Blake Morrison

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

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

Eliot Weinberger

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

Fuchsia Dunlop

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

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

Ian Buruma

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mara Moustafine

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

Nathalie Handal

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

Namu

Yang Erche Namu was born into a small Mosuo minority village in the north of Yunnan. At the age of thirteen she left home with a singing troupe and soon found herself in Shanghai with a scholarship to study music. The years that followed brought fame and controversy. Namu’s story runs the gamut, from her poor up bringing to international fame. From a proposal to Nicolas Sarkozy to the self-proclaimed “Biggest Bitch in China.” Namu’s first book, Leaving Mother Lake, describes her youth in a matriarchal society and the hands of fate that guided her to the international stage.

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

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.

Tim Clissold

Tim Clissold has worked in China for sixteen years and traveled there extensively. After graduating in Physics from Cambridge University and working in London, Australia and Hong Kong, he developed a fascination with China. He spent two years studying Mandarin Chinese before cofounding a private equity group that invested in China.

Victor Borg

In nineteen years of writing, Victor Borg has written more than two million words and more than a thousand articles which have been published in more than 100 publications around the world. He has written his own, and contributed to, guide books. His travel stories and articles have been published in publications large and small - in many national newspapers and magazines in many countries, and in some of the world’s most eminent travel publications.

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.

Zachary Mexico

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