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.

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).

TEW BUNNAG was born in Bangkok and studied Chinese and Economics at Cambridge University. After graduation, he spent seven years travelling around the world. In 1975 he became a t’ai chi and meditation teacher. Since 2000 he has been working for the Human Development Foundation in the slums of Bangkok. His published works of fiction include Fragile Days, After the Wave, and The Naga’s Journey. A new novel, The Curtain of Rain, is in progress.

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.

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.

TISHANI DOSHI is a writer and dancer. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from John Hopkins University. Her book of poems, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for best first collection and her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury and Penguin India.

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.

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.

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.

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. The first of his Conquest Trilogy, chronicling the momentous events surrounding the Battle of Hastings, will be published in May 2011.

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.

JAINA SANGA grew up in Mumbai and moved to the US as a student. After receiving a PhD in English she taught English and Cultural Studies for several years. She is the author of a book of criticism of Salman Rushdie’s fiction and the editor of two volumes on south Asian literature. Her fiction has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, Epiphany and Carpe Articulum. She lives in Dallas and travels to India frequently.

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.

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.

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.

Min K. Kang was born in Busan, South Korea. She has lived in the United States since 1996 and now resides in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University, College Station and is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University.

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.

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.

RAMONA KOVAL presents The Book Show, on ABC Radio National Australia, which can also be heard at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow. 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.

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 a number of 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 a number of international awards.

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.

THOMAS R. MOORE’s 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.

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).

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.

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.

KEVIN SIMMONDS is a writer and musician. His work has appeared in Field, jubilat, Kyoto Journal and Poetry, and in the anthologies War Diaries and The Ringing Ear. He wrote the musical score for Hope, a meditation on AIDS which won an Emmy in 2009, and Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country, an original composition in collaboration with poet Kwame Dawes, which opened the 2006 Poetry International Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com

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.

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.

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.

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.