Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Granta, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Booker Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright legacy award for debut fiction. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction in 2007. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005–6 academic year. She lives in Nigeria.
Anonymous is a well travelled man/woman of the world who has been known to swing, ménage, fall in love and – on occasion – to write.
Margaret Atwood’s books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children. Her novels include Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. They are the joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International.
Chris Bachelder was born in 1971. He is a frequent contributor to the publications McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the Believer. He is the author of three novels: Bear v. Shark, Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography, and U.S.! His work also appears in New Stories from the South 2006, the Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, and Mother Jones.
Peter Behrens is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter who lives in Maine and Los Angeles. Behrens was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His short stories have appeared in Tin House and the Atlantic Monthly, and in numerous anthologies. His novel The Law of Dreams received rave reviews in The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and won the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Canada’s highest literary honour.
David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. In 1980 he emigrated with his parents to Toronto, where he lives today. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth First Book, Regional Prize, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in the same year. His stories have appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Walrus. David’s stories have also been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2005, 2006. David is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow.
Joseph Boyden is a Canadian writer with Irish, Scottish and Métis roots. His first novel Three Day Road won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. He is the author of Born with a Tooth, a collection of stories that was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. He divides his time between northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.
Tessa Brown is a senior at Princeton University, where she is writing a joint thesis under the Religion and Creative Writing departments. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s magazine and New Sudden Fiction, and she has written book reviews for the Forward. She grew up in Chicago, which she still calls home.
Leonard Cohen is a writer and composer. His artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He has published two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, and ten books of poetry, most recently Book of Longing. He has recorded seventeen albums, including Songs From a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, I’m Your Man, The Future and Ten New Songs. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Montreal.
Douglas Coupland has written ten novels, including Generation X, Life after God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming and jPod. His writing has been translated into twenty-two languages, and appeared in over thirty countries. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Republic and ArtForum. His most recent novel is jPod, which was longlisted for the 2006 Giller Prize.
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local grammar school and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes; and four genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist, in the US, for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do it (winner of the 2004 W.H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography). He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.
Michel Faber is a novelist and short-story writer. Born in Holland, he moved with his family to Australia in 1967 and has lived in Scotland since 1992. His short story ‘Fish’ won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and is included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His most recent short-story collection is The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories (2005). His first novel, Under the Skin (2000), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and he has also won the Neil Gunn Prize and an Ian St James Award. Other fiction includes The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (1999), a novella, The Courage Consort (2002), the story of an a cappella singing group, and the highly acclaimed novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).
Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. His New York Times bestselling 2001 novel for adults, American Gods, was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX and Locus awards, was nominated for many other awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and appeared on many best-of-year lists. Anansi Boys débuted on the New York Times Bestseller list in September, 2005. He has written screenplays (Mirrormask); the script for Beowulf, with Roger Avary, and is co-author, with Terry Pratchett, of Good Omens which spent seventeen consecutive weeks on the Sunday Times (London) bestseller list in 1990. He is also the creator/writer of monthly cult DC Comics horror-weird series, Sandman, which won nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. He has written children’s books, plays and television series. Born and raised in England, Neil Gaiman now lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963 and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Galgut is the author of several novels and one short-story collection. His début novel, A Sinless Season, was published when he was just seventeen. His other novels include The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, winner of the 1992 CNA Literary Award (South Africa’s highest literary honour), A Small Circle of Beings, and The Quarry, which was adapted as a feature film that won the award for Best Film at the 1998 Montreal Film Festival. Galgut’s last novel, The Good Doctor (2003), was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book from the region of Africa.
Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied Engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His first book, the critically acclaimed Little Infamies (2002), is a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and his second book, The Maze (2004), a novel set in Anatolia in 1922, was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel The Birthday Party was published in July 2007. Panos Karnezis lives in London.
A. L. Kennedy has published five novels, two books of non-fiction, and four collections of short stories. She has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a number of prizes including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. She lives in Glasgow.
Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967 and is one of the leading voices in Israeli literature and cinema. He has published four books of short stories and novellas, four graphic novels and one feature screenplay. His books, bestsellers in Israel, have been published in twenty-six different languages. His first film, Malka Red-Heart, won the Israeli ‘Oscar’ for best television drama, as well as acclaim at several international film festivals, and his most recent, Jellyfish, won the prestigious 2007 ‘Camera d’Or’ Award, at the 60th Cannes Festival. His first collection of stories to be published in the UK was The Nimrod Flip-Out and his second collection, Missing Kissinger, was published in 2007. Keret teaches in Ben Gurion University’s Hebrew Literature department.
Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and the short story collection Noise (2005). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask Prize of the Society of Authors and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its Best of Young British novelists. He sits on the Executive Council of PEN and is a member of the editorial board of Mute magazine.
Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Northern Ireland. He was a scholar at Cambridge University, spent a year at Harvard University as a Visiting Fellow and worked as a lawyer. He is the author of one novel, Utterly Monkey, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and his first poetry collection, To a Fault published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection). He has received several prestigious awards for both poetry and fiction, including the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His poetry and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review and the London Review of Books. He published a second poetry collection with Faber, On Purpose, in August 2007. He lives in Rome.
Phil LaMarche’s first novel, American Youth, was hailed by the Guardian as being a ‘superbly edgy portrait of individual infighting and a community’s uneasy, prideful attitude towards gun culture and nationhood’. LaMarche was a writing fellow in the Syracuse University graduate creative writing program, awarded the Ivan Klíma Fellowship in fiction in Prague and a Summer Literary Seminars fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia. His short story In the Tradition of My Family, was published in the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories anthology and has been made into a film by Later Productions. LaMarche lives in central New York State.
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, the daughter of writer Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. Le Guin is the author of more than three dozen books, including the multi-award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. She was awarded a Newbery Honor for the second volume of the Earthsea Cycle, The Tombs of Atuan, and among her many other distinctions are the Margaret A. Edwards Award, a National Book Award, and five Nebula Awards. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including Motherless Brooklyn (1999), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Salon Book Award and Esquire’s Novel of the Year, and The Fortress of Solitude (2003). His latest book of essays is The Disappointment Artist (2004). In September 2005, he was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the ‘genius grant’. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Sam Lipsyte’s most recent novel is Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book for 2005. He is also the author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive. His work has appeared in many newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Quarterly, Open City, N+1, Slate, McSweeney’s, Esquire, Bookforum, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He teaches at Columbia University in New York City.
Gautam Malkani was born in west London in 1976. He is a journalist at the Financial Times and is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Londonstani.
Valerie Martin was born in Sedalia, Missouri, and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, where her father was a sea-captain. She is the author of seven novels, including Mary Reilly, The Great Divorce, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). A new novel, Trespass, was published in 2007. Valerie Martin has taught in writing programmes at Mount Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in upstate New York.
Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in the UK since 1986. His first novel, In the Country of Men, received praise from notable figures such as J.M. Coetzee and was shortlisted for both the Guardian First Book Award and the Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth First Book Prize for Europe and South Asia, the RSL Ondaatje Award, the Vallonbrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize and the Slaiano International Literature Prize.
Jan Morris is a Welsh writer and British historian born in 1926. Morris is considered one of the most influential travel writers in the world, best known for the trilogy Pax Britannica, a history of the British Empire, and for her detailed portraits of Venice, Oxford, Trieste and New York City. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Wales and the University of Glamorgan. In 1999 Morris accepted the honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Morris has published over two dozen books and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing and fine edition book production. She shows her artwork at Printworks Gallery in Chicago and is the author of a number of novel-length visual books and the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife (2004) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2004 and won the Sainsbury’s popular fiction award at the British Book Awards in 2006. The recipient of numerous grants, she lives in Chicago.
Jeff Parker has published one novel, Ovenman, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hobart and many other publications. He collaborated with artist William Powhida on a collection of stories and images called The Back of the Line. With Mikhail Iossel he edited the anthology Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, and he is the Russia Programme Director of Summer Literary Seminars in St Petersburg. Parker teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.
Francine Prose is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including, most recently, A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities such as Harvard, Iowa, Columbia, Arizona and the New School. She is a distinguished critic and essayist, the recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Prose lives in New York City.
James Robertson is the author of three novels, The Fanatic (2000), Joseph Knight (2003), which was awarded the two major Scottish literary awards in 2003–2004 – the Saltire Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year – and The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. He has also published stories, poetry, anthologies and essays. He served as the Scottish Parliament’s first writer in residence in 2004 and was selected for a prestigious Creative Scotland Award in March 2006. He lives in Angus.
Graham Roumieu is the creator of In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot (2003), Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir (2005) and the forthcoming Teenstache, Bigfoot: I Not Dead and 101 Ways To Kill Your Boss. Roumieu’s illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s and the Wall Street Journal and his work has received recognition from the Society of Publication Designers, the Society of Illustrators New York, American Illustration, and Communication Arts.
Mandy Sayer won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award with her first novel, Mood Indigo. Since then, she has been named one of Australia’s Best Young Novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald and has published seven books, including the memoir Dreamtime Alice, which has been translated into several languages and won the National Biography Award. In 2006, her second memoir, Velocity, won the South Australian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her latest novel, The Night has a Thousand Eyes, is a literary thriller of three children on the run from their murderous father. Sayer has BA and MA from Indiana University and a Doctrate from the University of Technology, Sydney. She lives in Sydney.
Lionel Shriver has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, among other publications. She is the author of eight novels, including We Need To Talk About Kevin (2005) which won the Orange Prize in 2005, and The Post-Birthday World, published by HarperCollins in 2007. She lives in London and New York.
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. He has written five collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992; his second book of short stories, Is This the Way You Said?, appeared in 2006 to critical acclaim, and his most recent novel, Between Each Breath, in 2007. He lives in France with his wife and three children.
Miriam Toews was born in Steinbach, Manitoba in 1964 and currently lives in Winnipeg. She writes both fiction and non-fiction in the genres of novel, memoir, magazine, newspaper and radio and her books include Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; Swing Low: A Life and, most recently, A Complicated Kindness which was shortlisted for the 2004 Giller Prize and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2005.
Carl-Johan Vallgren was born in 1964. He is a musician and the author of eight books, including The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot. His novels have been published in twenty-one countries. He currently lives in Stockholm.
M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including The Gunny Sack, winner of a Commonwealth Prize, The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, both winners of the Giller Prize. His most recent novel is The Assassin’s Song. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of the novels Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Boating for Beginners, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, Written on the Body, Art and Lies, Gut Symmetries; a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; two books for children, The King of Capri and Tanglewreck; and a book of essays about art and culture, Art Objects. Her latest book is The Stone Gods.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden (2002) and The Pajamaist (2006). He is also the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (2007). His poems and translations have appeared in many publications, including the Boston Review, Open City, Bomb, the New Republic and The New Yorker. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New School, and works as an editor with Wave Books. In autumn 2007 he became a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas. He lives in New York City.
Juli Zeh was born in 1974 in Bonn. She has worked for the UN in New York, Krakow and Zagreb, and now lives in Leipzig. Her first novel, Adler und Engel (Eagles and Angels, 2001) was awarded the Deutschen Bücherpreis for best first novel, the Bremer Literaturpreis, and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for the best novel by a German-speaking author. Her writing has been translated into over twenty languages.