Contributors from the archive...

Most of these writers and translators contributed to earlier issues of the Asia Literary Review and are not included in the Contributors section of our current website. Much of their work, however, is accessible to subscribers through our online reader, which we are expanding to include all issues of the Asia Literary Review.


 

ANNE ABAD is a graduate of Ateneo de Manila University. Her work has appeared in the Philippines Free Press, Damazine, Expanded Horizons, the Philippines Graphic magazine and Singapore’s Quarterly Literary Review. She will also feature in the forthcoming Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry.

ERIC ABRAHAMSEN is a freelance translator and literary scout in Beijing, where he has lived since 2001. His translations have appeared in Harper’s and the Guardian, among other publications, and he helps to run Paper Republic, a website dedicated to Chinese literature in translation.

GOPILAL ACHARYA was born in Gelephu, Bhutan, in 1978, and educated in Bhutan and Sweden. He is the author of Bhutanese Folk Tales (from the east and the south) and Dancing to Death (an anthology of poems). His debut novel, With a Stone in My Heart, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. His poems have appeared in international anthologies including The Quest, Blossoms and Rustling Breeze.

JAKE ADELSTEIN was a reporter for Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun from 1993 ᆳsponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. An expert on the country’s organised crime, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He writes for the Daily Beast and Newsweek and is working on his second book, The Last Yakuza.

ZEFFRY ALKATIRI, from Jakarta, is a lecturer and researcher in the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Indonesia. In 2001, his poetry collection From Batavia to Jakarta 1619–1999 received the Best Poetry Award from the Jakarta Arts Council. He has participated in numerous international poetry galas and his poems have been translated into English, Dutch, Portuguese, French and Chinese.

CHARLES ALLEN is an authority on British Indian and South Asian history. In 2004, he was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution to Asian studies. Published work includes: The Taj at Apollo Bunder (with Sharada Dwivedi, 2011); The Buddha and Dr Führer (2009); and God’s Terrorists: the Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (2006). Ashoka the Lost Emperor will be published in October.

KUMKUM AMIN was born in Bombay. Having graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Yale University, and the writing programme at Vermont College, she leads a parallel life as an international public health professional and a writer. She has lived in Ramallah and Jerusalem for the past three years working with Palestinian organisations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

ANU ANAND HALL is a former BBC World Service radio presenter now based in Delhi, where she lives with her husband, the author Tarquin Hall, and their two children. In addition to reporting and broadcasting from India, Anu is developing a series of bilingual Hindi-English ebooks for children.

XENIA ANDREOU was born in Nicosia in 1967. She taught history, which she studied at Southampton and Oxford, at secondary school level. For the past decade, she has been a freelance writer and translator. She lives and works in Nicosia.

AUDRA ANG grew up in Singapore and was a Beijing-based correspondent for The Associated Press from 2002 through 2009 In between meals of ‘saliva chicken’ and Associated Press from 2002 through 2009. In between meals of saliva chicken and ‘fragrant and spicy potato shreds’, she covered disasters, disease and dissent while chronicling the breakneck changes that were convulsing China. Ang also reported from North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is the author of To the People, Food is Heaven.

PROSPER ANYALECHI is the pseudonym of a nightlife worker in Tokyo's Roppongi neighbourhood. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Enugu State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria. His poetry has been published in underground expatriate publications in Tokyo. He lives in Saitama with his wife and two children.

UMA ANYAR is the pen name of photographer Tamarra Kaida. In 1988, she collaborated on The Other Side of the House with Pulitzer-Prize-winner Rita Dove. Her own book of short stories and photographs, Tremors from the Faultline, was published in 1989. Tamarra moved to Bali in 2004 where she writes short stories, reviews books for the Ubud Readers’ and Writers’ Festival, and is finishing her first novel, Matthew and Matilda – A photographic ghost story.

GRAHAM ARNOLD, from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, teaches English in Toronto. His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Echolocation, Event Magazine and Ninth Letter. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and is working on a collection of short stories about Japan as well as a novel set during the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of the 2000 Booker Prizewinning The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy. In 2007, she published Moral Disorder, a collection of interconnected short stories and The Door, a collection of poetry, from which the selection published here is drawn. Her novel, Oryx and Crake, was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and the Giller Prize.

BAE SUAH was born in Seoul 1965. She graduated from Ewha Women's University with a BA in chemistry and made her literary début in 1993 with the short story 'The Dark Room of 1998'. Her short story collections include Highway with Green Apples and The Owl's Absence; her full-length novels include An Essayist's Desk, and Sunday Sukiyaki Restaurant. Bae received the Hanguk Ilbo literary prize in 2003, and the Tongseo literary prize in 2004.

JULIAN BAGGINI is editor and co-founder of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He is the author of several books, including Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (Granta) and Complaint (Profile).

HARTOSH SINGH BAL was born in 1967. He trained as an engineer and a mathematician before turning to journalism. He is co¬author of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel, which won the Association of American Publishers’ award for the Best Professional/ Scholarly Book in Mathematics for 2007. He lives in Delhi, where he is the political editor of Talk, and has worked for the Indian Express, Tehelka and Mail Today. He is currently writing a travelogue set along the Narmada river.

MARCEL BARANG, a French national, has spent more than half his life in Thailand. He is a former journalist who converted in 1993 to full-time literary translation from the Thai, mainly into English and occasionally into French. His work is available as ebooks at Thai Fiction in Translation and he regularly posts some of the best Thai short stories on his Thai-to-English fiction bilingual blog: www.marcelbarang.wordpress.com

JOHN WALL BARGER is a Canadian poet living in Hong Kong. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and The Montreal Prize Global Poetry Anthology. His second collection, Hummingbird, was published in spring 2012.

ANDREW BARKER is a writer and academic whose poetry has been published in the Asia Literary Review, Fifty-Fifty and City Voices: Hong Kong. His first book of poetry, Snowblind from my Protective Colouring, was published by Chameleon Press and the villanelle-sequence ‘Everything in Life is Contagious’ was performed at The Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He has recently completed The Village, a novel in Onegin stanzas set in Hong Kong.

GINA BARNARD, a contributing editor to Poetry International, has been published in New Madrid, Web Del Sol, Poetry Now and Cosumnes River Review and in Japanese translation in Poemaholic Café. She was born in Fussa, Tokyo and spent her early years in Japan and the Sacramento Valley, California. She lives in San Diego.

ALLAN H. BARR was born in Montreal and grew up in the UK, visiting China for the first time as a British Council exchange student in 1977–78. He is the translator of Yu Hua’s debut novel Zai Xiyu Zhong Huhan (Cries in the Drizzle), and his research on Ming and Qing literature has been published both in the West and in China. He is Professor of Chinese at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

PRIYA BASIL was born in London to Indian parents. Her English-sounding surname resulted from a clerical error made in the 1940s in India, from where her grandparents migrated to East Africa. A slip of the pen and Bansil became Basil: a fragrant herbal legacy bestowed. Priya, raised in Kenya, lives in London and Berlin. Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, was published in June. Her first, Ishq and Mushq, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

F. H. BATACAN is a Filipino journalist and crime-fiction writer. She worked for nearly a decade in the Philippine intelligence community before moving into broadcast journalism. Her first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Grand Prize for the English Novel in the 1999 Palanca Awards, as well as the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. She has just finished a collection of short stories and is working on her second novel.

JOHN BATTEN is a curator, writer and critic on art, culture and urban planning and a former art gallery owner. Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. He is an organiser of the annual charity event Hong Kong ArtWalk and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian art magazine Broadsheet. He was Art Editor of the Asia Literary Review.

LOUIS de BERNIÈRES is the author of worldwide best-seller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. His other award-winning fiction includes the novels Birds Without WingsThe War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether PartsSeñor Vivo and the Coca Lord and A Partisan’s Daughter, and the short-story collection Notwithstanding. His situations have included motorcycle messenger, car mechanic, landscape gardener, teacher and cowboy. He lives in Norfolk, England.

DAVE BESSELING lives in Delhi. He was born and raised in Canada, but since skipping his university graduation ceremony for his first flight overseas, he has visited over thirty-five countries. He has worked as an English teacher, graphic designer, tattoo designer, visual artist, travel writer and journalist. His first book, The Liquid Refuses to Ignite, was published in July 2012 by Hachette, India. http://www.bookshopofindia.com/search.asp?action1=default&bookid=9104945

SUBEL BHANDARI, 25, has been writing in Nepal for the past six years. During this time, he has contributed to newswires, print media, radio and the Web. He has reported on many aspects of the ‘People’s War’ and covered the Constituent Assembly elections that took place on April 10, 2008. He is currently the Nepal correspondent for Agence-France Presse.

KAVITA BHANOT grew up in London and lived in Birmingham before moving to Delhi, where she directed an Indian-British literary festival and worked as an editor for India’s first literary agency. She has had several stories published in anthologies and magazines, and is the editor of Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, published by Tindal Street Press in 2012.

TANAZ BHATHENA writes Middle-Eastern and South-Asian fiction. In 2009, she won the Whidbey MFA Student Choice Contest and the Mississauga Arts Council award for Emerging Literary Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Third Reader, Sotto Voce, Glossolalia and Room. She is currently working on a collection of stories with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

MICHAEL BREEN has lived in South Korea for thirty years. He served for many years as Seoul correspondent for the Guardian and the Washington Times. He now runs his own public relations firm in Seoul, and frequently writes essays, commentaries and features for the local media. He is the author of The Koreans and Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader.

BROTHER ANTHONY was born in 1942 in Cornwall, England. He has lived in Korea since 1980 and is both an Emeritus Professor at Sogang University and Chair Professor at Dankook University. He has published thirty volumes of English translations of Korean poetry and fiction, including seven volumes of poetry by Ko Un. He is a naturalized Korean citizen with the name An Sonjae.

TEW BUNNAG was born in Bangkok and educated in the UK, where he studied Chinese and economics at Cambridge University. His fiction deals with modern life in Thailand and explores the tension between traditional values and the rise of aggressive consumerism. He draws on his experiences working for the Human Development Foundation – an NGO based in Bangkok’s largest slum – of which he is a board member.

CHARTVUT BUNYARAK graduated with a Master of Arts in Communication Arts from the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce. In 2003, his first short story, ‘Love in the Air’ was published in Sud Sup Da magazine. His publications include three short-story collections (Masked Rider’s Judgement Day, Dramas in Pleasure City and Case Study of a Lamb with a Rotten Tooth) and his first novel, Karaoke.

JOHN BURDETT has spent more than half his life in South East Asia, where he first worked as a lawyer in government and private practice in Hong Kong. After retiring from law he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to write novels. Burdett is the bestselling author of Bangkok 8 and its sequels, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts and The Godfather of Kathmandu. His most recent novel in this series, Vulture Peak, was released in January 2012. He now divides his time between Bangkok and south-west France.

URVASHI BUTALIA is a publisher and writer who lives and works in India. She co-founded Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, and is director of the Kali imprint Zubaan. Her books include The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, which won several awards. Butalia currently has three books in various stages of completion.

MICHELLE CAHILL is a Goan Anglo-Indian who lives in Sydney. She writes poetry and fiction. Her debut collection, The Accidental Cage (IP) was short-listed in the 2007 Judith Wright Prize. Cahill edited Poetry Without Borders (Picaro, 2008). Her work has appeared in Muse India, Heat, Meanjin, Jacket, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Antipodes. Vishvarupa, her manuscript in progress, is themed around Hindu gods and other deities.

CATHERINE CANDANO is a research scholar with National University of Singapore’s Communication and New Media Programme. Her literary work has been published in Crowns and Oranges: New Philippine Poetry (Anvil Publishing), At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Postcolonial Poetry in English (Philippine PEN), Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and ANI.

ALEXANDRU CETATEANU was born in Romania, which he escaped during the Ceausescu regime to Canada where he now lives. He edits Destine Literare and runs Scritorii Romani, an association of expatriate Romanian writers. Cetăţeanu’s published works include A Romanian in Canada (Helios, 1995), Canada – Country of Hyperboreans (Antim Ivireanul/Edition Langues et Cultures Européennes, 2004), and A Foreigner in America (Junimea, 2007).

SAM CHAMBERS, an award-winning journalist and author, has been covering east Asia for a decade. Now based in Dalian, half his time is spent on the road, predominantly in China and Korea. His next book – Oil on Water – will be published in early 2010, and he is currently putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, Life on the Periphery, a six-year odyssey tracking the lives of China’s ethnic minorities.

MEIRA CHAND, born in London of Indian-Swiss antecedents, has lived in Japan and India and now resides in Singapore. She is the author of eight novels, the latest, A Different Sky, having been published last year. She is an Associate of The Centre for the Arts, National University of Singapore and from 2000 to 2002 acted as Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

HA KIET CHAU from Sacramento, California, is a writer of poetry and short stories who has been published in Asia and the United States. She is a graduate student at San Francisco State University, studying creative writing with an emphasis on poetry. She was nominated for the Best New Poets anthology of 2011 and is now working on a collection of verse. Ha Kiet teaches art and literature in Oakland.

CHEN XIWO teaches comparative literature at Fuzhou Normal University and is a prolific, controversial writer, described by Asia Sentinel as ‘one of China’s most outspoken voices on freedom of expression’. Chen Xiwo has written seven major novels, but because of his refusal to compromise on style or content it was nearly twenty years before his works were published in China. In 2007, he sued the Chinese government after they confiscated his copy of the Taiwan edition of I Love My Mum, which is still banned in the mainland.

CHEN GUANG MING was born in Inner Mongolia in 1954 and began painting in the early 1980s. He was a graduate of the Xu Bei Hong Studio at the Central Institute of Fine Arts in China. Chen has exhibited since 1982 and his works are in collections in the United States, Europe, Singapore and China.

SHU-CHING JEAN CHEN is a contributing writer for Forbes Asia. She also writes regular news analyses for the Business Times in Singapore. She was formerly managing editor of CFO, published by The Economist Group, and a staff writer at Forbes. A native of Taiwan, she has covered China for more than a decade.

YSABELLE CHEUNG has juggled many professions. As a features journalist, she has interviewed literary figures such as Yan Lianke and Yan Geling. As a fiction writer, she has been published online and in anthologies. She is a reader for Peony Literary Agency and has read for Blake Friedmann Literary Agency and Granta magazine. For now, she is happily working as assistant editor at Tatler Hong Kong.

KAREN C.L. CHEUNG completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2006, with funding from the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund Fellowship, and went on to teach creative writing at the UEA for one year. She is working on her first and second novels, both set in contemporary Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review and Hong Kong ID (Haven Books).

REBECCA CHEW is an illustrator and graphic designer. She has previously been published in Silverfish New Writing 6. She lives in Malaysia with two cats and a dog.

CHI WEI-JAN is a Taiwanese essayist and playwright. A university professor, he holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Iowa. Private Eyes, his first novel, was a publishing sensation when it came out in 2011, winning almost every major literary award in Taiwan that year. His plays include MIT: Mad in Taiwan, The Mahjong Game Trilogy, and One Bed, Four Players.

O THIAM CHIN’s short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, Cha, Karavan and Qarrtsiluni. He is the author of two story collections, Free-Falling Man and Never Been Better (nominated for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award 2010). His new fiction collection, Under The Sun, will be published this year.

CHIU KIN FUNG grew up in the Walled City in Kowloon. He is a graduate of the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong and is pursuing a doctorate in IT in education. He teaches in a secondary school not far from where he grew up and lives in the green open spaces of Lamma Island with his two cats.

CHO OH-HYUN, who goes by the pen name ‘Musan’, was born in 1932 in Miryang in South Korea. He has lived in the mountains since he became a novice monk at the age of seven. He has written over a hundred poems, including many in sijo form. In 2007, he received the Cheong Chi-yong Literary Award for his book Distant Holy Man. The lineage holder of the Mt Gaji school of Korean Nine Mountains Zen, he is currently in retreat at Baekdamsa Temple at Mt Seorak.

TOM CHO is a fiction writer based in Melbourne, Australia. Look Who’s Morphing, a collection of short fiction, will be published by Giramondo in 2009. His stories have been published widely in journals and anthologies, and he has won numerous grants and awards. Cho is currently working on a PhD in Professional Writing. His website is www.tomcho.com.

CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY is the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf and the editor of the anthology India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion. He lives in Mumbai.

DON MEE CHOI is the author of The Morning News is Exciting. She received a Whiting Writers Award in 2011. Choi lives in Seattle and translates contemporary Korean women’s poetry.

JESSE CHUN’s fine art photography has been exhibited in the US, Hong Kong and South Korea, and has featured in publications including ARTnow and Elle magazine Hong Kong. Chun received a BFA in photography at Parsons School of Design in New York in 2006, and has guest lectured at NYU, Columbia University and Parsons. She lives in Seoul where she works as a photographer and a curator.

JAE WON CHUNG was born in Seoul, grew up in Philadelphia and is currently working towards a PhD in modern Korean literature at Columbia University in New York. His English translations of Kim Hoon, Ki Hyeong-do and Kim Yeonsu have appeared (respectively) in Azalea, Washington Square and New Writing from Korea. His short story ‘How Harold Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Han’ is forthcoming in Apogee Journal.

SIMON COCKERELL, originally from southwest England, moved to Beijing in 2000, joined Koryo Tours in 2002 and has since travelled monthly to North Korea. He has given presentations and lectures on the DPRK in many countries including China, the United States and South Korea. He is a keen football fan, and organised the first friendly soccer tours to North Korea.

BERNARD COHEN is the author of four novels and a children’s picture book. He has won numerous awards, including the 1996 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for The Blindman’s Hat. In 2006, he founded The Writing Workshop, which runs face-to-face and online writing courses for children. Since establishing the workshop he has taught creative writing to more than 12,000 young people from five to 18.

LIZZIE COLLINGHAM is the author of The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food and Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Having taught history at Warwick University she became a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is now an independent scholar and writer.

XAVIER COMAS, a Barcelona native, graduated from Barcelona University in Fine Arts before working as a creative director, photographer and illustrator. His photographs have been published and exhibited in Spain, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Thailand, Singapore and Japan. His Pasajero project, featuring perceptions of society, was recently displayed as an installation at the Singapore Art Museum. He is now based in Bangkok.

ROBBIE COREY-BOULET covered the trial of S-21 prison commandant Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) while working as a reporter for The Phnom Penh Post. He continues to monitor the Khmer Rouge tribunal in the Cambodian capital in his new role as news editor. He hails from University Place, Washington, northwest United States.

D. REGE is an Indian author and poet. She lives in Mumbai, where she also teaches creative writing at St Xavier’s College. Her work has appeared in publications including the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The North, DesiLit and Muse India. She is working on a collection of short stories and a book of poetry.

LIZA DALBY is an anthropologist and writer whose specialist subject is Japan. She is the author of Geisha; Kimono: Fashioning Culture; memoir East Wind Melts the Ice and two works of fiction, The Tale of Murasaki and Hidden Buddhas.

MAHMOUD DARWISH (March 13, 1941 – August 9, 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said of Darwish that he ‘is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging....’

BOB DAVIS began his photographic career making documentaries in Tasmania. By the late 60s he was established as a commercial photographer in Sydney. He left for London in 1970 and in the early 70s travelled to Hong Kong and Japan on assignment for The Times. During this time, he also worked in Japan, which culminated in publication of his book Faces of Japan. In 1979, he established The Stock House Limited, the first international photo agency in Hong Kong.

SALLY DELLOW’s poetry has appeared in three anthologies (OutLoud, PoetryLive! and Not A Muse) as well as Muse magazine and online in the Asia and Pacific Writers' Network. She is currently putting together her first solo poetry collection. She has performed at the Hong Kong Fringe Festival, OutLoud and the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Dellow is a playwright and actor and has staged four of her plays in Hong Kong. She runs Dramatic Difference, a communication and creativity consultancy.

FRANK DIKÖTTER is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of History on leave from the University of London. He has pioneered the use of Chinese archival sources and published seven books on the history of modern China, from The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to The Age of Openness: China before Mao (2007). Mao’s Great Famine will be his eighth. He is married and lives in Hong Kong.

TISHANI DOSHI is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She has worked and performed with the choreographer Chandralekha. Doshi won an Eric Gregory Award in 2001; in 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition; and Countries of the Body won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe in 2012.

NIC DUNLOP is a Bangkok-based photographer and author whose work has appeared in publications worldwide, including The Guardian, The New York Times and Le Monde. His book The Lost Executioner (2005) tells the story of his exposure of Pol Pot’s chief executioner, Comrade Duch. The HBO film Burma Soldier, which he co-directed, will be released in May.

FUCHSIA DUNLOP, from Oxford, is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She trained as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and is the author of three books, including the award winners Sichuan Cookery and Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: a Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. She has also written for publications including the Financial Times, The New Yorker, Gourmet and Saveur.

NICHOLAS YOHAN DUVERNAY teaches English at the Catholic University of Korea in Bucheon. He is an archer and plays bass in a rock band, Vanilla Unity. Duvernay grew up in the US and Korea and graduated from a Korean university at sixteen, with a BA in English language and literature. In 2007, he received an MA in linguistics and is now pursuing a PhD.

ANDRE EICHMAN has been a fine art documentary photographer for twenty years. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Royal Geographic, The Sunday Times, Vogue and Wanderlust. He is currently exhibiting his latest project, ‘The Chairman and I’, around the world, with venues in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai and St Petersburg.

ANNE ENRIGHT was born and lives in Dublin. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. Her works include one collection of stories and four novels. In 2007, The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Translation rights have been sold to thirty-one countries.

JOHN C. EVANS is a recovering engineer and semi-itinerant instructor in English literature and composition. Having graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Creative Writing, he moved to Cheongju, South Korea, where he is a doctoral student in Western Philosophy. His fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in more than 20 literary journals, including The Truth About the Fact, The Yalobusha Review and Square One.

MARJORIE EVASCO writes in two languages: Cebuano-Visayan and English. Her two books, Dreamweavers and Ochre Tones, have each won the National Book Award for Poetry awarded by the Manila Critics’ Circle. Her poetry is published in various anthologies and she has participated in numerous literary festivals including WordFeast in Singapore, the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and the XVIII International Poetry Festival of Medellín in Colombia.

SCOTT EZELL has been based in Hanoi since 2009. He has composed and recorded more than a dozen albums of folk and experimental music, including collaborations with Vietnamese composer Vu Nhat Tan. His books include Songs from a Yahi Bow, a collection of poems about Ishi, and Petroglyph Americana, a poem about landscapes of the American West and with reflections from Asian landscapes and cultures.

FANG HUI is a pioneer of China’s contemporary art movement; his paintings have been in numerous exhibitions in Beijing and Hong Kong. He focuses on the ability of different colours to arouse specific emotions, and uses various hues to express calm and melancholy, depth and purity. His portrait series, Youth, draws on memories from his childhood during the Cultural Revolution.

JONATHAN FENBY, a former editor of The Observer and the South China Morning Post, has written a dozen books. Five have been about China, including The Penguin History of Modern China. He is China Director of the research service Trusted Sources. His most recent book is The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved. He is working on another book about contemporary China.

HEINZ INSU FENKL, born in 1960 in Bupyeong, South Korea, is a novelist, translator and editor. His autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother was named a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ selection in 1996 and a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist in 1997. He began translating Cho Oh-hyun’s Zen poetry in May 2010. His most recent prose translation, Yi Mun-yol’s short story ‘An Anonymous Island’, was published in the 12 September 2011 issue of the New Yorker.

British historian FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO is the author of numerous acclaimed volumes of non-fiction, including Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food; 1492: The Year Our World Began; Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed; and Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. He is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at Notre Dame University, Indiana.

JÉANPAUL FERRO is a novelist and poet. He has been nominated eight times for a Pushcart Prize, his work has been featured on NPR, Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, Contemporary American Voices, Hawaii Review, and others. His published works include All the Good Promises; Becoming X; You Know Too Much about Flying Saucers; Hemispheres; Essendo Morti, nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz, nominated for both the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry.

VICTORIA FINLAY is the author of Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox and Jewels: A Secret History. She studied Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews before working at Reuters for three years. She then spent 12 years at newspapers in Hong Kong – five as Arts Editor of the South China Morning Post – where she also co-presented the weekly literary radio programme The Listening Ear. She returned to Britain in 2003.

LIAM FITZPATRICK was born in Hong Kong and educated at King George V School, Hong Kong and Christ Church, Oxford. His poetry has been collected in Vs: 12 Hong Kong Poets and City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English, 1945 to the Present. He is married with two daughters, lives in Hong Kong and works as a writer and editor for Time magazine.

PAUL FONOROFF, from Cleveland, began studying Mandarin at school. After his master’s degree in cinema studies he researched Chinese cinema at Beijing University. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1983 and been a South China Morning Post film critic for 23 years. He has appeared in more than 1,000 television programmesand played cameo roles in 20 movies.

LUIS H. FRANCIA is the author of the memoir, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, and of A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos. His poetry collections include The Beauty of Ghosts, Museum of Absences and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. He writes an online column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and teaches at New York University, Hunter College and the City University of Hong Kong.

PAUL FRENCH has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His books include the well-received North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula and a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow – A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times and Adventures of an American in Shanghai, described by the Financial Times as a ‘captivating narrative’. His next book, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, will be published in June 2009.

MARK R. FROST was born in England and raised in Australia by his Indian mother and Londoner father. For the last decade, he has lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, working as a writer, academic and occasional museum designer. In 2010 his first book, Singapore: A Biography, was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and awarded the Asia Pacific Publishers Association Gold Medal. He is still waiting for his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

NIGHAT M. GANDHI is a writer and professional mental health counsellor. She grew up in Dhaka and Karachi. After attending college in the US, she married and moved to Allahabad, India, where she raised her two daughters and became involved in women’s rights activism. She writes for Indian and Pakistani newspapers including the Hindu, Hindustan Times and Dawn. ‘Trains’, which appears in this issue of Asia Literary Review, is taken from Ghalib At Dusk & Other Stories, forthcoming from Tranquebar Press in September 2009.

TRINA GAYNON, a graduate of the University of San Francisco’s MFA program, volunteers with WriteGirl, an organization in Los Angeles that provides workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing. She also works with an adult literacy program. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Bombshells and Knocking at the Door, as well as in numerous literary journals.

ROB GIFFORD is London Bureau Chief of National Public Radio (USA). He has reported from around the world for NPR and from 1999 to 2005 was NPR’s correspondent in Beijing. His first book, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power, was published in 2007. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Durham University and an MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.

CHRISSIE GITTINS’ prize-winning poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, for which she also writes plays. Her poetry collections are Armature and I’ll Dress One Night as You. Her short-story collection is titled Family Connections. All three of her children’s poetry collections were Poetry Book Society Choices for the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf. Originally from Lancashire, she now lives in London. http://www.chrissiegittins.co.uk

JOHN GIVENS teaches fiction writing at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, studied art and language in Kyoto for four years and worked in Tokyo as a writer and editor for eight years. He has published the novels Sons of the Pioneers; A Friend in the Police; and Living Alone, Atheneum; and short story collection The Plum Rains.

PHILIP GOSTELOW is an award-winning photographer from Perth, Australia. His work has been published in Time, the Independent on Sunday Review, Figaro and Condé Nast Traveler and has been featured at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands. His project, Visible, Now – The Fragility of Childhood is published as an e-book, and his Black Christmas Bushfire Series is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Philip is also a journalist, and is currently involved in the production of a short film and other documentary projects.

SAYED GOUDA is an Egyptian poet and novelist with three books of poetry in Arabic and a novel in English, Once Upon a Time in Cairo. He has translated hundreds of poems from and into Arabic, Chinese, and English and is currently the editor of tri-lingual literary website Arabic Nadwah. He runs a monthly literary salon in Hong Kong.

KARL TARO GREENFELD is the author of Speed Tribes, Standard Deviations, China Syndrome and Boy Alone: A Sibling’s Journey Through Autism, a memoir about his brother Noah to be published in May 2009 by Harper. His articles have appeared in the anthologies Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Non-required Reading and Best Creative Non-fiction. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Cream City Review and New York Tyrant.

ROMESH GUNESEKERA was born in Sri Lanka and lives in London. His first novel Reef was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Sandglass (BBC Asia Award) and Heaven’s Edge, which like Monkfish Moon, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel The Match was described by the Irish Times as a book that ‘shows why fiction is written – and read’. The Prisoner of Paradise, his new novel, is set in Mauritius in 1825.

XIAOLU GUO was born in 1973 in a Zhejiang Province fishing village. She is a film­maker, poet and novelist. Her novels, translated into 23 languages, include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Village of Stone, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and UFO in Her Eyes. She directed the feature film She, A Chinese, which received the Golden Leopard award at the 2009 Lorcano Film Festival, Switzerland. Xiaolu lives in China and Europe.

HAN YUJOO debuted in 2003 when her short story ‘To the Moon’ won Literature and Society’s New Writers Award. She has published the short story collections To the Moon, Book of Ice and My Left Hand the King and My Right Hand the King’s Scribe. She won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2009. She currently teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and Korea University’s Department of Creative Writing.

HAN HAN was born in 1982 to middle-class parents. After dropping out of high school due to low grades, he wrote a novel, Triple Door, which became a runaway bestseller with more than twenty million copies sold. He has since become a star of the rally racing circuit and an international celebrity. He lives in Shanghai.

HAO QUN, from northeast China, studied law before working as a cosmetics company human resources manager. Murong Xuecun was Hao’s pseudonym on the publicly accessible company blog followed by millions of readers. His novel Leave Me Alone: Chengdu was nominated for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. The Missing Ingredient won the 2010 People’s Literature Prize for exposing pyramid schemes.

JUSTINE HARDY has covered the conflict in Kashmir since it began in 1989. She is a journalist, writer and aid worker, and divides her time between London, Delhi and Kashmir. Three of her six books are about the troubled valley: Goat, The Wonder House, a novel, and her latest, In the Valley of Mist, which will be published in June 2009. She works with a conflict resolution project in Kashmir, addressing the psychiatric damage caused by the fighting.

ALISHA HARIDASANI was raised in Hong Kong before setting off to pursue a BA in journalism and psychology at City University, London. She has worked for Business Traveller Asia-Pacific magazine and is currently working as a freelance journalist in Hong Kong, where she covers a wide range of topics including her favourites: art and culture. You can follow her blog on www.olooblog.com.

HARRY HARRISON always wanted to be a freelance cartoonist when he grew up but now realizes that just growing up would be something of an achievement. While he waits for this to happen, he is a cartoonist for the South China Morning Post and works as a book illustrator.

ANJUM HASAN is the author of the novels Neti, Neti (longlisted for the DSC and Man Asian Literary prizes) and Lunatic in My Head (shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award). She has also written a book of poems called Street on the Hill. Her reviews, short fiction, poetry, travel writing and literary essays have appeared in publications in India and internationally. She is Books Editor at The Caravan magazine and lives in Bangalore, India.

HE JIAHONG is a professor of law at People’s University in Beijing, and director of law at the Evidence Research Institute. He previously worked as deputy director of the Department for Anti-Dereliction of Duty and Infringement on Human Rights. In 2008, he published a series of essays, An Amnesty for Corrupt Officials, which stirred widespread debate. He has written five crime thrillers including Hanging Devils, recently published in English by Penguin.

SEAMUS HEANEY, MRIA (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2006 he attended the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and contributed poetry from the then-forthcoming District and Circle to the Asia Literary Review. His work was featured in our first issue.

DUNCAN HEWITT is a former BBC China correspondent now writing for Newsweek and other publications from Shanghai. He first lived in China in 1986–87 while studying for a degree in Chinese at Edinburgh University. He later worked as an editor and translator of Chinese literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Vintage 2008) focuses on how ordinary Chinese people have coped with the social changes that have accompanied economic reform.

CRISTINA PANTOJA HIDALGO is professor of creative writing and literature at the University of the Philippines. She has published some twenty books, including the novels Recuerdo and A Book of Dreams. Her stories and essays have been included in international anthologies and journals. She is a past director of the University of the Philippines Press.

JUSTIN HILL has been likened to George Orwell, a boxer and Tolstoy. His acclaimed first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a 2002 Betty Trask Award and was banned by the Chinese government. His second novel, Passing Under Heaven, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. Shieldwall, the first of his Conquest Trilogy, chronicling the momentous events surrounding the Battle of Hastings, was published in May 2011.

ISABEL HILTON is an author, broadcaster, documentary maker and founder of www.chinadialogue.net, a bilingual Chinese-English website devoted to climatic and environmental problems. She studied Chinese at Edinburgh University and in 1973 became one of the first British students to study in China. Hilton has worked as a journalist at The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian and The New Yorker, and on BBC radio.

STEVEN HIRST was born in Yorkshire, England, and has worked in Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he is based. After reading English at Oxford University he worked as assistant director to Alan Ayckbourn at the Old Vic in London and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. He studied creative writing at Hong Kong University and has been a language tutor to several renowned Chinese actors.

LOUISE HO was born and brought up mainly in Hong Kong, and has lived in Mauritius, England, America and Australia. She was associate professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ho is widely regarded as the leading English-language poet in Hong Kong. She is happy to work in a language that might be thought a colonial residue, and well versed in its poetic traditions, often making use and sometimes making fun of them.

TAMMY HO LAI-MING is a Hong Kong-born writer currently living in London. She is an assistant poetry editor of Sotto Voce Magazine and a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

J. E. HOARE has a PhD from the University of London, and was a research analyst in the British Diplomatic Service from 1969 until his retirement in January 2003. He served in the British embassies in Seoul (1981-5) and Beijing (1988-91), and was the first British representative in Pyongyang (2001-2). He now writes and broadcasts on Korea and teaches a course on North Korea at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Fiction and non-fiction writer MICHAEL HOFFMAN, from Montreal, has lived in northern Japan for the last 30 years. His non-fiction appears regularly in The Japan Times and irregularly elsewhere. He is the author of five books of fiction, his latest collection being Little Pieces: This Side of Japan.

VIKI HOLMES is a prize-winning British poet and performer who began her writing career in Cardiff. She has been living in Hong Kong since 2005. Her work has been published in Hong Kong, Wales, England, Australia, Canada, Macau and Singapore. Her first collection was titled Miss Moon’s Class and she was co-editor of Not a Muse, an anthology of women’s writing.

ANNA HOLMWOOD translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship award in 2010 and has since translated two novels and countless short stories for publication. In 2012, she co­founded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators. She also works as a literary agent specialising in promoting Chinese literature abroad.

BRIAN HOLTON is a prize-winning translator and poet who took up teaching to fund his translation habit, but has now retired to work full-time on translating Chinese literature. He has translated fifteen books of poetry, and published translations, poems and short stories in his native Scots and in English. He is best known as the principal translator of the poet Yang Lian.

JANET HONG is a writer and translator living in Vancouver, Canada. She received the grand prize in fiction from the 32nd Korea Times Modern Literature Translation Contest. Her translations and original work have appeared in numerous newspapers and periodicals in Canada, the United States, Japan and Korea. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

ANDREA HSU is a producer with NPR’s All Things Considered. She joined NPR in 2002, and has been the producer for many memorable reports on the programme, including coverage of wounded US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a journey down China’s Yellow River. She was in Chengdu when the earthquake struck in May this year, and has reported and produced exhaustively on the aftermath. Before NPR, she worked for the BBC in Beijing and London, and for National Geographic Television in Washington, DC.

HU DONG is a distinguished figure in contemporary Chinese writing. His work includes poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Sichuan, he was among the earliest members of the New Generation poetry movement after the Cultural Revolution. Since then he has been published underground, establishing a distinctive voice to reveal unspeakable darkness through the mystery of language. Since the 1990s he has lived in London as a writer in exile.

YU HUA was born in Hangzhou in China in 1960 and grew up in the coastal town of Haiyan. After a brief career in dentistry, he became a full-time writer in his twenties. He is the author of six collections of stories and four novels and his work has been translated into many languages. The English edition of his most recent novel, Xiongdi (Brothers), will be published next year. He lives in Beijing.

WEN HUANG is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Paris Review. His translations include The Corpse Walker (Pantheon, 2008) by Liao Yiwu and Woman from Shanghai (Pantheon, 2009) by Yang Xianhui.

MICHIEL HULSHOF is the China correspondent for the Dutch news and opinion magazine Vrij Nederland. Together with architect Daan Roggeveen he founded the Go West Project, a think tank tracking the development of emerging Chinese megacities. They publish articles in international media, lecture at universities in China and the Netherlands and organize exhibitions and events in both Asia and Europe.

BRUCE HUMES hosts the ‘Chinese Books, English Reviews’ web site and recently translated Chinese Dress & Adornment Through the Ages (CYPI Press, 2009), a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome, which is admittedly somewhat more politically correct than his earlier best-selling translation, Shanghai Baby (Pocket Books, 2001) by Wei Hui.

PEAULADD HUY was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975. In 1980, after her parents had been murdered by the regime, she emigrated to the United States with siblings and other relatives. Her work has been published by Blue Begonia Press, Cha and Nou Hach. She hopes to return to Cambodia with her family.

HWANG SOK-YONG is a Korean writer of world renown. His work, which grapples with the troubled history of his divided country, has been the cause of his imprisonment and exile. It has found a wide readership in both North and South Korea. The Old Garden, adapted for excerpt in this issue of Asia Literary Review and his most deeply autobiographical work to date, is printed here with the permission of Seven Stories Press/Picador and is forthcoming in September 2009.

MARK IKIN believes that if one has grown up in Australia one tends, if photography is of interest, to begin with landscapes. It’s difficult not to attempt to capture the raw beauty of the country; however, once he began travelling overseas it was people who interested him. He’s taken many environmental portraits with a Canon, but has recently used an iPhone for the ‘shooting-from-the-hip’ flexibility and unobtrusive capture of others’ lives.

PICO IYER is the author of the novels Cuba in the Night and Abandon. He has also written eight works of non-fiction, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Open Road. His newest book, The Man within My Head, on Graham Greene and hauntedness, came out earlier this year. Resident since 1992 in rural Japan, he’s long since lost the ability to tell whether he’s from the East, the West or nowhere at all.

RAHUL JACOB is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times and the author of Right of Passage: Travels from Brooklyn to Bali. As a writer on business in Asia for Fortune and Time magazines, he covered India’s economic reforms in the 1990s. He was born in Calcutta and studied history at the University of Delhi.

JAMIE JAMES is an American author currently living in Bali. In 1999, he left his post as a critic at The New Yorker to move to Indonesia where he has since written about travel and culture for many American magazines and newspapers. His most recent book is The Snake Charmer, a biography of the herpetologist Joe Slowinski.

JANG JIN-SUNG is a graduate of Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang. He worked as an official writer for the Workers’ Party and earned special recognition from Kim Jong-il for his poetry. In 2004, he defected to South Korea. He has since published a collection of poems, I Am Selling My Daughter for 100 Won, and a memoir describing his escape from North Korea, Crossing the Tumen River with Poetry in My Heart. He was the poet chosen by Poetry Parnassus to represent North Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012. Jang is an Honorary Fellow of the Asia Pacific Writers' and Translators' Association.

ANNA JAQUIERY was born in France and is of French-Malaysian descent. She started her journalistic career as a freelance reporter for Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod and has worked for Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and Bloomberg across Europe and Asia. She has published some of her poetry. Jaquiery lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and two sons.

JOHN JAVELLANA is a freelance photographer based in Manila. He began working as a wedding photographer in 2007 and was invited to shoot for Reuters in 2008, all while still at college. He became a regular contractor for the agency, covering major news stories. He is now completing various personal projects with a view to more documentary work. His photographs have been published worldwide.

JEON SUNG TAE was born in 1969 and graduated with a creative writing degree from Chung-Ang University. In his works, he uses humour and satire to critique Korea’s national division and its process of modernization under an authoritarian regime. His short story collections include Burying the Scent, Business of Crossing Borders and Wolf. He has also written a novel, The Female Barber. In 2005, he spent six months in Mongolia, where his story ‘The Korean Soldier’ is set.

JEONG I-HYEON was born in Seoul in 1972 and is the author of numerous works of fiction. She has been honoured with the New Writers Award, the Yi Hyo-seok Award and the Hyundae Literature Award. Her works include the short story collections Romantic Love and Society and The Lie of the Day, and the novels My Sweet City and What You Never Know.

JIMMY, born in 1969, is a Burmese writer, poet and political activist. He was arrested in 1989 for peacefully voicing his political views. Released in 2005 after almost 16 years, he married a fellow activist. When their daughter was four months old they were both detained for opposing the Burmese regime; they were sentenced to 65 years’ imprisonment each.

KAVITA A. JINDAL was born in India and has lived in both Hong Kong and England. Her work is fuelled by observations made in these three distinct landscapes and societies. Her poetry collection, Raincheck Renewed (Chameleon Press) was published in 2004 to critical acclaim. Her poems have been translated into German, Romanian and Punjabi, and her writing has appeared in The Independent, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Dimsum, Asian Cha and In Our Own Words.

GARY JONES is a British journalist based in Shanghai. Focusing on human-interest and behind-the-news features, he has contributed words and pictures to numerous publications worldwide, including Time magazine, The Times and The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, British GQ and the South China Morning Post.

NICHOLAS JOSE has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture. He worked in China in 1986–1990, was president of Sydney PEN, 2002–05, and currently holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. His novels include Avenue of Eternal Peace (re-issued in a new edition this year), The Rose Crossing, The Red Thread and Original Face.

HAMID KABIR was born in Kabul and studied medicine at Moscow Medical Academy. In 1997, he settled in the UK for further study and was chairman of the Afghan Association of London in 2010-11. Hamid has commented on Afghan affairs for various TV and radio programmes. He is also the editor in chief of Simorg, the only Afghan newspaper published in London.

MITSUYO KAKUTA was born in Yokohama in 1967. She graduated from Waseda University, majoring in Creative Writing. She is the author of more than forty books and is one of Japan’s most prolific writers. She has won nine major literary awards in her home country, including the prestigious Naoki Prize for the novel Woman on the Other Shore and the Chuo Koron Literary Prize for The Eighth Day, both published by Kodansha International.

SUZANNE KAMATA, originally from Michigan, has lived in Japan for most of her life. She is the author of the novel Losing Kei and The Beautiful One Has Come: Stories. She has also edited three anthologies, including The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

DEBORAH KAN is a television journalist living in Hong Kong where she works as a correspondent for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Kan was for four years the main anchor of Star News Asia, a daily news programme broadcast to more than 30 million people in Asia and the Middle East.

MIN K. KANG was born in Busan, South Korea. She has lived in the United States since 1996 and is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Louisiana State University after graduating from Texas A&M University and San Francisco State University. She has previously worked with English language students as a tutor for America Reads.

SHEBA KARIM is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her young-adult novel, Skunk Girl (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), about a Pakistani-American teenager living in upstate New York, will be published in April 2009. Her fiction has appeared in EGO and DesiLit magazines and the anthology Growing Up Girl, and is forthcoming in the Kartika Review. She lives in New York City.

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA has written basslines, travel stories, ads and most recently a novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, the tale of an alcoholic sportswriter tracking down a lost cricketer. Chinaman won the 2008 Gratiaen Prize and in 2012 the DSC prize for South Asian Literature, and was selected for Waterstones’ Top 11 of 2011. He lives in Singapore, where he is growing his hair and working on a second novel.

STEPHEN J. B. KELLY, born in 1983, grew up in Nigeria, Oman, Hong Kong and England. He has pursued several long-term projects in China and won numerous awards, including The Observer Hodge Photographic Award, the Reginald Salisbury Award and the Made in China Award at the Lodz Fotofestiwal, Poland. His work has featured in The Independent Magazine, The Observer Magazine, D La Repubblica delle Donne and IL Magazine, among other publications.

TIPPAPHON KEOPASEUT is the owner of the Book-Café Vientiane bookshop, Laos, and joint owner of Lao Insight Books, an English/French publishing house that publishes books exclusively about Laos. Political affiliation: never mind the principles, stick to the Party. Literate, likes pho noodles and shoes.

ALEX KERR graduated in Japanese Studies from Yale University, later taking Chinese Studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He first went to Japan in 1964 and has lived most of his life in Japan and Thailand. His books include Lost Japan (1993), originally written in Japanese and the winner of Japan’s Shincho Literary Prize, best­seller Dogs and Demons (2001) and Bangkok Found (2010), the sequel to Lost Japan.

JAMES KIDD, based in London, writes for The Independent on Sunday, the South China Morning Post, The Observer, Time Out, The Jerusalem Post, The Daily Telegraph, The London Magazine and Square Meal magazine. He is a member of the advisory board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature in London. He wrote the introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of Patricia Cornwell’s debut novel, Postmortem (2010).

CHI-YOUNG KIM is a literary translator based in Los Angeles, and is a recipient of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for her translation of Shin Kyungsook’s Man Asian Prize­winning novel, Please Look after Mother. Kim’s other translations include Kyung Ran Jo’s Tongue, Lee Dong-ha’s Toy City, and Kim Young-ha’s Your Republic Is Calling You and I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.

KIM HYESOON is one of the most prominent poets of South Korea. She lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim’s poetry in translation can be found in When the Plug Gets Unplugged, Anxiety of Words, Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, and All the Garbage of the World, Unite! Kim has been chosen by Poetry Parnassus to represent South Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012.

LUCIA SEHUI KIM is a writer from New York City, where she worked as a teacher and book scout. She was also the poetry editor for Storyscape Literary Journal. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College; her work has appeared in Lumina and the anthology Dance the Guns to Silence. She currently works as a freelance writer in Hong Kong and is working on a collection of poems.

KIM YOUNG-HA is one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, with numerous novels and short story collections to his credit, including his acclaimed debut, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. His novel Black Flower will appear in English in October 2012.

KIM CHENG BOEY was born in Singapore and is now an Australian citizen teaching at the University of Newcastle. He has published four books of poetry: Somewhere-Bound, Another Place, Days of No Name and After the Fire. A collection of personal essays, Between Stations, will be published by Giramondo this year.

KIM JAE YOUNG made her debut when she received South Korea’s Pioneering Writers’ Newcomers’ Award in 2000. She is known for evocative explorations of the difficult lives of those living in the underbelly of society, and tells the stories of foreign labourers and the unemployed who search for love and justice.

EUGENIA KIM is the daughter of Korean parents who journeyed to America after the Pacific War. She has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, and is an MFA graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and son. ‘The Daughter of the Woman from Nah-jin’ in this issue of Asia Literary Review is taken from her first novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, forthcoming from Henry Holt and Company.

SORA KIM-RUSSELL teaches at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. Her translations include fiction in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture and Words without Borders; a non-fiction work, A Journey in Search of Korea’s Beauty by the actor Bae Yong-joon; and the forthcoming novels I’ll Be Right There by Man Asian Literary Prize-winner Shin Kyung-sook, and Ashes and Red by Hyundai Literary Award ­winner Pyun Hye-young.

MARK KITTO is the author of China Cuckoo, How I Lost a Fortune and Found a Life in China and a columnist with Britain’s Prospect magazine, for which his brief is to ‘illustrate the big picture of China with anecdotes from rural life’. He runs a coffee shop in a disused brothel in Moganshan, a mountain resort near Shanghai and is rarely short of material. He used to be a magazine publisher.

KO UN is Korea’s foremost living writer. Born in 1933, he became a Buddhist monk during the Korean War. His first poetry collection was published in 1960. He became a leading spokesman in the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and was frequently arrested and imprisoned. He has published more than 150 volumes of poems, essays and fiction, and his work has been translated into twenty languages.

RAMONA KOVAL presented The Book Show, on ABC Radio National Australia. She is the author of a cookbook, Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks, a novel, Samovar, and several non-fiction books. A collection of her literary interviews, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, is forthcoming from Scribe in August.

ANANTH KRISHNAN is the China correspondent for The Hindu, India’s second-largest English daily. He has reported from Beijing for the newspaper since June 2009, covering politics, the economy, religion and Sino-Indian relations. Ananth previously worked for The Hindu in Chennai and Mumbai. He holds an MA from the University of Chicago.

JEROME KUGAN is a writer and musician living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since graduating from the University of Canberra in 1998, he has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, singer-songwriter and composer. He participated in the Utan Kayu Literary Biennale in Jakarta and Magelang in 2007 and has been a guest at the Ubud Writers’ & Readers’ Festival and the Singapore Writers’ Festival. The poems that appear in ALR are from the unpublished collection Imaginary Poems.

A. K. KULSHRESHTH has had stories published in two anthologies of new writing, Bear Fruit and Silverfish 4, and in Muse India. He has BSc and MSc degrees in engineering and a PhD in management.

NICK LAIRD is the recipient of many prizes for his poetry and fiction, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Award, the Betty Trask Prize, a Somerset Maugham award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Laird has published two novels, Utterly Monkey and Glover’s Mistake, and two prizewinning books of poems, To a Fault and On Purpose. Go Giants will be published by Faber in 2012.

ANDREW LAM is a writer and an editor with New America Media. His book of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, 2006. His collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out in 2010 and he is working on a novel. He was featured in the documentary My Journey Home, which aired on PBS nationwide in the US on April 7, 2004, in which a film crew followed him back to his homeland, Vietnam.

WAYNE P. LAMMERS taught Japanese Language and Literature for several years before becoming an independent translator and writer. In 2007, he introduced Japanese writer Mitsuyo Kakuta to the English-speaking world with the novel Woman on the Other Shore. Along with contemporary Japanese fiction, his work has included translations of classical romance, memoirs, stage plays, screenplays and subtitles, manga, and a manga guide to Japanese grammar. He lives near Portland, Oregon.

VIOLET LAW is a Hong Kong-born-and-bred Chicagoan who rediscovered her bilingualism in 2008, when she parachuted herself into foreign reporting in China. Her English translation of Feng Bangyan and Nyaw Mee Kau’s Enriching Lives was published by Hong Kong University Press in 2010. Law graduated from the University of Chicago and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

WENDY LAW-YONE, a native of Burma, was born in Mandalay. She grew up in Rangoon, and lived in Thailand, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur before settling in the United States, where she published two novels, The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango. Following a David TK Wong creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia, she moved to the UK in 2005 and now lives in central London. Her latest novel, The Road to Wanting, is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus in April.

NAM LE's debut collection of short stories, The Boat (Knopf), was published in the US earlier this year. Born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, he has received the Pushcart Prize and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies including NPR’s Selected Shorts, the Best American Non-required Reading, Best New American Voices and Best Australian Stories. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

JENNA LE’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The New York Quarterly, Post Road, Salamander and other journals. She won the 2011 Minnetonka Review Editor’s Prize and was nominated for a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award.

SHIRLEY LEE, a composer and musician, is studying Persian at Oxford University. She has read at the Man Hong Kong and Orient-Occident International Literary Festivals and has had poetry and translations published in various journals and anthologies. Lee is currently working on her first book and as co-writer of a progressive opera about the life of Nina Simone.

LEE SANG-WHA is a professor in the English Department of Chung-Ang University, Seoul. She has published six volumes of translations of English literature, including two prose works by Gary Snyder.

JOSEPH LEE is a literary agent at KL Management and represents Korean writers including Shin Kyung-sook, Jo Kyung-ran, Han Kang, Gong Ji-young and Hwang Sun-mi. He worked at the Imprima Korea Agency for seventeen years before becoming an independent agent. He is also the author of A Man Selling Novels.

MICHAEL Y. LEE was born in Taiwan and grew up in the US. He recently graduated from the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University, where he studied fiction and literary translation. He has worked for various non-profit organizations in New York and was also a corporate attorney for ten months. He lives with his wife in Queens, New York.

MOON-OK LEE teaches English at Munmyeong High School in Gyeongsan, South Korea. She completed her doctoral coursework in Korean studies at Yeungnam University. She has translated several works from Korean to English for the Korea Literature Translation Institute, and continues to be one of their regular contributors.

MADELEINE LEE has four books of poetry published by First Fruits Publications: a single headlamp (2003), fifty three/zero three (2004), y grec (co-written with Eleanor Wong) and most recently, synaesthesia published in 2008. She is currently working on a translation of her poetry into Chinese. Madeleine has read at poetry festivals in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Adelaide, Melbourne, Ubud and Taipei. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies.

THOMAS LEE lives in Northern California and is currently working on a collection of short stories about the experiences of Korean American immigrants in New York City, where he lived for most of his life. His work, for which he has received several awards, has appeared in American Literary Review, Eclectica, Brink Lit, Kartika Review, AIM Magazine, Lullwater Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, and Short Fiction World.

JENNIFER 8. LEE is a journalist and the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. She was one of the youngest reporters employed by The New York Times, where she spent nine years. She is on the boards of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Center for Public Integrity. Jennifer graduated from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and Economics and studied international relations at Beijing University.

ARIAN LEKA was born in 1966 in Durrës, Albania. He belongs to a group of avant-garde writers who have come to the forefront since the opening of his country’s borders. He has authored twelve books, including poetry collections, stories and novels, and publishes the poetry magazine POETEKA. He received the Most Distinguished Albanian award in the category of Best Poetry Collection in 2005 for Shpina e Burrit (The Back of Man, 2004). Leka attended the 2008 Hong Kong Baptist University International Writers’ Workshop.

DANIEL LEVITSKY teaches modern Russian history and film at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of several articles on Soviet cinema and is currently working on a book, Soviet History in Post-Stalin Cinema: The Making of New Myths and Truths. He lectures and broadcasts regularly on Korean revolutionary history and film, and has travelled to North Korea seven times since 2001, accompanying tourist groups as a guest lecturer and historical consultant.

LIAO YIWU is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. His collection of interviews, The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published by Pantheon in 2008. Other non-fiction works include Testimonials, The Earthquake Chronicle and Report on China’s Victims of Injustice. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett grant and, in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre. He lives in Sichuan Province.

SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM’s first collection, Crossing the Peninsula, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published six other volumes of poetry, three books of short stories, two novels, a collected edition of her fiction and poetry and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, which won an American Book Award. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Shirley hails from Malacca.

BERTIL LINTNER is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and is currently Asia correspondent for the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, as well as a contributor to Asia Times Online, Hong Kong and Jane’s Information Group in Britain. He has written seven books on Burma, including Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy; Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 and Land of Jade: A Journey Through Insurgent Burma.

LIU JIAJU was born in 1931. In 1949, he joined the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and rose through the ranks as a writer. Liu worked as an editor at the People’s Liberation Army Literature and Art and after retiring from the military was executive editor in chief of the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu.

LIU HONGBIN, his work banned by the Chinese authorities, lives in exile and is not permitted to return to China. His poems were among those that provoked the authorities ahead of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Praised by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Liu has read to distinguished audiences worldwide and his work has been widely translated. Recent collections include Poetry in Exile (2006) and Un jour dans les jours (2008).

LIU XIAOBO, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is a poet, although he is better known as a scholar and literary critic. Liu’s most influential works include Dialogue with Li Zehou and Aesthetics and Human Freedom. He is one of the authors of Charter 08, which calls on the Chinese government to respect human rights. He helped save hundreds of lives during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Liu is interned in Jinzhou Prison.

MING LIU is a writer and journalist whose work has been published by, among others, the Financial Times, V Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph and China International Business. It has also featured on programmes such as the NBC Today Show. When not studying for her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Manchester, Ming spends her time in London or Beijing. She is writing a novel about Chinese Americans living on the mainland.

SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS was a television journalist who works as a foreign correspondent for BBC World Affairs. Over the course of her career she produced reports from states such as North Korea and Syria, highlighting environmental issues and human rights. In 1995, she was awarded the European Women of Achievement Award.

LUO HUI has pursued literary studies in China, the United States and Canada, earning degrees in English, Comparative Literature and Chinese. He is interested in contemporary uses of the past and literary translation, avant-garde poetry and independent film, among other cultural media. He has translated CBC documentaries and books of poetry, including Wings of Summer by Zheng Danyi. He lives in New Zealand.

WIN LYOVARIN, the son of a Chinese immigrant father and a Thai mother, twice received the prestigious SEA Write Award in the 1990s for his collection of short stories and for his novel, translated into English as Democracy Shaken and Stirred. His large and versatile body of work can be found at winbookclub.com and some of his short stories in English on www.thaifiction.com.

MA YAN was born in Chengdu in 1979 and graduated from Beijing University. A novelist, critic, editor and organizer of literary festivals and events, she also worked as editor of and contributor to Felicity Troup. Her poetry has been published in Today, Foreign Literature, Big River South North, Book City, Chinese Poetry Criticism, Southern Weekend, Shanghai Culture, Limits and In Chengdu. Ma Yan committed suicide on 30 December 2010, in Shanghai.

MA THIDA is a Burmese writer and medical doctor who has won numerous human-rights awards. In 1993, she was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment but was released in 1999 with help from Amnesty International and PEN. Since then she has published widely and taught at Brown and Harvard universities in the United States. She recently returned to Rangoon, where she writes, edits and practises at a free clinic.

PAUL STJOHN MACKINTOSH is a British poet, writer and journalist living in Hong Kong. His first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Books in 1997, and his second, The Musical Box of Wonders, is forthcoming from H. Harksen Productions. He has published English translations from Japanese and Romanian and, working with his wife, Hungarian film-maker Lilla Anna Ban, is an award-winning film producer.

MAI JIA is a former Chinese army cryptologist who became a novelist and scriptwriter. His work includes the spy novels Decoded, The Conspiracy and The Wind’s Voice. His screenplays for the TV series The Conspiracy and the film The Message (based on The Wind’s Voice) have been extremely influential, sparking the current craze for spy stories in China’s TV and film industry.

HENNING MANKELL is an internationally acclaimed novelist who has received Germany’s Tolerance Prize and the UK’s Golden Dagger Award. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are published in thirty-three countries and have been adapted for film and television, most recently the award-winning BBC television series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. He divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he has worked as the director of Teatro Avenida since 1985.

NIKI MARANGOU was born in Limmasol, Cyprus, in 1948. She studied sociology in West Berlin, worked for ten years at the State Theatre of Cyprus, and since 1980 has run the Kochlias Bookshop in Nicosia, where she now lives. She has published books of prose, poetry and children’s fairy tales. In 1998, she was awarded the Cavafy Prize for Poetry in Alexandria. Her paintings have been widely exhibited.

PETER MARES presented the weekly public policy discussion programme The National Interest and is a regular contributor to The Book Show on ABC Radio National in Australia. He has been an ABC journalist and broadcaster for more than twenty years, having previously presented the daily regional current affairs programme Asia Pacific and worked as a foreign correspondent based in Hanoi. He is the author of Borderline (UNSW Press, 2001) an award-winning book on Australia’s refugee policies.

Photographer RICK MARTIN is based in Adelaide. His exhibitions have included Golden Palace at Tadu Contemporary Art Gallery, Bangkok; Helpers at the Ayala Museum, Manila; and Breathtaking: A Passage on the Titanic at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. He has been artist in residence at studios around the world. The Cha Chan Teng series evolved from 2000 to 2002 at restaurants throughout Hong Kong.

JOHN MATEER was born in South Africa and lives in Australia. He has published five books in Australia and booklets in Medan, Kyoto, Johannesburg, Perth, Sydney, Macau and Lisbon. Publications include Elsewhere (Salt), with Layli Rakhsha, The Language, and Ex-White (Sisyphus), a volume containing all his South African poems. Forthcoming are The West (Fremantle Press), and Southern Barbarians (Giramondo and T41).

MATSUGU MIHO is Assistant Professor of Japanese literature in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University in Chicago. Her publications include “In the Service of the Nation: Geisha and Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country” Her work has appeared in the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, and Japan Forum, among others. She is currently working on her first book, Kawabata Yasunari for the 21st Century: The Izu Dancer, Snow Country, House of the Sleeping Beauties, and Canaries. She earned her doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

RALPH MCCARTHY is a translator and writer living in southern California. He has published English translations of two collections of short stories by Dazai Osamu, Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo and, more recently, Otogizóshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu. His other translations include In the Miso Soup and Popular Hits of the Showa Era, both by Murakami Ryu, and Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama.

FIONNUALA MCHUGH was born in England, lived in Northern Ireland for 10 years, began travelling to Asia as a journalist in 1986 and has been based in Hong Kong since 1993. Her work appears in many publications and will also feature in Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper, a Daily Telegraph-commissioned anthology of railway travel for which she ventured from Hong Kong to Lhasa.

DAVID McKIRDY was born in Scotland and raised and educated in Hong Kong. An organiser of Hong Kong poetry group OutLoud and a former director of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, his work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals. His collection of poetry, Accidental Occidental, was published in 2005. He repairs and rebuilds vintage cars for a living.

WAYNE McLENNAN was born into a coalmining family in New South Wales in 1954. He has mined gold in Costa Rica, skippered a fishing boat in Nicaragua, and has been a professional boxer. Rowing to Alaska, his first book, was listed by the New York Times as a notable book of 2005. Tent Boxing was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

JAMES MCMATH is a scholar and freelance translator of Chinese. He is based in Beijing, where he works for a legal NGO. His translations have mostly focused on early modern literature, though he periodically ventures into contemporary works on state and society as well. He is actively preoccupied with developing computational tools for the analysis of literary style.

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA has published four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places (1998). He edited The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003), The Last Bungalow (2007), and The Boatride and Other Poems (2009). The Absent Traveller (1991), a volume of translations, has been recently reprinted. He is currently undertaking a translation of Kabir, the fifteenth-century Indian mystic poet, to be published by the New York Review of Books.

AVANTIKA MEHTA was born in 1982 in Delhi. Her family had moved to India from Multan (now in Pakistan) in 1947. Avantika studied law in England and specialized in intellectual property law litigation for several years. She moved back to India in 2007 and worked with various prestigious law firms before taking a sabbatical to pursue literature in 2010. She is currently enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

CARLA CAMILLE L. MENDOZA graduated from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, and has worked as an operating-room nurse. She wrote and produced segments for Life and Style with Ricky Reyes on GMA News TV, assisted in the production of the 33rd Catholic Mass Media Awards, and wrote and produced two books for the UST Medical Alumni Association. She also wrote for the 2012 London Olympics on AKTV. She has recently been accepted into ABS-CBN’s workshop on scriptwriting for TV and film.

MARTIN MERZ was raised in Australia, studying Chinese Language and Literature at Melbourne University before heading to Asia. After two decades in China trade he earned an MA in Applied Translation from Hong Kong’s Open University. He has translated folk tale Mulian Rescues His Mother and co-translated, with Jane Weizhen Pan, Wang Gang’s novel English, Li Yu’s opera Ordained by Heaven and Li Er’s short-story collection The Magician of 1919.

JEONGSHIK MIN, originally from Korea, is a research student working on a paper titled ‘Narrative and Life Story’ for a doctorate in education at Bristol University in the UK. Her paper, ‘A Visual Collective Biography of the Former Korean Comfort Women’, was presented at Culture, Learning, Identity and Organisations in March 2007 and at a conference of International Art-Based Educational Research in July 2007. She is a psychotherapy practitioner in the UK and in Korea.

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, REID MITCHELL, from New Orleans, has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China. A historian and fiction writer, he has taught at Jiangnan University in Wuxi and now teaches at Huaqiao University in Quanzhou. Mitchell's poetry has been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry Macao, Softblow and elsewhere.

LUCY MIZE was raised internationally and graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with an English literature degree. Since moving to Indonesia she has has been published in Jakarta24 magazine, the International Herald Tribune and the Jakarta Post. In 2007, she attended the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and was inspired to continue writing.

GOENAWAN MOHAMAD, from Batang, Central Java, has written four volumes of poetry, four non-fiction books on literature and philosophy, seven volumes of essays, three opera librettos, two plays and two scripts for the Javanese puppet theatre. His forthcoming publications are Don Quixote and other Poems and Towards an Aesthetics of Rest. He is the founder of cultural organisation the Utan Kayu Community.

REZA MOHAMMADI was born in Kandahar in 1979 and is regarded as one of the most exciting young poets writing in Persian today. He studied Islamic law and philosophy in Iran before obtaining an MA in globalisation from London Metropolitan University. Along with writing award-winning poetry, he is a prolific journalist, with articles published in Afghanistan, Iran and the UK.

PALANI MOHAN was born in Chennai, India, moved to Australia as a child and lives in Malaysia. His photography has featured in many of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers. He has published three books, the latest being Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia and has won several international awards.

MARCUS MOK is a self-taught photographer from Singapore. He became interested in the male form in 2002. Working in the restrictive environment of Singapore has led him to explore ways of revealing the grace and beauty of the male form without recourse to nudity. Mok has held solo exhibitions in Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne and his worked appears in numerous international publications, including blue. More of his work can be viewed at www.marcusart.net.

CHARLES MONTGOMERY teaches in the English Interpretation and Translation Department at Dongguk University in Seoul. He has been published in LIST magazine, Acta Koreana and Education about Asia, amongst others. He has edited translations for LTI Korea, Ewha University, Daesan Foundation and others. He presents weekly radio programmes about Korean literature on Arirang Radio and TBS EFM in Seoul. He also blogs about modern translated Korean literature at www.ktlit.com.

THOMAS R. MOOREs poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, College English, Wolf Moon Journal, The Café Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Flint Hills Review, Naugatuck River Review, Off the Coast and Words and Images. His poem ‘Calving in Te Awamutu’ received First Prize in the 2009 Naugatuck River Review narrative poetry contest. He has taught in Iran and Istanbul. He lives in Maine, United States.

MARSHALL MOORE is an American writer based in Hong Kong. A native of eastern North Carolina, he is the author of novels An Ideal for Living and The Concrete Sky and short ­story collections Black Shapes in a Darkened Room and the forthcoming The Infernal Republic. He is the founder of Signal 8 Press, a publishing company that focuses on Asia­-Pacific writing.

Artist and illustrator MICHIRU MORIKAWA has won Britain’s prestigious International Manga and Anime Award and a Best New Manga Artist award from publishing house Kodansha. As a graphic artist, Morikawa has designed concert, theatre and public-service posters in Japan and Britain.

JAN MORRIS was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother; when not travelling, she lives with partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy, Conundrum and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books and several volumes of travel essays. Her most recent book is Contact!

ENRIQUE MOYA, born in Caracas in 1958, is a Venezuelan-Austrian poet, fiction writer, literary translator, publisher, essayist, music and literary critic. His works have appeared in newspapers and magazines of Latin America, the US and Europe and his published collections of poetry include Oval Memory (2000), Café Kafka (2005) Theories of the Skin (2006), and Before Soren Kierkegaard’s Tomb (2007). He is director of the Latin American-Austrian Literature Forum.

DIPIKA MUKHERJEE saw her debut novel, Thunder Demons, longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2009. She has edited two anthologies of short stories: The Merlion and the Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002) and Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006). Her first poetry collection, The Palimpsest of Exile, was published in 2009. She is Professor of Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University.

INDRANIL MUKHERJEE is chief photographer of the Mumbai bureau of international news group Agence France-Presse and covers key events in southern India. Assignment highlights include the Kashmir earthquake in 2005, events in post-Taliban Afghanistan, the 2004 tsunami aftermath in Sri Lanka, communal riots in Gujarat in 2002, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He started as a freelance in Kolkata before joining the Asian Age in 1996. He lives in Mumbai with his wife and six-year-old son.

POULOMI MUKHERJEE was born in Jamshedpur, India. Her first stories were published in The Statesman, a national daily newspaper. She worked as an advertising agency copywriter for a few years before becoming a travel writer, which allowed her to indulge her two passions: travelling and writing. Presently, she writes graphic novels, moonlights as an avid travel blogger, and is penning a travel book.

RUBY J. MURRAY was born in Melbourne. She was educated at Princes Hill Secondary College, the University of Melbourne, La Sorbonne, the Australian National University and in Jakarta’s 40,000 taxis. She has a background in environmental politics and writes regularly for Australian magazines, newspapers, journals and anthologies. Running Dogs is her first novel.

SARAH MURRAY is the author of Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre, How We Dignify the Dead and Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat. She is an established Financial Times contributor. Born in Dorset, Britain, she lives in New York City.

KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM’s work has appeared in more than 400 publications worldwide, most recently in Boston Review, Coe Review, Cold-Drill, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Southword and Strong Verse. She has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and four times for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Her publication credits are listed here: http://kristinemuslim.weebly.com

AKERKE MUSSABEKOVA was born in 1987 in Kyzylorda, a small city on the banks of the Syr Darya River in Kazakhstan. She studied at the Kazakh National University where she specialized in translation and English interpretation. She visited Canada as part of the Poet in the City exchange project, and is a technical translator at the International Road Project Western Europe-Western China.

MARIKO NAGAI is the author of Histories of Bodies (Red Hen Press, 2005), the winner of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award; and Georgic, the winner of the 2009 GS Chandra Sharat Prize and forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2010. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Yaddo, Djerassi, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Writing Programs at Temple University, Japan Campus, in Tokyo.

DALJIT NAGRA was born and raised in England of Punjabi parentage. He received the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem for Look We Have Coming to Dover!, also the titular poem of his first collection (Faber & Faber, 2007) for which he was awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and The South Bank Show Decibel Award.

CHANDRAN NAIR is the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent social-venture think tank dedicated to increasing awareness of the impact of globalisation. He is the Chairman of Avantage Ventures, an advisory company in the field of social investing. He is also the author of Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet.

BEN NAPARSTEK is a Melbourne literary journalist whose collection of interview-profiles of international writers will be published by Scribe Publications later this year. He is co­-editor of The Jacqueline Rose Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2010, and was recently named editor of The Monthly, Australia’s magazine of politics, culture and the arts.

ALICE NELSON is an Australian writer who has spent several years living and studying abroad. She studied creative writing in the renowned Master’s program at the City University of New York and her award-winning short fiction has appeared in a range of American and Australian journals. Nelson’s first novel, The Last Sky (Fremantle Press, 2008), set in Hong Kong, was shortlisted for The Australian/ Vogel Literary Prize and won the TAG Hungerford Award.

GRAHAM NEWMAN, a veteran of the graphics rat race in the UK, has lived in Hong Kong for the past eight years. During his early career, he worked in a little-known design studio for Factory Records in Manchester. Graham started his company Newman Zhang because he found he too often did not recognise the business he was in. Outside the design studio he is a filmmaker and photojournalist.

NGUYEN QUI DUC is the author of Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family (1994), and the co-editor of Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1995) and Once Upon A Dream, the Vietnamese American Experience (1995). He is the translator of the novella Behind the Red Mist by Ho Anh Thai (1997) and of The Time Tree: Poems by Huu Thinh (2004).

O THIAM CHIN graduated with a degree in English from the Singapore Institute of Management. His debut collection of short stories, Free-Falling Man, was published in 2006, and he is now working on a second collection, due out in early 2009. He has also written a screenplay for which he received a merit prize in Singapore’s 2006 National Scriptwriting Competition.

LUCIA ORTH lived in Manila for five years, working for a non-profit organisation. She has lived in London, Beijing and Washington, DC, and has travelled extensively in Asia, and Eastern Europe. She graduated from Notre Dame Law School and currently teaches in the Indigenous and American Indian Studies department at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Her debut novel, Baby Jesus Pawnshop (The Permanent Press) was published in November 2008.

J. P. O’MALLEY, from Dublin, works as a freelance arts journalist in London. He has written for The Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Economist, the Irish Examiner, Sunday Business Post, Verbal Arts Magazine, thequietus.com, culturenorthernireland.org and The Big Issue, among other publications.

LAKSMI PAMUNTJAK was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Anagram and Ellipsis; a treatise on violence; the award-winning The Jakarta Good Food Guide series; a collection of short stories titled The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art; and two translations of the works of leading Indonesian poet Goenawan Mohamad, Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things.

JANE WEIZHEN PAN, a native speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese, holds an MA in translation studies from Monash University and taught translation at RMIT University. She co-translated Wang Gang’s novel English, Li Er’s short-story collection The Magician of 1919 and the Li Yu opera Ordained by Heaven with Martin Merz and is working on Cantonese and Mandarin translations of a puppet-show script of Alice in Wonderland.

ALVIN PANG holds first class honours in Literature from the University of York and a Fellowship in Writing from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (2002). As a poet, he has been featured in major publications and festivals around the world, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Poetry Parnassus (2012). He contributes commentary to The Straits Times, and is a founding director of the Wordfeast international poetry festival and The Literary Centre (Singapore). He manages several literary websites including poetrybillboard.com, writer.per.sg and verbosity.net. His books include Testing the Silence (1997), City of Rain (2003) and such anthologies as No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000).

ED PARK is an assistant professor of the Korean language and a translator who lives in Salinas, California. He has been published in Acta Koreana.

PARK MINGYU was born in South Korea in 1968. He is the author of Legend of Earth’s Heroes, The Sammi Superstars’ Last Fan Club, Ping Pong and Pavane for a Dead Princess. His short fiction includes Castella and Double. He is a winner of the Munhakdonge New Writer’s Award, the Hankyoreh Literary Award, the Yi Hyo-seok Literary Award, the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award and the Yi Sang Literary Award.

LINDA SUE PARK was born in Urbana, Illinois and grew up outside Chicago. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old, and her favorite thing to do as a child was read. Linda Sue is the author of many books, including Seesaw Girl (1999) and A Single Shard, which won the Newbery Medal in 2002.

CAROLINE PETIT is the author of two literary thrillers featuring Leah Kolbe. The recently published Deep Night and the earlier The Fat Man’s Daughter are set in Hong Kong and Macau during the 1930s and 1940s. Her writing has been acclaimed for effortlessly weaving together fact and fiction. She has also published short stories and produced a television series on screenwriters. Born in Washington, DC, she now lives in Melbourne, Australia.

PHAM HAI ANH was born in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1970. She has a PhD in Language Studies and taught at the University of Pedagogy in Hanoi between 1991 and 1997. She has published four collections of short stories in the US and in Vietnam, including To the End of the Rainy Road (2002) and Looking for the Moon at the Bottom of the Water (2003), and was awarded the National Literature Prize by the Writers' Association in Vietnam in 2003.

JACK PICONE is an Australian-born editorial and documentary photographer based in Bangkok. He has spent more than 20 years working in scores of countries, including some of the world’s most dangerous, such as Israel, Angola, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia. He has won several of photojournalism’s most prestigious awards and conducts The Jack Picone Photography Workshops.

CATHERINE PLATT, originally from the UK, has been based in China’s Sichuan Province since 2004 as a freelance editor, writer, translator and consultant to non-governmental organizations. Her translations of Chinese poetry and fiction have been published in MaLa, the Chengdu Bookworm Literary Review, Chengdoo Magazine and Unshod Quills, and in a forthcoming Anthology of Twentieth Century Chinese Literature to be published by Springer and Yilin Publishing Company.

Singapore-born American novelist WENA POON is the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes, Alex y Robert and The Biophilia Omnibus. Her work has been serialised by BBC Radio, performed in a Roman amphitheatre in France and is to be staged by London’s Bush Theatre. She won the 2010 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Singapore Literature Prize.

G. B. PRABHAT is the author of two novels, Chains (2000) and Eimona (2006). He has published short stories in newspapers The Hindu and The Indian Express. His stories have also been translated into Telugu and Hindi. Prabhat is the founder and CEO of Anantara Solutions, a consulting and outsourcing company. He lives with his family in Chennai, India.

GYAN PRAKASH is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He has written Bonded Histories and Another Reason and has edited several volumes of essays, including the recently published Noir Urbanisms. His latest book is Mumbai Fables. He has also written the script for Bombay Velvet, a film to be produced and directed by Anurag Kashyap in 2012.

IAN PREECE worked as a commissioning editor for much of his twenty-one years in book publishing in London. More recently he has written for When Saturday Comes, Caught by the River's website and their magazine An Antidote to Indifference. He puts together a radio show, featuring music books, for Seeks Music http://seeksmusic.com/show/third­light-home/#/blog

FREDI PROKO was born in 1972, in a tiny town in the south of Albania, right on the Greek border, and read English and American literature at the University of Tirana. His Albanian translations most notably include John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Fiona Sampson’s The Distance Between Us. In English, he has translated Arian Leka’s Canticle Face and a collection of Leka’s poems for the Orient Express literary review.

RYAN PYLE spends much of his time in China’s hinterlands. Based in Shanghai, his work spans journalism and documentary photography. He is a freelance contributor to publications worldwide, including The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, Der Spiegel and The Sunday Times Magazine.

JIMMY QI is a prolific writer of novels, essays, philosophical discourses and biographies. He began to write during ten years of ‘exile’ as a businessman in Canada; later he returned to China to take up a teaching post at Beijing Language and Culture University. Yu Li: Confessions of an Elevator Operator is a translation of the first part of a trilogy about migrant workers. A translation of his comic novel about China’s missteps on the capitalist road, President Q, will be published in 2013 by Make-Do Publishing.

QIU XIAOLONG is the creator of the award-winning Inspector Chen series of novels, which he uses to explore the impact of change on a people brought up to believe in the infallibility of the Communist Party. Years of Red Dust, first serialised in Le Monde in 2008 and being prepared for publication in English, is a chronological collection of interlinked stories beginning in 1949. Born in Shanghai, Qiu lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.

SINDHU RAJASEKARAN is a twenty-four-year-old Indian writer and Bharatanatyam dancer. Her debut novel, Kaleidoscopic Reflections, was published by Frog Books in 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Vodafone-Crossword Book Award. She recently graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Rajasekaran currently lives in Mumbai, where she is working on her next novel.

MADHVI RAMANI was born in London, where she studied English and then creative writing at university. Her short stories have appeared in Stand, Underground Voices and in Too Asian, Not Asian Enough. Her first series of children’s books, Nina and the Travelling Spice Shed, are due to be published in 2012 and 2013. She lives in Berlin with her husband and imaginary cat.

MANI RAO is author of seven poetry books and has been published in journals including Tinfish, Wasafiri and Meanjin, and in numerous anthologies. She has performed at literary festivals in Australia, Canada, Asia and the US, was Visiting Fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 2005, and won the 2006 University of Iowa IP writer-in-­residence fellowship.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a New Zealand Maori (Te Atiawa), who has lived in Asia for 14 years. His published work includes Home Away Elsewhere (Proverse, Hong Kong, 2011), china as kafka (Kilmog Press, Dunedin, Aotearoa-New Zealand, 2011), Karon Beach (Good Samaritan Press, Thailand, 2012) and English Language as Hydra (Multilingual Matters, U. K., 2012).

ROBERT RICARDO REESE graduated from Santa Clara University with a BA in English. His writing has appeared in Drunken Boat, Poems against War, Santa Clara Review, Poecology, Monterey Journal and his poetry is forthcoming in the latest issue of the Blackbird Literary Journal. A Cave Canem Fellow and a student in the MFA programme at San Francisco State University, Reese has taught poetry as a writer-in-residence at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.

BLAIR REEVE, who holds a BA degree in Japanese and English Literature, performed poetry in New Zealand in the mid-and late 1990s, recording some presentations on CD. Later he moved to Japan for seven years and now resides in Hong Kong. His poems have been published in Glottis, Takahe and JAAM, by online magazines Cha and Trout and in Japanese journals. He is working on a collection of short stories.

DREUX RICHARD is an American writer, journalist and literary translator from Tokyo. He covers Japan's African community for the Japan Times. His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Days Japan, Kyoto Journal and Metropolis.

KATE ROGERS’ poetry has been published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, the US and Britain, in Many Mountains Moving, Dimsum, Pressed, The New Quarterly, Contemporary Verse II, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mad Woman in the Academy and Orbis International. She is co-editor of the international women’s poetry anthology Not A Muse and has published a collection, Painting the Borrowed House.

SANDIP ROY is a journalist and radio-show host based in San Francisco. He is a New America Media editor and a commentator on National Public Radio. An immigrant from India, he writes regularly for ethnic and mainstream media in the US and India and blogs for The Huffington Post. His work has been included in anthologies such as Contours of the Heart, Story-Wallah, The Phobic and the Erotic, Desilicious and Mobile Cultures.

THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI grew up in central Pennsylvania, USA, and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the novels Tetched and Roughhouse. Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He teaches fiction writing at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA and lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan. As a visiting author, he was a participant in the 2009 Hong Kong Literary Festival.

ANNA SAA-FELICIANO graduated with a B.A. from the University of Santo Tomas in her hometown of Manila. An English instructor, she is also undertaking an M.A. in English Language and Literature Teaching at the Ateneo de Manila University. She presented an academic paper at the 15th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) in Cebu, Philippines, last October.

FARRUKH SALEEM is the Sunday columnist for The News, Pakistan’s largest English­-language daily. He writes on conflict dynamics, political economy and governance. His previous positions include national consultant for the World Bank’s Post Conflict Need Assessment, executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies, and contributor to the UN-sponsored Common Country Assessment.

MINOLI SALGADO was born in Malaysia and grew up in Sri Lanka, South East Asia and British boarding schools. Her fiction and poetry have been published in the UK and the US, and recently appeared in Bridges: A Global Anthology of Short Stories and The World Record. She is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, England, and the author of Writing Sri Lanka. She was selected to represent Sri Lanka at Poetry Parnassus, part of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012.

PREETA SAMARASAN was born in Ipoh, Malaysia. She moved to the US to complete her education, and currently lives in France. Her debut novel, Evening Is the Whole Day, was published this year, for which she received praise from the New York Times for ‘her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place, and her psychological acuity’.

JAINA SANGA grew up in Bombay and moved to the US in 1980 as a student. After receiving a PhD in English from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, she taught English and Cultural Studies for several years. She is the author of a critical book on Salman Rushdie’s fiction and editor of two volumes on south Asian literature. ‘The Good Price’ is her first published fiction. She lives with her husband in Dallas and travels to India frequently.

Tokyo-based photographer SHINICHI SATO hails from Oita in Kyushu. He specialises in interior and architecture-related photography, as well as the portrayal of quotidian cityscapes, which he shoots with a large-format, custom-made Ebony 45S flatbed view camera for detailed natural perspectives. In 2000, in conjunction with author Yumi Yoshimoto, he published the photography and short-story collection Where I Am.

RON SCHAFRICK completed an M.A. in English Literature (Creative Writing) at Concordia University in Montreal, then spent nine years working as an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Now living in Toronto, he is working on a collection of short stories, many reflecting his experiences in South Korea. His stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Prairie Journal and The Antigonish Review.

DEVAN SCHWARTZ is a graphic novelist and freelance journalist who has worked as a human-rights reporter in Southeast Asia. He is enrolled on the Portland State University MFA programme in the United States and is writing his first literary novel, The Disunion of Hope. His work has appeared in New Plains Review, Rio Grande Review and Street Roots.

CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIORE is a contributing editor and books editor for Time Out in Beijing. She has lived in China since 2009; her numerous interviewees have included literary figures from Amitav Ghosh to Yan Lianke. She has written for publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Observer, New Statesman, Prospect and the South China Morning Post.

HARESH SHAH is a Norman Mailer Writers Colony fellow. He was born and raised in Bombay, educated in England, and has lived in Germany, the US, Mexico and the Czech Republic. Former editorial director of Playboy magazine’s international editions, he conceived and edited the Czech magazine Serial. His first book was Of Simultaneous Orgasms and other Popular Myths: A Realistic Look at Relationships (Kindle Edition, 2009). He is currently working on his second, Parallel Lives: Mumbai and I. He lives in Chicago.

EDWINA SHAW was born and raised in Queensland, Australia. She lived in Singapore, Cambodia and Germany before settling in Brisbane where she completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. Her debut novella, Thrill Seekers (Ransom Publishing) is forthcoming in early 2010. Her fiction and memoir has appeared in Griffith Review, Island, Hecate and Idiom 23. In 2008, she was awarded the Griffith Review Frank Moorhouse mentorship for most promising new writer.

SHEN HAO BO was born in 1976, in Jiangsu, and now lives in Beijing, where he graduated from the Beijing Normal University. He began to write and publish poetry in 1996. The Chinese Poetry Society focussed attention on him in 1999 after the publication of his influential article ‘Who Is Ruling Poetry in the ’90s?’. In 2000, he co-founded the poetry magazine Xia Ban Shen (Nether Regions). He is the author of two books of poems.

ANIS SHIVANI is a fiction writer, poet, and critic living in Houston, Texas. He is the author of Anatolia and Other Stories (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books, 2009) and he is finishing a novel, The Slums of Karachi, and a book of criticism. ‘The Fifth Lash’ is part of a forthcoming collection, Alienation, Jihad, Burqa, Apostasy. New work appears in Boston Review, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Stand and Meanjin.

BRON SIBREE is a freelance journalist based in Perth, Western Australia. She juggles her unruly passions for literature and food, travel and interiors by contributing to a variety of publications across Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

KEVIN SIMMONDS is a poet, composer and performance artist. His publications include Mad for Meat, the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the edited collection Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof. His music has been performed around the world. Fellowships and commissions have been granted by Cave Canem, The San Francisco Arts Commission, the Fulbright Programme and the Jack Straw Writers Programme.

KRISHAN PARTAP SINGH is a former banker who now lives and writes in New Delhi. He is the author of The Raisina Series, a trilogy of novels set in Lutyen’s Delhi, India’s seat of power. He can be reached at raisina.series@gmail.com

E. V. SLATE’s short stories have appeared in such journals and anthologies as the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, Ploughshares, New England Review, Crazyhorse and Best New American Voices 2005. She has lived in Singapore since 2007 and is currently working on her first novel.

MADELEINE MARIE SLAVICK has written several books of poetry and non-fiction; her most recent title is Delicate Access. Slavick has worked as an environmental activist, guidance counsellor, literature teacher, social worker, editor, photographer, and a publisher of bilingual Chinese-English books. She lives in Hong Kong.

DEBORAH SMITH graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in English literature. She received an MA in Korean Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she is currently researching for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature. Her thesis will focus on representations of reality and the construction of history. She is the current recipient of the International Communication Foundation translation fellowship. Bae Suah's 'His First Love' (in Volume 24) is Smith's first published translation.

ANUSHKA ANASTASIA SOLOMON is a Malaysian Catholic poet in exile in the United States. Author of two poetry chapbooks, Please, God, Don’t Let Me Write Like a Woman and The Hindu and the Punk, she was one of twelve authors featured by Amnesty International in its 2008 Heroes and Heroines exhibition at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The Buying, Babe, Is Good Only in America was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press.

RONNY SOMECK was born in Baghdad and immigrated to Israel with his family as a child. He has a BA in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Philosophy, has worked as a counsellor for street children, and currently teaches Literature in a secondary school as well as running writing workshops.

DILIP D’SOUZA trained in engineering at BITS Pilani, India and computer science at Brown University, USA. He worked in software in the US and India for over twenty years before realizing that writing was his passion. He has published four books and has won several awards for his writing, including the Newsweek and the Daily Beast Prize for South Asia Commentary. He lives in Bombay with his wife Vibha, children Surabhi and Sahir, and cats Cleo and Aziz.

DAWN STARIN has a PhD in anthropology and is an honorary research associate at University College London. She has been conducting research in Africa and Asia for decades. Her non-scientific pieces have appeared in various newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Natural History, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Index on Censorship, Areté and Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.

STEPHANOS STEPHANIDES was born in Cyprus. He left the island as a child and returned thirty years later in 1992. He is a translator, fluent in Greek, Spanish, English and Portuguese, an award-winning poet, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus.

ANIL STEPHEN, who has a master’s degree in journalism, is a former news producer for Star TV in Hong Kong. He is the CEO for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human-rights organisation that campaigns for religious freedom in more than 25 countries. He has travelled extensively and lived in India, the Seychelles, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

ERIN SWAN is a writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has been published in The Quarterlife Quarterly, The Cuirt Journal and Black Lantern Publishing. The author of nine non-fiction children’s books, she has worked in publishing, taught English in South and Southeast Asia and is now teaching literature and writing in a New York City public high school.

MAXINE SYJUCO is a Filipina poet, performance artist, musician, photographer and commercial model. In 2007, she represented the Philippines in the International Performance Art Festival. She published her first book of poems entitled A Secret Life in 2008. Syjuco is the front woman of the experimental art-band Utakan, fusing her poetry with electronic devices and sound-art.

MIGUEL SYJUCO, from Manila, is the author of Ilustrado, his first novel, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Palanca Award, his country’s highest literary honour. A product of the thriving Philippine arts scene, he has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is completing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Adelaide.

GILLIAN SZE is a native of Winnipeg, Canada. She studied in Montreal where she earned a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing at Concordia University in 2008. Her graduate thesis, a collection of poems based on visual art from a range of cultures, is the basis of Fish Bones (DC Books, 2009). She has two chapbooks published by Withwords Press and her poetry has appeared in literary journals.

MASARU TAMAMOTO is a research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and a visiting bye-fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is also a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, New York.

SHAUN TAN is best known for his illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and the acclaimed wordless graphic novel The Arrival have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America. His most recent publication is Tales from Outer Suburbia, a collection of short illustrated stories.

ROYSTON TAN is an internationally acclaimed Singapore filmmaker, whose award-­winning short films have made him an Internet icon. His first full-length feature film, 15 (2004), about teenagers on the fringe of Singapore society, was the first Singapore film to be invited to the Venice Film Festival and his subsequent work – 4:30 (2006) and 881 (2007) – cemented his status as one of Asia’s leading filmmakers. His fourth feature film, 12 Lotus, was released in 2008.

TAN TWAN ENG is author of The Gift of Rain, which was long listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. Tan was born in Penang and lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. After studying law through the University of London, Tan worked as an advocate and solicitor in Kuala Lumpur. His most recent novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was short listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and has been long listed for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize.

LUCY TAN is a fiction writer and New Jersey native who works and writes in Shanghai. She recently graduated from New York University, where she earned a B.A. in English and American Literature, East Asian Studies and Creative Writing. A reluctant child of the suburbs, she is drawn to established and burgeoning cities, which her stories often explore.

DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW was born in Hong Kong and completed her schooling there before moving to China aged eighteen to study Chinese. A journalist, she has worked at The Associated Press, Die Welt and Deutsche Welle. In 2003, she returned to China to report on social and personal transformations there, winning eleven prizes for her feature work at the South China Morning Post. She lives in Beijing with her husband, seven-year-old son and toddler daughter.

EDDIE TAY teaches children’s literature and creative writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Remnants and A Lover’s Soliloquy. Both collections consist of original poems as well as loose translations of the poems of Li Bai, Li He, Du Fu and Li Shangyin. His poems are included in Asia Literary Review Volume 8, Autumn 2008.

AMIT TAYAL wanted to be an artist since he was nine years old. After a brief shot at accountancy and then animation, he found his niche as an illustrator at Campfire Graphic Novels in New Delhi.

HSU-MING TEO is a novelist and historian based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo won the The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and her second novel Behind the Moon was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She was one of the judges of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the editor of Cultural History in Australia, the author of Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012) and of a range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, fiction and popular culture. She is working on her third novel.

JEET THAYIL is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct and English, and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His libretto for the opera Babur in London toured internationally in 2012. He is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil. His debut novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. He lives in New Delhi.

HARVEY THOMLINSON is the founder of Hong Kong-based press Make-Do Publishing, which has published fiction by several previously untranslated contemporary Chinese writers, as well as Asia-themed non-fiction. His translation of Murong Xuecun’s novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, was nominated for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. Harvey’s novel, The Strike, was shortlisted for the 2011 Patchen Award. http://www.makedopublishing.com

LAURIE THOMPSON was born in York, England, and lived in northern Sweden for several years. He taught Swedish language and literature in the University of Wales, and was editor of Swedish Book Review (1983–2002). He has translated some fifty books from Swedish, including works by Henning Mankell, Håkan Nesser, Åke Edwardson, Mikael Niemi, Peter Pohl and Stig Dagerman. He lives in rural Wales with several cats and a Swedish wife.

RENEE MELCHERT THORPE was born fifty years ago in the US. Forty years ago, she published a bimonthly family newsletter. Thirty years ago, honeymooning in Asia, she and her husband vowed to return. Twenty years ago, they moved to Hong Kong, where her career as a painter flourished and she was published as a fiction and travel writer. Ten years ago, she graduated from HKU with BAs in English Literature and Fine Arts. Today she writes in Bali.

TOMOKO SAWADA is a recipient of numerous photography awards. Her work appears in more than ten museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art. By photographing herself in an array of traditional female roles, Sawada seeks to describe and question Japanese societal norms and culture in a thought-provoking yet light-hearted way.

SU TONG is the author of six novels including Rice and My Life as Emperor. Among his other works are a dozen novellas and more than 120 short stories. He is best known outside China for the novella Wives and Concubines, which was adapted for the Oscar-­winning film Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

MICHELLE TOOKER lives in Philadelphia, where she works in marketing by day and writes poetry by night. An avid traveller, she has visited 33 countries and plans to visit at least 100. Her favourite region is Southeast Asia, particularly Burma. Michelle’s work has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Ampersand, Foundling Review and Gutter Eloquence.

PHOEBE TSANG was born in Hong Kong, educated in England and currently resides in Canada. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies including Atlas 02, Garden Variety (Quattro Books) and Not a Muse (Haven Books). Her full-length collection, Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse (Tightrope Books), will be released in October 2009. A professional violinist, she is a multi-genre artist who holds a BSc in Architecture.

TSAO LI-CHUAN is a writer, poet and lyricist from Changhua, Taiwan. She graduated from Tamkang University, where she studied Chinese. She won the United Daily News Literary Award for her first story ‘Beauty’ in 1982, for ‘Dance of the Maiden’ in 1991 and in 1996, the 10th Unitas New Writers Award for Recommended Novella with White Hair. Her first short-story collection, Dance of the Maiden, was published in 1999 and recently republished to great success. Her blog can be found at: blog.roodo.com/bluecheese.

CLARENCE TSUI is the film editor of the South China Morning Post and a part-time instructor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Journalism and Communication.

SIR MARK TULLY, KBE, was born in Calcutta in 1936. He was for twenty years the BBC’s Chief of Bureau in New Delhi, before resigning in 1994. A journalist and a broadcaster, he is the author of India in Slow Motion, No Full Stops in India, The Heart of India, Divide & Quit, Last Children of the Raj, From Raj to Rajiv – Forty Years of Indian Independence, India – 50 years of Independence, India’s Unending Journey and Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle.

UCHIDA TATSURU is a professor emeritus at Kobe College University. He has won Japanese literary awards for his bestselling book, Japan as a Peripheral State and the earlier A Private Study of Jewish Culture. His other works include Ethics of Hesitation, Attention to Murakami Haruki and Fourteen Lectures on Creative Writing. He is a seventh-grade aikido master, and runs a school for aikido and philosophy in Kobe, Japan.

BURLEE VANG is the author of the poetry collection The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth. His prose and poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Runes and the anthologies Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: Best New Writers of 2006 and Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley. He is the founder of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle.

SIVAKAMI VELLIANGIRI was included in Dr Srinivasa Iyengar’s History of Indian Writing in English and has published her poems in The Little Magazine, Indian Literature, Kavi, Parampara, Dance Macabre, and elsewhere. Her online chapbook, In My Midriff, was published by Lily Press. Hosted by the Prakriti Foundation she has read her poems at Chamiers, the Semester-at-Sea, and at Spaces. Her poem Kodaikanal won a second prize in the IBPC Poetry Contest. She is passionate about taking poetry to the young.

ANURADHA VIJAYAKRISHNAN lives in Chennai, India. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in New Writing 14, Orbis, Aesthetica, The King’s English, Desilit, Bare Root Review, Eclectica and Indian Literature. Her unpublished novel Seeing the Girl was longlisted for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. She has participated in poetry events in Chennai and Hyderabad and is currently working on poems, short stories and a new novel.

MICHAEL CARLO C. VILLAS teaches language, literature and communication at Leyte Normal University in the Philippines. He is a former fellow of the Visayas Writers’ Workshop, which was then directed by one of the Philippines’ most respected poets, Merlie M. Alunan. Michael’s poetry has appeared in Corpus and the Philippines Free Press and is forthcoming in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry. He is also a literary critic.

OCEAN VUONG was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and lives in New York, where he is an undergraduate English student. He has received an Academy of American Poets award and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems can be found in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Cha, Softblow, Lantern Review and Asian American Poetry. He practises Zen meditation and is an animal-rights activist.

JANE WALLACE is an author and journalist based in London and Hong Kong. She published her debut novel, Into the Light, the first of the science fiction trilogy Epizodes, in 2010. She is a lifetime member of the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle and her short stories appear in many of its anthologies.

WANG LIXIONG is well-known as a vigilant and vocal observer of China-Tibet relations and ethnic-minority issues in China. His works are considered among the most authoritative and balanced on Tibetan issues by a native Chinese writer. Wang was recognized in 2002 with the Freedom of Expression Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Association.

SHASHI WARRIER is the author of the thrillers Night of the Krait, The Orphan Diaries and Sniper and the forthcoming Noordin’s Gift. He has also written Hangman’s Journal, a fictional biography of the last hangman of the kingdom of Travancore, and The Homecoming, a novel set in Kashmir. He has written two books for children, The Hidden Continent and Suzy’s Gift. He is currently working on another thriller set in Goa, as well as an account of his motorcycle trip around India.

JILL WIDNER grew up in Sumatra, Indonesia, where her father was a petroleum engineer in the 1960s. Excerpts from her novel in progress, The Smell of Sulphur, which fictionalises her experience, have been published in Hobart, Kartika Review, and North American Review, and two different forms of the piece published here appeared in Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 3 (pretend genius press) and Kyoto Journal. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

SEAN MICHAEL WILSON, from Edinburgh, lives and works in Japan, the only British professional comic-book writer to do so. He has written 17 comic books for American, British and Japanese publishers, often working with Japanese and Chinese artists. He is also the editor of story collection AX: Alternative Manga.

TIM WINTER is a Sydney-based photographer and academic. Much of his photography is integrated with his academic research on Asian cultural politics and heritage, and he has held exhibitions in Cambodia, Singapore and Australia. He is the editor of the forthcoming book Shanghai Expo: The World in a City.

TSERING WOESER is a Lhasa-born poet and journalist who was raised and educated entirely in Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. As an adult, Woeser rediscovered her Tibetan heritage and rose to become one of the most respected writers on Tibet. She maintains a widely-read blog aptly called Invisible Tibet. Her work appears in Asia Literary Review, Volume 24: Voices from Tibet.

WON SEOUNG WON studied fine arts in Seoul, Dusseldorf and Cologne, obtaining her BFA in South Korea and her MFA in Germany. Her works have been on exhibit throughout Germany as well as in Paris, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere in Europe and Asia. She is known for her complex photographic montages, which often resemble paintings.

FRANCES WOOD is curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library. She studied at Liverpool College of Art and graduated in Chinese from Cambridge University. After a PhD in Chinese architecture at London University, Wood spent a year as a ‘worker-­peasant-soldier’ in Beijing in 1975–76. Her books include Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995), The Silk Road (2003) and The First Emperor of China (2007). The Lure of China is due out later this year.

KIRBY WRIGHT was born and raised in Hawaii. Before the City, his first book of poetry, was awarded first place at the San Diego Book Awards. He is the author of the companion novels Punahou Blues and Moloka’i Nui, both of which are set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2009 International Writers’ Workshop in Hong Kong.

FAN WU grew up on a state-run farm in southern China, where her parents were exiled during the Cultural Revolution. She travelled to the US in 1997 to study at Stanford University and began writing in 2002. Her debut novel, February Flowers (Picador Asia), is being translated into eight languages. Her second novel, Beautiful as Yesterday, will be published in 2009. Her short stories have appeared in Granta and The Missouri Review. She lives in Northern California.

XU XI is the author or editor of ten books, most recently Evanescent Isles (essays), The Unwalled City (novel), Overleaf Hong Kong (stories and essays) and Fifty-Fifty (an anthology of new Hong Kong writing). She is on the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaching MFA in Writing. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand.

XIANHUI YANG lives in Tianjin, China. ‘Woman from Shanghai’ is excerpted from Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labour Camp, which is forthcoming from Pantheon and printed here with the permission of the publisher. It is his first book to be translated into English.

YAO FENG graduated in Portuguese from the Beijing Foreign Studies University and is assistant professor at the Portuguese department of the University of Macau. He is an essayist and poet, and his poems are included in more than twenty collections. He was awarded the fourteenth Rou Gang Poetry Prize and distinguished with the Portuguese honorific medal of Sant’Iago da Espada.

PAUL YOON was born in New York City. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Best of the Web 2008 and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. ‘Faces to the Fire’, which appears in this edition of Asia Literary Review, is taken from Once the Shore (Sarabande Books), his forthcoming collection of short stories, due out in April 2009.

AKIKO YOSANO (1878-1942) was a prominent Japanese poet and author who campaigned for pacifism, social reform and women’s rights. In her first collection, Midaregami (Tangled Hair; 1901), Yosano pioneered a revolutionary approach to tanka poetry, using it to convey a sensual and romantic individualism. Her death went largely unmarked during the chaos of World War II, but modern audiences are beginning to rediscover her work.

BANANA YOSHIMOTO, novelist and essayist, hails from Tokyo. She won the Kaien Newcomer Writers’ Prize in 1987 and the Izumi Kyoka Prize in 1988 for her first novel, Kitchen. She has also been the recipient of numerous other Japanese and international literary prizes, notably Italy’s Maschera d’Argento. Her work has been widely translated and is published in more than thirty countries.

DAVID YOST was born and raised in St Louis, Missouri. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, he recently returned to the US from working with Burmese refugees in Thailand. His fiction has appeared in Witness, Pleiades, The Mid-American Review, Harpur Palate and The Minnesota Review.

CHANGMING YUAN is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and co-author of Chansons of a Chinaman and Three Poets. He grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to North America. Yuan has a PhD in English and teaches in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in eighteen countries in 420 literary publications including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, Taj Mahal Review and Yuan Yang.

ALFRED A. YUSON, nicknamed Krip, has authored novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories and biographies. He is the recipient of the SEA Write Award for lifetime achievement and has been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary distinction. In 2008, he was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He teaches fiction and poetry at Ateneo de Manila University.

Z.Z. was born in Shanghai, China, and educated in the United States. A US-qualified attorney, he lives and practises law in Beijing. Raised in a family of academics, he has worked with companies and individuals engaged in education, and has been an active entrepreneur in China’s emerging market since 2002.

MONICA ZARAZUA, from Michigan, recently completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and has been published in The Collagist and The Blotter. A former schoolteacher, she lives in Oakland, California.

ZHANG BINGJIANG was born in Shanghai in 1960 and graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1982. He was awarded an MFA from the University of South Carolina in 1993 and now lives in Beijing, where he works with film and contemporary art. Zhang has directed and produced numerous films shown at major festivals internationally. His artwork has been displayed and collected widely in China and the US.

ZHENG DANYI was born in Sichuan, China, in 1963, and his poetry was first published in the 1980s. He has won awards in New York and China and was shortlisted for the 2003 Grand Chinese Media Prize in Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including Ten Major Poets Today, Gold in Blue Sky, New Generation: Poems from China Today, and have been translated into ten languages. He has published six collections of poetry and four novellas. Zheng's highly-acclaimed bilingual collection is Wings of Summer.

YVETTE ZHU was born in Beijing. She now lives in San Francisco and was runner-up in the 2011 Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition. She divides her time between consulting and writing and has completed a collection of short stories. She is currently working on a novel set in Beijing in 1976.

DAFNA ZUR received her PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. She teaches courses on Korean literature and visual culture in the Korean Language and Literature Department at Keimyung University and will be teaching at Stanford University in autumn 2012. Her translations of Korean fiction have appeared in Words without Borders, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture and Waxen Wings.