Asia Literary Review - Contributors - Asian American writing

Contributors

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ANDREW BARKER lives and teaches in Hong Kong and has a PhD in American Literature, an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and a BA in English Literature. His first collection of poetry is entitled Snowblind from my Protective Colouring, and the selection published here is from the villanelle sequence ‘Everything in Life is Contagious’, in which the unnamed He and She argue in the death-throes of their relationship.

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.

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.

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 a number of 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.

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.

KAREN CL 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.

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.

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.

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.

XAVIER COMAS is a creative director, photographer and illustrator focusing on book covers published internationally. Based in Bangkok, his photo essays have been published and exhibited in Spain, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. His ‘Pasajero’ project has been recently showcased as installation at the Singapore Art Museum, published by La Vanguardia’s newspaper magazine in Spain, and featured in Quotation, the prestigious art magazine in Japan.

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.

André 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

XIAOLU GUO is a Chinese novelist and filmmaker. She was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007 for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and her most recent novel, Twenty Fragments of A Ravenous Youth, is published this year. Her forthcoming novel, UFO in Her Eyes, is due to be published in January 2009.

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.

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 a George Orwell, a boxer, and Leo Tolstoy. His first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse (chosen by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2001) won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a 2002 Betty Trask Award, and was banned in China. His second, Passing Under Heaven, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

KAVITA 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.

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.

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.

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.

JAMES KIDD studied English literature at Liverpool University and University College London. Based in London, he writes for the South China Morning Post, The Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph. He recently contributed to the Little Black Book of Books: A Century of the Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Rocked the Literary World.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices and Best Australian Stories. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

SHIRLEY LEE, composer and musician, is currently reading Classics at Oxford. Korean by mother-tongue, birth and nationality, Hong Kong has long been home. She has read at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival and has had poetry published in various journals and anthologies.

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.

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.

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 Center.

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).

LUO HUI has pursued literary studies in China, the United States and Canada, earning degrees in English, comparative literature and Chinese. His translation work ranges from Exxon Mobil tender documents and CBC documentaries to books of poetry, including Wings of Summer by Zheng Danyi. Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, Hui is writing his dissertation on Chinese ghost stories. He also writes a semi-regular column for a Toronto-based art gallery.

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 presents 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.

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 of his South African poems. Forthcoming are The West (Fremantle Press), and Southern Barbarians (Giramondo and T41).

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.

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.

REID MITCHELL, a New Orleanian, has spent much of the time since the Katrina flood in Hong Kong. A historian and writer of fiction, he will be teaching at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China, in 2008-09. His poetry has been published in Pedestal, Mascara, 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.

PALANI MOHAN was born in Chennai, India, moved to Australia as a child, and currently 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 a number of 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.

MARSHALL MOORE is the author of the novel The Concrete Sky (Haworth Press, 2003) and two short-story collections, Black Shapes in a Darkened Room (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004) and The Infernal Republic (Ignavia Press, 2009). A native of the American South, he now lives and works in Hong Kong.

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’s poetry has been published in literary journals in the US, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. She has been a Paumanok Poetry Contest ﬁnalist and a writer in residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington. She has performed her poetry at the Sugar Factory, Amsterdam, and at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Her ﬁrst poetry collection, The Palimpsest of Exile (Rubicon Press), will be published in March 2009.

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.

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.

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 (Addison-Wesley, 1994), and the co-editor of Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 1995) and Once Upon A Dream, the Vietnamese American Experience (Andrews and McMeel, 1995). He is the translator of the novella Behind The Red Mist by Ho Anh Thai (Curbstone Press, 1997) and of The Time Tree, Poems by Huu Thinh (Curbstone Press, 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.

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 a number of 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.

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.

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.

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.

KATE ROGERS’ poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada and the UK. She was shortlisted for the Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Prize in January 2008. Her poetry collection, Painting the Borrowed House, debuted at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival in March 2008. Her next project is co-editing an international women’s poetry anthology, Not A Muse (Haven Books), to be published in Hong Kong in spring 2009.

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 is a participant in the 2009 Hong Kong Literary Festival.

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.

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.

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.

ANUSHKA ANASTASIA SOLOMON is a Malaysian poet in exile in the US. 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.

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.

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.

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 a number of literary journals.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 of 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.