Participants of Worlds 2011

A-E //F-J //K-O //P-T// U-Z

Jane Alger

Jane Alger is the Director of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. The office was set up in September 2010 following Dublin’s designation in July 2010. She was the main researcher and coordinator for the Dublin application and was also instrumental in Dublin’s previous application to UNESCO for World Book Capital status. Formerly a Divisional Librarian and chief stock buyer with Dublin City Libraries, her previous brief was to promote reading and the reading experience in Dublin. She nurtured the growth of book clubs in Dublin City Libraries with the result that the branch libraries’ network currently supports 145 clubs. The first Readers’ Day in Ireland was started by Jane in Dublin in 2002. Internationally renowned authors such as Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Barry, Joanne Harris, Michael Scott, Salley Vickers, Joseph O’Connor, and many more have attended what is now an essential event in the lives of Dublin book club members. She also introduced the Reader Development concept to Ireland. Dublin: One City One Book, the multi-award winning annual celebration of a book with Dublin connections, was started by Jane in 2006 and goes from strength to strength.

 

Gillian Beer

Dame Gillian Beer was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and President of Clare Hall College. Most recently she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art 2009-2011. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society  of Literature and an Honorary Foreign member of the American Academy of  Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, as well as a trustee of Writers' Centre Norwich. Her books include Darwin’s Plots (3rd edition 2009), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996). She has published editions of works by Freud, Darwin, Jane Austen, and H.G. Wells and a number of essays on rhyming. From 1992-2002 she was a Trustee of the British Museum, and was Chair of the Poetry Book Society for four years. She has (twice) been a judge for the Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Both a writer and a critic, she is currently President of the British Literature an Science Society and of the Modern Humanities Research Association, and is on the Council of Arts Council England, East. Penguin is publishing her annotated and collected edition of Lewis Carroll's poems later this year and she is finishing a study of the 'Alice' books.

 

Chris Bigsby

Christopher Bigsby, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, is an award winning academic, novelist and biographer. His first novel (of five), Hester, won the McKitterick Prize. Beautiful Dreamer (2002) was an American Library Association Notable Book. With Don Wilmeth, he won the Bernard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History and the George Freedley Jury Award for The Cambridge History of the American Theatre. His biography of Arthur Miller was shortlisted for the James Taite Black Memorial Prize, the Sheridan Morley Prize and the George Freedley Memorial Award. It was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 and was joint winner of the American Studies network Award. His is also winner of the Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama.

 

Julia Bird

Julia Bird grew up in Tetbury, Gloucestershire and now lives in south London. She studied English Language & Literature at Reading University and has an M.A. in Creative Writing & Education from the University of Sussex. Her first job (after the summers spent behind the till of a pick & mix sweetshop) was in an arts centre in the Cotswolds where she devised educational activities based on the centre’s theatre, fine art, music, craft and literature programme. She moved to London in 1997 to work for the Poetry Book Society where she stayed for eight years before moving to the Poetry School part-time and also setting up a small independent literature promotion company, Jaybird. As a freelancer, she has managed UK-wide author tours for the British Council and the Poetry Translation Centre. She also produces touring live literature poetry shows - What Are They Whispering?, her current show, will be on the road in Autumn 2011.  She started writing in her mid-twenties and her work was been published in various print and online magazines as well as in fresco form on the walls of the Arts Council England, London’s office. Hannah and the Monk, her first poetry collection, was published in 2008 - a second is due in 2012/3.

 

Alfred Birnbaum

Writer/translator/artist Alfred Birnbaum has lived in Japan for over thirty years. Born in Washington DC, he first came to Japan in 1960, attended primary school and high school in Tokyo, received a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship for studies in Japanese art history at Waseda University 1977-78, then trained in tea ceremony aesthetics at Urasenke 1979-80, and has been based in Japan almost continuously ever since.

Alongside activities in art—as curator of two major international exhibitions of video art in Tokyo and member of the Kyoto-based media art performance group Dumb Type—since 1980 Birnbaum has translated in the fields of art, architecture, design and contemporary fiction, as well as writing short stories and articles in Japanese magazines on Asian pop culture. He translated the early novels of Haruki Murakami—including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—along with more recent works by Miyabe Miyuki, Ikezawa Natsuki and others. He and his wife's co-translation of the contemporary Burmese novel Smile as They Bow by Nu Nu Yi Inwa was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Asia Literary Prize.

 

Jean Boase-Beier 

Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation and Head of the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she runs the MA in Literary Translation and supervises many PhD students working on the theory and practice of translation. She has been  an Executive Committee member of the British Comparative Literature Association for several years, and runs the international John Dryden Translation Competition on behalf of the Association. Besides writing academic articles and books (- the most recent are Stylistic Approaches to Translation, which appeared with St Jerome in 2006 and  A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, appearing with Continuum this month - ), she is a  translator between German and English and the editor of the Visible Poets series of bilingual poetry books for Arc Publications. Among other works she has translated the poetry of Rose Ausländer and Ernst Meister for Arc.

 

Amy Botfield

Amy Botfield is Relationship Manager, Literature at Arts Council England where she works with a range of arts organisations including the British Centre for Literary Translation, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Writers’ Centre Norwich. Arts Council England works to get great art to everyone by championing, developing and investing in artistic experiences that enrich people's lives. It supports a range of artistic activities from theatre to music, literature to dance, photography to digital art, and carnival to crafts. Between 2011 and 2015, Arts Council England will invest £1.4 billion of public money from the government and a further £0.85 billion from the National Lottery to create these experiences for as many people as possible across the country. Amy is also a writer and editor in the field of contemporary art.

John Boyne

John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of seven novels for adults and two for younger readers. His 2006 novel, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, topped the New York Times bestseller list, won several international literary awards and was made into a Miramax feature film. His subsequent novels Mutiny On The Bounty, The House of Special Purpose and Noah Barleywater Runs Away  have all been international bestsellers. His new novel, The Absolutist, is published in May 2011. His novels are published in over 40 languages.

 

 

James Bridle

James Bridle is a writer, publisher and artist based in London, UK. He investigates the intersections of literature and technology by making things with books and the internet. He has published 18th century erotica, the first book of Twitter and a historiography of Wikipedia, and created quietube, an accidental anti-censorship proxy for the Middle East.

He can be found at http://booktwo.org

 

 

Urvashi Butalia 

Urvashi Butalia is a publisher, writer and feminist based in India. Co-founder of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, she is now Director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. She has a long involvement in the women’s movement in India and has writes narrative non fiction on her work with women, and on issues of identity, religious fundamentalism, memory, democracy and the state. She has several publications to her credit, including Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (2002, edited); Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (1995, co-edited). Her best known work is the award winning oral history of the Partition of India: The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (winner of the Oral History Book Association Award 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture 2003, and translated into several languages). She is currently working on two other books – a collection of writings on India entitled The India Reader (forthcoming Duke University Press) and a book on the life of an Indian eunuch: Mona: A Sort of Life/A Life of Sorts.

 

AS Byatt

A S Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Her most recent novel, The Children’s Book was published in 2009. Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

 

 

 

 

Jane Camens

Jane Camens last year won the Fish Publishing Short Story prize. Some of her other stories have been broadcast on the BBC World Service and published in Asian literary journals and anthologies, including City Voices: Contemporary Hong Kong Writing in English (Hong Kong University Press) Terra: A Bilingual Anthology in Bhasa Indonesian and English. She co-founded Hong Kong’s International Literary Festival, the first international writers’ festival in Asia to focus on writing from the region, and now runs the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership. She is also the editor a bi-monthly magazine produced by the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre which annually organizes the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival near her home in northern New South Wales, Australia. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and MFA in Writing Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Catherine Cole

Professor Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Creative Arts, Wollongong University, NSW, Australia. She has published three novels, (Dry Dock, Skin Deep and The Grave at Thu Le), two non-fiction books, (Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction and The Poet Who Forgot.) She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam (UWA Press, 2010) and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, (Berg UK and USA, May 2009). Cole also has published poetry, short stories, essays and reviews.

 

Jon Cook

Professor Jon Cook is Chair of Arts Council England, East He is Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.The focus of his teaching and research has been on romantic and modern literature. He has supervised a large number of PhD students on subjects in modern literature, literature and philosophy, and creative and critical writing and he was convenor of the MA in creative writing at UEA from 1986-1996. He has taught at universities in the United States, Europe and India, most recently as a Hurst Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. He is on the international advisory board of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College and a Literature advisor to the British Council. His recent publications include Poetry in Theory (2004) and a biographical study, Hazlitt in Love (2007).He played an active role in establishing Writers' Centre Norwich and the Worlds programme, and has hosted and chaired the Salon since its inception in 2005.

 

Andrew Cowan

Andrew Cowan is the Director of the MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) at the University of East Anglia, and the author of four novels, including Pig, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award among several other literary prizes. Common Ground and Crustaceans both received competitive Arts Council bursaries. What I Know was the recipient of an Arts Council Writers' Award.  His guidebook The Art of Writing Fiction is published by Pearson Longman this spring.

 

 

 

Stephanie Cross

Stephanie Cross was born in Norwich in 1979 and has lived in Norfolk for much of her life. She studied at the University of Cambridge, gaining a BA in English from Emmanuel College, and an M.Phil in English Studies: Culture and Criticism (Distinction) from Selwyn College. During the course of this latter degree she specialised in psychoanalytic literary theory, and also wrote extensively on the work of W.G. Sebald. She was subsequently commissioned by the Writers’ Centre Norwich to present a meditative personal essay on Sebald and Somerleyton to the 2009 Worlds Festival.  In 2006 she won a place on the Writers’ Centre Norwich’s ‘Escalator’ talent programme for emerging prose writers in the eastern region, and in 2010 was short listed for the post of ‘Curious Thinker in Residence’ by the Society for Curious Thought. She has recently moved to Hampstead, and is currently researching a non-fiction project based around the psychoanalytic communities in London and New York.

 

Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson is the author of seven novels and editor of six anthologies. Fred & Edie was short-listed for The Whitbread and Orange Prize and Watch Me Disappear was long-listed for the Orange. The Great Lover, a novel about Rupert Brooke, was a best-seller and a Richard and Judy Summer Read.  Her new novel Lucky Bunny, has been optioned by the BBC for a three-part drama and is published this summer. Until recently Jill was a Board Member of Writers’ Centre Norwich. Translated into more than a dozen languages, she has won awards for poetry and screenplays.  In 2003 she held the Creative Writing Fellowship at UEA, and taught on the MA.  Her CW teaching spans twenty-five years and many countries including the USA, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand.   In 2006 Jill was awarded an honorary doctorate. She mentors new writers under a scheme she founded: www.gold-dust.org.uk.

 

C.J Driver

C.J. (“Jonty”) Driver is a poet, novelist and essayist. For many years a teacher, he is now a full-time writer, living in East Sussex, but traveling regularly to his country of birth and upbringing, South Africa. He was President of the National Union of South African Students, 1963 and 1964, and was held in solitary confinement under Ninety Day Detention by the South African police in 1964. Refused the renewal of his passport while a postgraduate student at Oxford, he became stateless before getting British citizenship; his first two novels were banned in South Africa and he was a prohibited immigrant until 1991. He has been an honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at UEA since 2007. He was a judge of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2007 and again in 2008. He was a research fellow at the University of York in 1976 and more recently has held residencies at the Liguria Study Centre in Bogliasco, at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and at the international writers’ retreat in Hawthornden Castle, Scotland.

See also www.jontydriver.co.uk

Maureen Freely

Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Istanbul, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has made her home in England for the past twenty-five years. She is the author of six novels, as well as three works of non-fiction. Her most recent novel, Enlightenment, was published in 2007. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. Now a Professor at the University of Warwick, she is perhaps best known for her translations of the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

 

Vesna Goldsworthy

Vesna Goldsworthy is Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. She studied at the Universities of Belgrade and London. A former BBC journalist, Vesna scripts and presents programmes for British and European radio and television. Her recent productions include “Finding a Voice in a Foreign Country”, a look at foreign writers writing in English, which was broadcast on BBC Radio Four in October 2010. Her books, including Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale, 1998), a seminal study of cultural representations of the Balkans, and Chernobyl Strawberries (Atlantic, 2005), a bestselling memoir about growing up in Belgrade under Tito, have been translated into many languages. Chernobyl Strawberries was serialized in The Times and on the BBC. In Germany, where it was published in 2006 as Heimweh nach Nirgendwo (Homesick for Nowhere), it had thirteen editions in the year of publication.

 

Linor Goralik 

Linor Goralik was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1975 and emigrated to Israel before moving to Moscow in 2001.

She has published a number of prose books including two novels written in collaboration: No was co-authored with Sergey Kuznetsov; and Half of the Sky, with Stanislav Lvovsky. Both were published in 2004. She has produced several poetry collections, with many pieces appearing in journals such as Novy Mir and Vozdukh, as well as publishing two children’s stories. As a journalist Goralik is constantly writing articles for leading periodicals and magazines, including Vedomosti, Snob and the New Literary Observer. She has written an essay: "Hollow Woman: Barbie's World Inside Out", which explores the cultural roles and meanings of a Barbie doll.

As an artist Goralik has participated in a number of exhibitions. Her latest solo exhibition - God's Every Day - took place in the newly built Perm Museum of Modern Art. She is also the author of Hare PZ! comic books.

 

Kate Griffin 

Kate Griffin is working with Writers Centre Norwich on international programme development. This is alongside her half-time role as interim director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. She is on the board of Modern Poetry in Translation and the Next Page Foundation in Bulgaria, and is a member of English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee. From 2004 to 2010 she was a judge of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She worked as an international literature officer at Arts Council England from 2001 to 2010, developing translation-related projects in the Middle East, China and Europe. This was followed by a stint at PEN International, co-ordinating the network of Free the Word! festivals around the world. In the 1990s she lived and worked in Brussels and Moscow.
www.kategriffin.org

 

Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman lives in the UK and works as a free-lance translator. Contemporary Chinese literary translation is a great passion and she's working on many different kinds of writing within that broad category: novels, short stories, non-fiction and – most recently – poetry. She has translated the work of: Xinran, Zhang Ling, Han Dong, Mian Mian and Yan Geling, taught on a translation studies course at Imperial College London and is actively involved in the website for Chinese–to–English translators, Paper Republic. Nicky Harman often gives talks and workshops on aspects of Chinese–to–English translation and is taking up a new post this autumn for three months, as translator–in–residence at the Free Word Centre, London.

 

 

Maja Hrgovic

Maja Hrgovic was born in Split, Croatia, in 1980. She graduated in Croatian and English language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. Since 2003, she's worked as a journalist in Novi list, Croatian national daily newspaper, covering culture and gender issues. As a fellow in prestigious regional project "Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence" in 2009, she did a research on socio-economic migrations of women in Eastern Europe and won the first prize for investigative reporting (Journalistic Excellence Award by BIRN, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network). Her journalistic work has been represented in numerous international media, including the book "Identity: The Search for Belonging in a Changing Europe". Her fiction has been included in several collections, including the anthology of best Croatian short stories of 2007. (Najbolje hrvatske price 2007.), Best European Fiction 2012 (edited by Alexandar Hemon and published by Dalkey Archive Press) and, most recently, The Granta Magazine. Her first short story collection Pobjeduje onaj kojem je manje stalo won the national Kiklop award for the best newcomer of the year 2010. Currently she is working on the novel Ostatak svijeta, helped by the writers' stipend from Central European Initiative and Vilenica Festival.

 

Natsuki Izekawa

Writer, translator, critic. Born in Hokkaido, July 1945. Majored in Physics at Saitama University. Began writing poetry in his 20s and novels in his 30s. An inveterate traveller who has lived in Greece and France, his works focus on relations between humans and nature and encounters with “others.” Visited Iraq in autumn 2002, four months prior to the war. Since March, his immediate thoughts and efforts concern Japan’s earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crises.

 

 

 

Gail Jones

Gail Jones is an Australian writer, author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry and most recently, Five Bells. She is the recipient of a number of literary prizes, residencies and awards and is Professor of Writing at the University of Western Sydney.

 

 

Manu Joseph

Manu Joseph was born in Kottayam, in the south Indian state of Kerala. Serious Men, his first novel, is the winner of The Hindu Best Fiction Award, and (at time of sending this note), shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Fiction. He is the editor of the Indian newsweekly, Open, and writes the ‘Letter From India’ for the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. He lives in Delhi. The UK publisher of Serious Men is John Murray. The author’s literary agent is Isobel Dixon of Blakefriedmann in London.

Website: manujoseph.com

 

 

David Karashima

David Karashima is responsible for The Nippon Foundation's 'Read Japan' programme aimed at supporting the translation of contemporary Japanese literature. His translations have been published by Penguin, Random House and Faber & Faber, and his novel The Making of the Next Kamimura was published by Kodansha in 2010.

Visit David Karashima's website here.

Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s first novel, The Longshot (2009), was a finalist for the 2010 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and is currently being developed into a feature film by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock).  She writes regular art criticism for Frieze, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired.  She served as creative consultant on the three-part documentary for Channel 4 television, "The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema", featuring philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Kitamura was educated at Princeton and London Universities, and currently lives in New York City.

 

Andrey Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels.

 

 

 

 

Dmitry Kuzmin 

Dmitry Kuzmin, born in 1968, graduated from Moscow State University for Pedagogics and taught literature, working as an Assistant Professor of Foreign Literature and Literary Translation. In 1989 Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets, the organisational hub for Moscow's experimental poetry scene. In 1996 he started the Vavilon Internet project, an online anthology of contemporary Russian writing. Since 1993 he has been the Head of ARGO-RISK Publishers publishing about 20 new poetry titles annually.

He has run several periodicals including the first Russian magazine for gay writing Risk. He is currently editor in chief of Vozdukh, a quarterly poetry magazine. His poetry has been published in translation in many US journals including A Public Space and Words Without Borders, and in two anthologies.  Kuzmin’s poems have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Polish, and Serbian.

 

Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth Lewis was appointed Wales's first National Poet in 2005. She has published nine books of poetry in Welsh and English. Gwyneth wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of Cardiff's new Wales Millennium Centre, which has become an icon for the whole of Wales. In 2010, Gwyneth was given a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors for a distinguished body of work. Gwyneth has also published two non-fiction works, written libretti for Welsh National Opera and has just written two stage plays.

In the past Gwyneth studied in the US as a Harkness Fellow Harvard andthe Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University in the City of New York. She’s been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and at the Stanford Humanities Center. She’s currently Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner at Girton College, Cambridge.

 

John McAuliffe

John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Ireland. He has published three books with the Gallery Press, A Better Life (2002, shortlisted for a Forward Prize), Next Door (2007) and Of All Places (forthcoming, 2011).  He publishes reviews and essays on contemporary and twentieth-century poetry and co-directs one of the UK’s leading creative writing programmes at the Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester where he also edits the online journal The Manchester Review and the popular online poetry digest, The Page.

 

Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976. He moved with his family to England and spent his childhood in Norwich and Thetford, Norfolk, later studying at Bradford University for a degree in Media Technology and Production. He started writing seriously during his final year at University, contributing a series entitled 'Cinema 100' to the anthology Five Uneasy Pieces (Pulp Faction). He has had short fiction published by Granta magazine, and a short story entitled 'While You Were Sleeping' broadcast on Radio 4.

He was the youngest contender and only first novelist on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize, for If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. The Sunday Times named it a  ' … triumphant prose-poem of ordinariness …', celebrating  ' … the miraculousness of the everyday.'  It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and to be shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best First Book) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways To Begin, was published in 2006. His most recent book is a third novel, Even The Dogs (2010).

 

Joyelle McSweeney 

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the lyric novels Flet (Fence, 2008) and Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) as well as the poetry volumes The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004) and The Red Bird (Winner, Fence Modern Poets Series, 2001). Her prose, poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, How2, Jubilat, Conduit, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere, and is featured in such anthologies as My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande 2006). She is also a co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, as well as a contributing editor of the collective culture blog Montevidayo. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. A new volume of poems and plays, Percussion Grenade, is forthcoming from Fence in Spring 2012, and a new prose volume, Salamandrine, 8 Gothics, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press in Fall 2012. The Necropastoral, an artist’s book featuring engravings, collages, essays and poems was produced in collaboration with Andrew Shuta, was published by Spork Press in 2011.

 

Christopher Merrill

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water  and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many works of translation and edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. A new nonfiction book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, will appear in September. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his honors include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government, and his journalism appears in many publications. He directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

 

Kei Miller

Kei is a poet, novelist, occasional essayist and at last, a blogger. These days, he walks about with his camera a lot. At home he has a cat who is suspiciously fond of the delete button on his laptop. It works though — this relationship. For a regular supply of sardine, Metu (the cat) edits him ruthlessly. For 30 years, Kei has lived under a saltire flag.

 

 

 

Martin Pick

Martin Pick is a former publisher and now a literary agent (Chair of Charles Pick Consultancy and of Tibor Jones). He set up the Charles Pick Fellowship at UEA in 2001 for an unpublished writer.
He campaigns for human rights issues worldwide and especially for artists and writers, and is a writing mentor at the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture.

 

 

Claire Potter

Claire Potter was born in Perth and educated at the universities of Western Australia, New South Wales and Paris 7 where, under the auspices of a French Embassy Scholarship, she wrote her Masters thesis on the setting in psychoanalysis and tragedy. In 2006, she received an Australian Young Poets Fellowship and was mentored by Kevin Hart. She has two pamphlets, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, Sydney, 2006) and N’ombre (Vagabond, Sydney, 2007), and her first full-length collection, Swallow, was published in 2010 with Five Islands Press, Melbourne. Her poetry has been Highly Commended in the Gwen Harwood 2010 Poetry Prize and featured in Best Australian Poems 2010 (ed. Robert Adamson). After five years teaching, translating and studying in Paris, she now lives and works in London.

 

Alex Preston

Alex Preston was born in 1979. He lives in London with his wife and two children. He used to work as a trader in the City and is now studying at UCL for his PhD on Violence in the Novel. This Bleeding City is his first book, and is published by Faber and Faber in the UK, and across eleven further territories. It won the Spear’s and Edinburgh Festival first book prizes. Alex’s next novel, The Full Fathom Five, will be published by Faber in January 2012. Alex also writes a fortnightly column in the New Statesman and the lyrics of some of his brother’s songs. He studied English under Tom Paulin at Hertford College, Oxford.


Shyam Selvadurai

Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo Sri Lanka. Funny Boy, his first novel was published to acclaim in 1994 and won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and The Lambda Literary Award in the U.S. He is the author of Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea and the editor of an anthology, Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. His newest book, The Hungry Ghosts, will be published in 2012. His books have been published in the U.S, U.K and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey and Israel.

 

Rebecca Swift

Rebecca Swift, writer and editor is co-founder and Director of The Literary Consultancy. For seven years she worked at Virago Press, where she first conceived of the idea for TLC. Amongst her publications are a volume of letters between Bernard Shaw and Margaret Wheeler, Letters from Margaret: The Fascinating Story of Two Babies Swapped at Birth (1992) and Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers, a book of conversations between writer A.S. Byatt and psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre  (1995). Rebecca has also had poetry published in Virago New Poets (1990), Vintage New Writing 6 (1995), Driftwood, US, (2005), and Staple (2008). A libretto written by Rebecca Swift was funded by the Arts Council of England. The opera, composed by Jenni Roditi, and called ‘Spirit Child’, was performed at Ocean, Hackney, in London in 2001. Rebecca has also written and reviewed for The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian. Dickinson: Poetic Lives, a biography of Emily Dickinson, was published by Hesperus in February 2011.             
Rebecca is a trustee of the Writers' Centre Norwich and has appeared at numerous literary festivals and on many panels talking about the work of TLC and the relationship between writers and the publishing industry.

 

George Szirtes

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Hewas educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as atranslator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009). Bloodaxe has also published John Sears’ critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia. Photo courtesy of Clarissa-Upchurch.

Cab Tran

Cab Tran is the 2010/11 David T. K. Wong Fellow.  He was born in 1978 in the village of Vam Cong in Vietnam.  As part of the diaspora following the war, he left at eighteen months with his father and pregnant mother (his brother was born en route to the United States). Cab spent his childhood in rural Oregon, where his parents still work in a potato factory.  In 1997 he pursued a secondary education at the University of Montana, but discontinued his studies after six years to focus on other non-academic interests. Cab has recently been published in Black Warrior Review and 580 Split.

 

 

 

C. K. Williams

C. K. Williams’ most recent book of poems, Wait, was published in 2010, as was his study of Walt Whitman, On Whitman.  His Collected Poems appeared in 2006, and he has previously published nine other books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the National Book Award for 2003.  His previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and an earlier work, Flesh and Blood, the National Book Critics Circle Award.  

He has published translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others.  His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998, and a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000.  A new book of essays will be published some time in the next few years. Among his other recognitions, he has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN lifetime achievement award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Grants, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.    

Luke Williams

Luke Williams was born in 1977 and grew up in Fife, Scotland. He studied History at Edinburgh University, and Creative Writing at UEA. In 2003, he was a recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship. His first novel, The Echo Chamber, will be published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton in May 2011 and in the US by Penguin Viking in August 2011.  Luke's practice is research-based and informed by his studies in History: through his work he seeks to interrogate the formal gap between history and story. He divides his time between Edinburgh and London.

 

 

 

Evie Wyld

Evie Wyld is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA in Creative Writing. In 2009 her first novel After the Fire a Still Small Voice was published and won the John Llewllyn Rhys prize, and a Betty Trask award. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. In 2011 she was listed by The Culture Show as one of their Best New British Writers. Her short stories have been published in various magazines including Granta and Vogue. She has also written various non-fiction pieces for The Observer, The Telegraph and the Guardian. She is currently writing a second novel and a piece of graphic memoir while working in an independent bookshop in Peckham, London.

 

Xu Xi

Xu Xi  has published eight books of fiction and essays and edited three anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English.  Her most recent title is the novel Habit of a Foreign Sky (Haven Books, 2010), a finalist for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize.  A story collection, Access: Thirteen Tales (Signal 8 Press), is forthcoming in 2011-12.  Her fiction and essays are included in the recent anthologies The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler, The Jazz Fiction Anthology, Another Kind of Paradise and Imagining Globalization, and new work appears in the journals Hotel Amerika, Wasafiri, Muse, Cutthroat, Memorious and Upstreet.  She splits life between Hong Kong and New York, and has been known to inhabit the flight path connecting both points with the South Island of New Zealand.  She has been visiting writer or in residence at several universities and arts centers internationally, most recently the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction program.  She is the current faculty chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Writing.  Her MFA (fiction) is from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  In 2010, she joined City University of Hong Kong as their full-time Writer-in-Residence and established an international, low-residency MFA that specializes in writing of Asia in English, the first such program anywhere. Website: www.xuxiwriter.com
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