a fortune and found a life. Kitto runs a coffee shop on Moganshan, a mountain near Shanghai, where he lives with his wife and children.

Miriam Clifford and Cathy Giangrande

Cathy Giangrande and Miriam Clifford are longstanding friends and professional partners. They met at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London as graduate students in the Conservation Department and have since that time maintained a lasting friendship and working relationship. Cathy, an American still resident in London, is an art historian and archaeological conservator. She has worked in museums and on underwater archaeological sites in the US and Europe. She is the author of books on museums and collecting, and currently works for the World Monuments Fund in Russia and China. Miriam has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing for fourteen years, working throughout China as a freelance photographer and photojournalist. Her work has appeared in leading publications, including the South China Morning Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

MO YAN

Mo Yan is a leading writer in the contemporary Chinese literature scene, and a frequent winner of national literary prizes, including the prestigious China Annual Writer's Prize. He is the author of many novels, including Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and Big Breasts and Wide Hips. His seminal novel Red Sorghum was made into a film by Zhang Yimou. Mo Yan is the first ever recipient of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, a lifetime achievement award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for US-China issues. He was shortlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize in 2007.

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.

NICOLE MONES

In 1977 Nicole Mones came to China to start a textile business, which she ran for eighteen years before beginning to write. Her novels The Last Chinese Chef, Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light are published in eighteen languages. Lost in Translation was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Kafka Prize for the year’s best work of fiction by an American woman. The Last Chinese Chef was the only American finalist for the 2008 Kiriyama Prize for fiction, awarded for books that advance world understanding of Pacific Rim cultures; it also won a World Gourmand Award as a Chinese cookbook, even though it is a novel with no recipes. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in numberous magazines including Gourmet, the New York Times e, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

PALLAVI AIYAR

Pallavi Aiyar is an award winning Indian journalist who has reported from China for over six years. Considered one of the foremost commentators on the Sino-Indian relationship, she lived until recently with her husband and two cats in a hutong to the north of the Forbidden City. Her book Smoke and Mirrors: an Experience of China was published to wide acclaim in 2008.

Paul French

Paul French is a writer who has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His previous books include the critically acclaimed North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula and a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow - A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai, described by the Financial Times as a ‘captivating narrative’. He has also contributed to the Asia Literary Review and to The Bookworm’s own Beijing: Portrait of a City. His next book, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, will be published in June 2009.

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

RIDLEY PEARSON

Over the past twenty-five years, Ridley Pearson, a New York Times bestselling novelist, has crafted nearly thirty novels. With ten million copies of his work in print, he has earned a reputation for writing fiction that grips the imagination. His crime novels emphasize dazzling investigative detail, and, all too often, imitate life. His previous novels have helped solve two real-life homicides, helped settle an environmental lawsuit, and regularly tackle subjects that eerily become national news after he writes about them.

Ridley is also the author of a half dozen novels for younger readers including the award-winning series Peter and the Starcatchers, co-written with humor writer, Dave Barry; the Kingdom Keepers; and Steel Trapp.

Sebastian Barry

Novelist, poet and playwright Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and attended Trinity College, Dublin. He has written for the theatre since 1986, and his plays, including Our Lady of Sligo, The Steward of Christendom, Whistling Psyche and The Pride of Parnell Street have continued to receive both prizes and rave reviews. His first novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, was published in 1998 to great acclaim, and his second, Annie Dunne, in 2002. A Long Long Way, the story of the son of a Dublin policeman who goes to the trenches in 1915 was short-listed for both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Prize. Sebastian's new novel The Secret Scripture is currently enjoying a great deal of media attention since being short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008. He lives with his wife and three children in County Wicklow, Ireland.

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.’

TODD ZUNIGA

Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine, the co-creator of the Literary Death Match reading series, and the host of Opium Live, an interview series in New York City. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his fiction has appeared most recently in Canteen, and online at Lost Magazine. With his second novel in submission, he's now at work on "Passport," a non-fiction collection about memory and home that covers 20 countries. During the day he works as a freelance editor for 1up.com and ESPN Video Games. He longs for a Chicago Cubs World Series victory and an EU passport.

Wang Gang

WANG GANG is a critically acclaimed novelist and screenwriter in China. English is based on his experiences growing up in western China. He lives in Beijing.

WILLIAM F. ZORZI

Social critique has rarely come in sharper form in recent years than from the biting HBO series The Wire. Set among the housing estates, political offices and police stations of Baltimore, The Wire has been described as ‘TV as great modern literature’ (Matt Roush, TV Guide). Screenwriter Bill Zorzi is a former reporter and editor for The Sun of Baltimore and brings his 20 years of journalistic expertise to writing for the small screen. As part of The Bookworm International Literary Festival Zorzi will discuss the fine line between fiction and hard-hitting reality, which the show so successfully captured. He will also be giving workshops on screen writing.

ZACKARY 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.