Worlds Literature Festival 2010 - Writer Biographies

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; it was read on BBC radio's Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. She has published prize-winning short fiction in a number of anthologies. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City and in 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin's online We Tell Stories project. She writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Penguin published her second novel, The Lessons, in April 2010.


Ellah Allfrey is Deputy Editor of Granta magazine. She worked for five years at Penguin Press before moving to Random House for six years.   As Senior Editor, she was responsible for Jonathan Cape’s acclaimed list of African writers as well as editing a wide range of authors including Carmen Callil, Bettany Hughes, Antony Quinn and Julian Barnes and commissioning highly praised and award winning writers such as Dinaw Mengestu, Evie Wyld and Laura Fish. Since joining the Board of WCN she has been active in the organisational changes and expansion of the company.
 

Steven Amsterdam was born and raised in New York City, and educated at the University of Chicago. He did copywriting in Tokyo, worked on movies in LA, and made wedding cakes on Washington Island, Wisconsin. He also worked in publishing as a cartographer, travel editor, and graphic designer. Leaving New York City for Melbourne in 2003 let him get some writing done. He received a master’s degree in creative writing and a bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of Melbourne. It all makes perfect sense, really. His writing has appeared in Best Australian Stories 2009, Meanjin, Overland, Sleepers Almanac and on fivechapters.com. Things We Didn't See Coming is the first book for Amsterdam, as well as his Australian publisher, Sleepers. The book won The Age's Book of the Year for 2009 and was selected for the curriculum for high school students in two states in Australia starting in 2011. Already published in Australia and North America, the book will be printed in the UK by Harville Secker in August of 2010, with French and Dutch versions to follow in 2011. Amsterdam currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he currently divides his time between working as a palliative care nurse and writing.


Gabeba Baderoon is the author of three poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005) and A Hundred Silences (2006). The Dream in the Next Body was named a Notable Book of 2005 by the Sunday Independent and A hundred silences was a finalist for the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the 2007 Olive Schreiner Award. Her poetry has been widely translated, including in selected volumes in Swedish, Tystnaden innan vi talar (The Silence Before Speaking) (2008) and Spanish, El sueño en el cuerpo venidero (The Dream in the Next Body) (2008). In 2005 she held the Guest Writer Fellowship at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden, and in 2008 was a fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the inaugural Wits Humanities Writer in Residence at the University of Witwatersrand. In 2005, Baderoon received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry.


Christopher Bigsby has published some forty books on aspects of English and American culture, from African American literature and popular culture to theatre. He is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and is also an occasional contributor to BBC Radio, and presented Kaleidoscope (Radio 4) for eight years in the 1980s. His first book was Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66 (1967). He has published five novels: Hester (which won the McKitterick Award for best first novel), Pearl, Still Lives, Beautiful Dreamer and his latest novel, One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights.

Bigsby is highly regarded as an analyst of theatre, and in particular as the definitive commentator on playwright Arthur Miller. Bigsby's books on Miller include, but are not limited to, Remembering Arthur Miller (2005), Arthur Miller & Company (1990), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (1997), Miller: A Critical Study (2005) and the most recent - Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography, was published in November 2008.


Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she runs the MA in Literary Translation. She has translated poetry by Volker von Törne, Rose Ausländer and Ernst Meister and has written extensively on translation, especially the translation of poetry. Her most recent books are (ed., with Michael Holman) The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity, (St Jerome Publishing, 1999), The German Language (with Ken Lodge), published by Blackwell in 2003, Between Nothing and Nothing, a translation of Ernst Meister's poems, published by Arc in 2003 and Stylistic Approaches to Translation, published in 2006 by St Jerome. She is the editor of the series of bilingual poetry books Visible Poets, published by Arc Publications.


Antonia Byatt is Director, Literature at Arts Council England.  She has the overview of Arts Council funding (about £11m per year) across England and works to build partnerships with broadcasters, publishers, libraries and the education sector to provide more opportunities for people to produce and consume creative writing. Before joining Arts Council England, Antonia was Director of the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University (2000 – 2007), an academic research library and cultural centre containing the largest collection of women’s history in the UK. Prior to joining the library, Antonia was Head of Literature and Talks at the South Bank Centre (1993-2000), which involved overseeing the literature programme of around 130 events a year and overall management of the poetry library. She is a governor of the Bishopsgate Institute and since 2008 has been governor of New Buckinghamshire University.


J.M Coetzee is the first author to win the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and a second time for Disgrace in 1999. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and has received numerous other prizes, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Faber Memorial Award, and the Commonwealth Literary Award. His most recent works are Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Summertime (2009). Coetzee was born and grew up in Cape Town. He later worked and taught in London, Texas, and New York before returning to lecture at Cape Town University. He now lives in Adelaide. As well as his thirteen works of fiction and autobiography, J. M. Coetzee is the author of many books of literary criticism.


Professor Catherine Cole is Chair, Creative Writing, RMIT University. 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 forthcoming anthology, Writing 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.  In addition to her Doctorate on politics and crime writing, she has a Masters degree on the short stories of James Joyce and George Moore. She majored in literature and languages in her undergraduate degree.

Cole is a project coordinator and journal editor for The Australian Literary Compendium, a co-project with ABC Radio National which develops web-based resources on Australian Literature for schools and universities in Australia and internationally. Her research also explores the teaching of creative writing, particularly the ways in which memory and place have fashioned literary movements. She has extensive experience of teaching in a number of Australian universities. She has been a Writing and Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK, a resident of the Keesing Studio, Cité International des Arts in Paris, and an Asialink writer-in-residence in Hanoi, Vietnam.

 
Professor Jon Cook is Chair of Arts Council England, East. He is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Professor of Literature, and Director of the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia. The centre hosts the Spring International Literary Festival at UEA and the Visiting Writers' series at the Savile Club in London. 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.


Jill Dawson is the author of six novels, including Fred & Edie (short-listed for The Whitbread and Orange Prize) and Watch Me Disappear (currently being adapted for screen by ITV). Her most recent novel is The Great Lover, about the poet Rupert Brooke; a best-seller and a Richard and Judy Summer Read.  She has also edited six anthologies of short stories and poetry, including two which were co-edited with Australian writer Margo Daly.  Dawson has won awards for poetry and screenplays and held many fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at UEA in Norwich.  Her Creative Writing teaching over twenty years has included the Arvon Foundation, UEA, Bath Spa University, the Faber Academy, The Sunday Times Oxford Literature Festival, the National University of Singapore and many others both nationally and internationally, most recently in Beijing.  Her writing has been widely translated and in she was awarded an honorary doctorate.  She is the deputy editor of the International Literary Quarterly and an Advisory Fellow to the Royal Literary Fund, as well as being a long-standing board member of Writers’ Centre Norwich. She currently mentors writers under a scheme she founded: www.gold-dust.org.uk.


Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and migrated to Australia with her family in 1972. She has taught English at the University of Melbourne, as well as working as an editor and book reviewer. Her novels, The Rose Grower (1999), The Hamilton Case (2003), and The Lost Dog (2008), have been published across the world. She lives in Sydney. Photograph by Virginia Cummins.
 

Isobel Dixon is a literary agent and poet.  Born in South Africa, she has a Masters in English Literature and also in Applied Linguistics from Edinburgh University. She is a director of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London, where she represents writers from around the world, including several prominent South African writers. She regularly does poetry readings and workshops at universities, schools, and creative writing courses, and gives talks on subjects ranging from working in publishing and how to get published, to how to balance the working and creative life.  Her latest poetry collection A Fold in the Map is published by Salt in the UK and Jacana in South Africa. In South Africa, she won the Sanlam Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize for her debut collection Weather Eye, and her work has been translated into German, Dutch, Turkish and French. Photograph by Jo Kearney.


C.J.Driver, usually known as “Jonty”, is South African by ancestry, birth, upbringing and most of his education. Elected President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963 and 1964, he was detained in solitary confinement by the security police in 1964, then came to England.  Deprived of a passport by the South African authorities, he was stateless for five years before becoming a British citizen. After two years’ post-graduate study at Oxford, he was Housemaster of the International Sixth Form Centre at Sevenoaks School (1968-73), Director of Sixth Form Studies at Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive School (1973-78), Research Fellow at the University of York (1976), Principal of Island School, Hong Kong (1978-83), Headmaster of Berkhamsted School (1983-9), and Master of Wellington College (1989-2000).  He has published five novels, six books of poetry (the latest Selected Poems 1960-2004, So Far), a biography as well as a number of “essays in biography”. He is a Trustee of the Beit Trust, and has been honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing of the University of East Anglia since 2006. He was a judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2007 and 2008, held a Bogliasco Fellowship in 2007 and was resident in the Macdowell Colony in the autumn of 2009. Photograph by Ellen Elmendorp.

 
Vesna Goldsworthy was born in 1961 in Belgrade. She was an acclaimed poet and radio presenter when she left Yugoslavia for England in 1986. Since then, she has worked in UK publishing, for the BBC World Service, and as a university teacher. She is currently Reader in English and Creative Writing at Kingston University. She has scripted, produced and presented radio and television programmes with literary and cultural themes in the UK, as well as Ireland, Sweden, Serbia, and other European countries. She reviews for publications in Europe and North America, and has edited Writing Worlds 1: The Norwich Exchanges (2006), a book of conversations with international writers. She has also judged a number of prestigious literary prizes, most recently IMPAC Dublin fiction prize in 2009.

Her first book, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale, 1998) is on the reading lists of some sixty universities world-wide. Her second, a memoir entitled Chernobyl Strawberries, was published by Atlantic in March 2005 to broad critical acclaim. It was serialized in The Times, and read by Vesna herself as Book of the Week on the BBC’s Radio Four. It has been a bestseller in a number of European languages.


Colin Grant is an independent historian. He studied medicine at the Royal London Hospital for five years before joining the BBC, where he works as a producer for the radio science unit. His first book, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey was published by Jonathan Cape in 2008. His next book, I&I, The Natural Mystics, a group biography of the original Wailers (Tosh, Marley and Wailer) will be published by Cape in January 2011. And his memoir, Bageye at the Wheel (from which the Granta story Lino is taken), is due out in February 2012.


Kate Griffin is working freelance after far too many years as a bureaucrat. She specialises in international literature and translation.

 
Graeme Harper is the author of On Creative Writing (2010), among other critical works. He was most recently Paschal P Vacca Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts in the southern USA. His recent creative work – writing as Brooke Biaz -- includes such novels as Camera Phone (2010), Moon Dance (2008) and the forthcoming Medicine (2011), as well as the short story collection and novella Small Maps of the World (2006) and the choral work Seasons (2008), with composer Ed Wright. He was the Creative Writing member of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Steering Committee on Practice-Led Research (2006-2009), and holds doctorates in Creative Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of East Anglia. He is currently a Professor and Honorary Professor of Creative Writing in the UK. Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Routledge), editing the Blackwell Companion to Creative Writing (Blackwell-Wiley) for publication in 2012 and completing a new collection of short stories. 


Dr Valerie Henitiuk is Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and Associate Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. She obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, and currently teaches and researches in Translation Studies and World Literature. Honours include the SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Award and the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal. Her work on gendered translation, translatability, adaptation, East/West cultural contact, women’s writing, and metaphor has been published in such journals as Translation Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and META, and in edited volumes that include Romantic Border Crossings (Ashgate 2008), Teaching World Literature (MLA 2009), Thinking through Translation with Metaphor (St. Jerome 2009), the Dictionary of Bible Translation (Nida Institute, forthcoming) and Women and Translation (University of Ottawa Press, forthcoming). Embodied Boundaries, a monograph on liminality images in women’s writing in English, French and Japanese was published in 2007 by Gateway Press, Madrid.
Henitiuk manages an International Literary Translation Summer School at UEA and edits In Other Words, the journal for literary translators. She has done consultant work establishing translator training in China, and also serves as a faculty member for the Nida School of Translation Studies, held annually in Italy.

 
Dr Kathryn Heyman is a novelist, scriptwriter and writing mentor. Her four novels include The Accomplice and Captain Starlight's Apprentice. She is a regular radio drama writer for the BBC and Storm, her current theatre work with Australia's Flying Fruit Fly Circus, will premier at the Sydney Opera House in 2011. Kathryn Heyman has won an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate and the Southern Arts Awards, and been nominated for the Orange Prize, the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Edinburgh Fringe Critic's Awards, the Kibble Prize (Australia), and the West Australian Premier's Book Awards. In Australia, she was the recipient of a two year Australia Council for the Arts Established Writers Grant (2006 - 2008). Two of Kathryn's novels have been adapted for BBC Radio, and Captain Starlight's Apprentice is in development as a feature film. Kathryn Heyman has taught writing for the University of Sydney and the University of Oxford as well as open courses in Fiji, Australia, Singapore, South Africa and the UK. Kathryn Heyman was the Sottish Arts Council Writing Fellow for the University of Glasgow and the Royal Literary Fund Fellow for Westminster College, Oxford. She mentors new and emerging writers – in Australia, the UK, Spain, Holland and New Zealand -  from draft to publication.


Hanh Hoang is the 2009-2010 David T K Wong fellow at UEA. While at UEA, she is working on a collection of short stories and a novel that takes place in the 60’s. Born in Vietnam and educated in the U.S., Hoang writes about Vietnamese characters who must confront deep-seated customs and traditions, or Vietnamese Americans who experience cultural shocks in America. A frequent theme of Hoang’s fiction has been the dilemmas of a woman, alone, having to come to terms with herself, her family and community. Hoang also writes about coming-of-age characters rebelling against their mothers and strict cultural traditions. Her major characters are usually women, children, animals, and ghosts, and her stories, poems, and nonfiction works have been published in anthologies, magazines, and a book on writing. Hoang was also the winner of the 5th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition in 2005.


Chloe Hooper’s first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, became a New York Times Notable Book, and was short-listed for the 2002 Orange Prize. In 2005 she began following the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee in Far-north Queensland, and her book-length account of the case, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2008), won may Australian literary awards and has been widely published internationally.

 
Simmone Howell grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She spent her teen years writing love odes to eighties pop stars and English essays for her friends. Her novel Notes from the Teenage Underground was awarded the 2007 Victorian Premier's Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Her second novel Everything Beautiful was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Best Writing. Simmone lives in a crumbling cottage in Victoria with her husband, son and an ever-growing pile of records, books and ex-rental videos. Photograph by Mark Stringer.


M.J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and law at the University of Melbourne and worked as a lawyer for several years. How the Light Gets In, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden and Encore Prizes and was also longlisted for The Orange Prize. Her third novel This is How (2010) has received widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into nine languages and is published in fifteen countries. And, in March 2010, This is How was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Hyland lives in Manchester where she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Helen Ivory was born in Luton in 1969 but has lived in Norwich for nearly 20 years. She has worked behind bars, on building sites and with 2000 free range hens. She studied art at Foundation level and has a Cultural Studies Degree from Norwich School of Art and Design. In 1999 she won a major Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for a collection of then unpublished poems.  In 2005 she was given an Art’s Council Writer’s Award. She has two collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books The Double Life of Clocks (2002) and The Dog in the Sky (2006) and her third, The Breakfast Machine has just been published. She has taught creative writing for Continuing Education at UEA for nine years and has been Academic Director there for four. She also teaches on Norwich University College of the Arts’ BA in Creative Writing and MA Writing the Visual.  She is an Editor for the Poetry Archive, a judge for the PBS Pamphlet Choice, and a tutor for the Arvon Foundation.  She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical writing at UEA.

 
Mick Jackson was born in Great Harwood, Lancashire in 1960. He now lives in Brighton. Several things have happened in between (not all of them interesting). He went to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn and studied Drama at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, was a singer in a band for several years and lived in London, before finally accepting that neither thing was doing him much good. He moved to Cambridge, then Norwich where he studied Creative Writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain and after hearing about the eccentric 5th Duke of Portland, decided to write a novel about someone a little similar, but completely made-up.

He has published four books – The Underground Man, Five Boys (both novels) and Ten Sorry Tales and Bears of England which are more akin to ‘folk tales’ or ‘curiosities’. His third novel, The Widow’s Tale was published in March 2010. He is currently working on the next book and a variety of screenplays, including an adaptation of The Underground Man.


Nicholas Jose is an author whose books include the novels Paper Nautilus (1987), Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989, new revised edition 2008), The Rose Crossing (1994), The Custodians (1997), The Red Thread (2002) and Original Face (2005), and the non-fiction works Chinese Whispers, Cultural Essays (1995) and Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (2002). He has written widely on Australian and Asian culture. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Literature of Australia: an anthology (2009).
He is a member of the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, with a Chair in Writing. After teaching at universities in China in 1986-87, he became Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy, Beijing, 1987-90. He was president of Sydney PEN, 2002-05 and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, 2005-08. He is a Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-10.


Kate Kilalea was born in South Africa and studied at the University of Cape Town before moving to the UK in 2005 to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, One Eye’d Leigh, was published by Carcanet in 2009 and shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Kate Kilalea works as a publicist for an architectural practice in London and has contributed writing to a number of design books and magazines. She has received an Arts Council Award for poetry and her poems have appeared in publications including the 2010 Forward Prize Anthology, PN Review and Magma. She has read on the BBC’s arts and culture programme, The Verb, at the Wordsworth Trust Poetry Festival and gives regular readings in London. Photograph by Elena Lammers-Heatherwick.

 
Birgit Larsson is Swedish and Icelandic but has spent her life moving between Europe and the US. In 2009, she was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia to work on her novel in progress, a darkly absurd travel narrative set in the remote corners of Scandinavia. She has degrees in English literature from Harvard and the University of Edinburgh. She worked as an Assistant Editor at W.W. Norton before becoming a Community Outreach Coordinator, mediator, and Restorative Justice facilitator at a non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. She has also been an ESL teacher, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, and a wedding officiant. This upcoming fall she will begin a PhD in Social Work at UEA focused on female juvenile offenders.


Retšepile Makamane was born in Lesotho. She completed her BA in Theatre and Philosophy at NUL (National University of Lesotho). Before coming to England, she lived and worked in Johannesburg for eight years where she studied Drama & Film and worked as a theatre actress and waitress, and later on as a commissioning editor for SABC (The South African Broadcasting Corporation). She has been resident in the UK since 2008. She received an MA in Development Studies and Gender at the University of Leeds in 2009, and is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her short stories have been published in ITCH Magazine in Cape Town, and the Oxford University Press Anthology of African Stories of 2007. She’s writing Tears Without Destinations – the working title of her first novel, and short stories. Her stories concern the lives of the people of South Africa and Lesotho and what they have lived through, first, during Apartheid, and now, in this transitional post-Apartheid period.


John McAuliffe has published two books with The Gallery Press, A Better Life (2002) and Next Door (2007) and a pamphlet A Midgie (2010) with Smith/Doorstop.  A selection will be published in the US by Wake Forest UP in 2011. He was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He lives in Manchester, where he co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and edits the Manchester Review and the online poetry digest thepage.name.
In Spring 2010 he was Visiting Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University.


Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways To Begin. He is the winner of the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. Even the Dogs is his third novel.


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; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several 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. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and he is the book critic for the daily radio news program, The World. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.


Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and New Life. Her translation of Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, Broken Nest and Other Stories, has recently been published. Mohanty's work has appeared in journals and magazines in India, U.S.A., U.K., and France. She has held a fellowship at Germany's Akademie Schloss Solitude, as well as in France and the U.S.A., most recently at Yaddo. She is also a recipient of a Senior Fellowship in Literature from the Indian Ministry of Culture. Mohanty attended the MFA programme in Fiction at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Mohanty is founder editor of the online literature journal Almost Island, and the initiator and organiser of the Almost Island Dialogues, an international writers meet held in New Delhi every year. She is currently on the international faculty of the new Creative Writing MFA at the City University of Hong Kong.


Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta and educated in Calcutta, Oxford, and Cambridge. He reviews fiction for the Times and TIME Magazine Asia and has written for the Guardian, the TLS, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the New York Times, the Boston Review, the Sunday Telegraph and Biblio. He is also a contributing editor to Boston Review. His first novel, Past Continuous (Picador India, 2008), was joint winner of the Vodafone-Crossword Award for best novel of 2008 (along with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies). Neel also won the GQ (India) Writer of the Year award in the magazine’s first Men of the Year awards in September 2009. The UK edition of the novel, titled A Life Apart (Constable), came out in January 2010. He lives in London.

 
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1982 and a second honoris causa degree in 2006 from the University of Antwerp for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition, narrative and literary theory. She has been Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Stanford University and the University of Washington at Seattle as well as a Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at Cambridge. Her most recent award (2009) is Senior Nehru NMML Fellowship. In 1990, Nair got the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition and in 2000 was selected as a 'Face of the Millennium' in a national survey of writers. Called 'the first significant post-modern poet in Indian English', she is currently working on a fourth volume of poems, Shataka – on the Mumbai terror attack.  She is the editor of Biblio, and contributes to major national dailies and magazines, is on the editorial boards of several academic journals and is a frequent panellist on Mark Tully's BBC broadcast 'Something Understood'. Nair’s writing, both creative and critical, has been included on the syllabi of universities such as Chicago, Delhi, Harvard, Kent, Oxford, Toronto, and Washington. In addition, she has delivered plenary at universities across the world from Aarhus and Berkeley to Trieste and Xinxiang. Nair is also editor of Biblio, a leading Indian literary and cultural review journal.  Her great ambition is simply to continue to write and research.


Susanna Nicklin, Director of Literature, joined the British Council from English PEN, the London branch of the international writers’ association, in November 2005. The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organization for educational opportunities and cultural relations. Before that, she worked as an international literary agent, selling translation rights to publishers worldwide. Susanna manages a team of specialist advisors and directs the British Council’s global literature programme, with special responsibility for China, India, and Russia, and major partnerships. She has co-chaired the British Council’s Oxford conference and Cambridge seminar as well as debates and events at international book fairs and festivals. She sits on a variety of literature committees and has judged UK and international prizes, both literary and for literature entrepreneurs.


Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone’s/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the 'Best of Young British Novelists' and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives in London.


Nii Ayikwei Parkes was born in England in 1974 and raised in Ghana. He lives in Manchester. He has performed poetry in the UK, Europe, Ghana and the US and was a 2005 Associate artist-in-residence with BBC Radio 3. In 2007 he was writer-in-residence at California State University and in 2009 was the Booktrust online Writer-in-residence. He is also one of the youngest living writers to be featured in the Poems on the Underground programme in London for his poem Tin Roof. Tail of the Blue Bird is his first novel.


Martin Pick graduated from UEA in social studies in 1967.  He then worked as an editor and publisher with OUP in India and Pakistan between 1967-72, and with Longman and Macmillan in the UK until 1979. He then started his own company, Belitha Press, publishing childrens' non-fiction books, which he ran from 1980-94.  He was  involved in making  many documentaries for Channel 4 during the 1980s. He became a literary agent in 1994 and still acts part-time in this capacity. He was a Council member of Minority Rights Group International from 1998-2006. He is a mentor with the Write to Life group at the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, is Chair of  the Trustees of City and Hackney Mind, is a trustee of Peace Child International.  He is Hon Events Organizer at the Savile Club in London, where he has run an annual UEA/Savile series of literary evenings with Jon Cook for seven years.  He is currently on the Advisory Council for the Sri Lankan Campaign for Peace and Justice, a group seeking to encourage reconciliation in Sri Lanka.

 
Henrietta Rose-Innes is a novelist and short-story writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has written two novels, Shark’s Egg and The Rock Alphabet (2000 and 2004), and edited a miscellany of South African writing, Nice Times! (2006). Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications in South Africa, the UK and Germany. A short story collection, Homing, will appear in 2010, and Dream Homes, a collection of short pieces, came out in German translation in 2008. Her writing has also been translated into Arabic and Romanian. In 2008 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for which she was shortlisted the previous year, and in 2007 she received the Southern African PEN short story award. She was shortlisted for the Willesden Herald short story prize in 2010. She has held writing residencies in Germany, Switzerland, the USA and South Africa. Rose-Innes was born in Cape Town in 1971.


Katri Skala was part of the founding team of Writers’ Centre Norwich, when it was known as the New Writing Partnership, and the first programme director of New Writing Worlds, precursor to the Worlds Literature Festival. Prior to that, she edited with Jon Cook a twice yearly literary magazine, Pretext, based at UEA.  She has worked as a literary programmer, editor, administrator and fundraiser for a number of organisations, including the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and the Arvon Foundation in London. In an earlier life, she was a script editor and developed dramas for ITV, Channel Four and the BBC.  During this time she founded Women in Film & Television, and went on to win a competition for her screenplay, Getting It On. She received an Arts Council of England award in 2007 for her first novel, a work-in-progress, Questions of Pleasure. She left the New Writing Partnership (now WCN) in 2008 to develop her own projects and to write.  Her first story Prelude was published recently by Untitled Books, and her second story, At the Theatre, won special mention in a New York short story competition. 


Adrian Slatcher was born in Walsall, Staffordshire in 1967. He studied English at Lancaster and has an MA in novel writing at Manchester. He writes fiction and poetry, and is also involved in projects that include digital elements. A long-term blogger on literary matters, he has blogged from the last two Worlds festivals.  He has recently published a chapbook of 4 long poetry pieces entitled Extracts from Levona and has a number of pieces available on online. He lives in Manchester where he advises arts organisations on how best to use digital technologies.

 
Rebecca Stott is the author of several academic books on Victorian literature and culture, two books of non-fiction, including a biography of Charles Darwin, Darwin and the Barnacle for Faber (2003), and a cultural history of the oyster. She now works for half the year as a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and the other half as a freelance writer and broadcaster. She spends several hours on the River Cam every week, rowing strokeside in a crew of eight. Rebecca’s first novel, Ghostwalk, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK in 2007, and been translated into 12 different languages including Russian, Serbian and Chinese. It was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award, the Society of Authors First Novel Award and long listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Coral Thief, was published earlier this year.


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 area 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. A biography of Emily Dickinson is forthcoming in September 2010 with Hesperus Press.
             
Rebecca is a trustee of 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 was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator 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.


Zoë Wicomb was born in South Africa. She has in English departments at the University of the Western Cape and at Strathclyde University in Glasgow where she is Emeritus Professor. She  writes fiction as well as critical essays on South African writing and culture.  She lives in Glasgow.  


Evie Wyld’s first novel After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Pantheon in the US. She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009 and is short listed for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award 2010.  She is currently working on a second novel as well as being Writer in Residence for the Book Trust, and working in a small independent bookshop in Peckham, called Review.