Chair:
Xu Xi is the current Chair of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she teaches creative writing and lectures on globalized culture at various colleges and universities worldwide. She is on the faculty at Vermont College’s MFA in Writing, and is currently visiting lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and Stockholm University. She resides between New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand. She is the author of six books: Overleaf Hong Kong (Stories and Essays of the Chinese, Overseas), three novels, The Unwalled City, Hong Kong Rose and Chinese Walls, and two short fiction collections, History’s Fiction and Daughters of Hui. She is co-editor of the first comprehensive anthologies of Hong Kong Writing in English, City Voices and City Stage. Her personal essay collection Evanescent Isles, and an anthology of new Hong Kong writing, Fifty-Fifty (ed.), will both be published in 2008. Awards include a New York State fiction fellowship, the Ploughshares Cohen story award, and residencies in Switzerland, Norway and the U.S. Her novel-in-manuscript, Habit of a Foreign Sky has been long-listed for the inaugural Man Asia Literary Prize.
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Executive Director:
Jane Camens is the Executive Director and initiator of the APWP. She co-founded the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and advised on the inaugural Ubud Writers’ Festival. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and project-managed the first event of the UK’s New Writing Partnership, ‘New Writing Types’. Her short fiction has been broadcast on the BBC World Service and published in literary journals and anthologies in the UK, Hong Kong and, most recently, in a bilingual Indonesian-Australian collection of creative writing. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Griffith University.
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Information co-ordinator:
Nury Vittachi is an author and literary activist. As a writer, he is best known for his novel series The Feng Shui Detective, published in many languages around the world. But he has written numerous other works, and his publishers include St Martin’s Press (US), Birlinn Polygon (UK), and Allen and Unwin (Australia). Vittachi founded the Asia Literary Review, a journal which has published many of the world’s top authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomas Keneally, Romesh Gunasekera and David Mitchell. Vittachi co-founded the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (with Jane Camens), initiated the Man Asia Literary Prize, and teaches literary skills to young people at university level in Hong Kong. He is chair of the judges of AALA, one of the world's biggest literary prizes.
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Ronald Baytan is an Associate Professor of Literature at De La Salle University-Manila. He is the author of The Queen Sings the Blues: Poems, 1992-2002 (Anvil, 2007). His forthcoming book is The Queen Lives Alone: Personal Essays. His areas of specialty include Philippine literature in English and creative non-fiction.
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Catherine Cole is a writer, teacher of writing and researcher. She is a member of the Committee of Management and the executive of the Australian Society of Authors. She has published three novels - Dry Dock, Skin Deep and The Grave at Thu Le. Her non-fiction book Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks, explores the theories which underpin crime fiction. She has been a recipient of the Keesing Studio in Paris and an Asialink residency in Hanoi. She is researching Australia’s cultural relationship with Vietnam, examining contemporary Vietnamese writing.
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Jon Cook is a senior educator at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts. The Centre hosts the Spring International Literary Festival at UEA and the Visiting Writers’ series at the Savile Club in London. He was convener of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA from 1986-1996. His publications include Poetry in Theory (2004) and Hazlitt in Love (2005).
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Jill Dawson is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred & Edie (short-listed for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year) Wild Boy, and Watch Me Disappear. She has also edited five anthologies. Jill lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens in the UK, where for four years she held various fellowships at the UK's most famous course in Writing, at the University of East Anglia. Currently Jilly is Vice-Chair of the New Writing Partnership in the UK.
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Robert Dixon, FAFA, was appointed Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in 2007. This is the only permanent chair of Australian literature in Australia. He was previously Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of English, Media Studies & Art History and the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland. He has published widely on Australian literature, postcolonial literatures, Australian cultural studies and Australian art history and is a past-president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
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Debjani Ganguly is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University. Her areas of specialization are postcolonial literary and historical studies and comparative/world literatures in the era of globalization. She is currently working on a world literature project on Anglophone writing in the post-Cold War period (1989-present) with a focus on transnational works dealing with the global immanence of terror, warfare and genocide. Her publications include a co-edited volume on the legacy of Edward Said, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual (MUP, 2007), in which leading Australian and overseas scholars have written about the ways in which humanities and literary studies in particular can engage with the oeuvre of this leading postcolonial humanist in the 21st century. Debjani also works on the literatures and cultures of the Indian subcontinent.
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George Quinn is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Asian Studies and Head of the Southeast Asia Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Gadjah Mada University, Jogjakarta (1974) and a PhD from the University of Sydney (1984). He teaches Indonesian and Javanese, and contributes to courses on Indonesian literature, Indonesian religion and East Timor. His main publications are The Novel in Javanese (1992) and The Learners Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian (2001). His current research focuses on popular Islam in Java, especially sacred places and local pilgrimage in Java and Madura. As Head of the Southeast Asia Centre, Dr Quinn is responsible for tuition programs in the languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma/Myanmar and East Timor.
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Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, translations, several acclaimed novels and one memoir. He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy, Beijing, 1987-1990, and has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture. A past president of Sydney PEN, he currently holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the University.
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Christopher Merrill is Director of the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa. Previously he held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross (USA). His books include four collections of poetry, Brilliant Water, Workbook, Fevers & Tides, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and four books of nonfiction. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
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Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. In 2000 Nair was selected as a “Face of the Millennium” in a national survey of writers by India Today. Nair has been called “the first significant post-modern poet in Indian English” by more than one critic. She has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone and The Ayodhya Cantos (Viking Penguin, 1992 and 1999) and, most recently, Yellow Hibiscus (Penguin, December, 2004). Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), in the anthology Mosaic, featuring award-winning writers from the U.K and India (1999), in Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002) and a special issue of Poetry International (2004).
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Chusak Pattarakulvanit is an associate professor and Head of English Language and Literature Department, Thammasat University, Bangkok.
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Mohit Prasad teaches Pacific Literature, Diaspora and Postcolonial Studies at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. He is the Director of the Pacific Writing Forum and Divisional Head of Literature. Among his publication are three volumes of poetry, Eyes of the Mask (1998), Eating Mangoes (2000) and Kissing Rain (2006). His current collection Jahajin's Songs will be published in late 2007. His research interests lie in postcolonial and diasporic studies with a particular emphasis on popular culture. He has written The History of Soccer in Fiji. He completed a PhD on Indo-Fijian Diaspora and Popular Culture at the University of Western Sydney in 2005.
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Dinah Roma-Sianturi is the director of De La Salle University's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (Manila). Her first book of poetry A Feast of Origins (2004) was awarded the National Book Award by the Manila Critics' Circle while her recent collection of poems Geographies of Light (2007) won a Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. She also teaches literature and creative writing at De La Salle University.
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Ketut Seken was born in Klungkung, Bali, Indonesia. He earned his doctoral degree in English language education in Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia. He started his career as an assistant lecturer at the English Language Education Department of FKIP of Universitas Udayana Denpasar, Indonesia, and later served there as Head of English Language Education Department. He has been involved in research on linguistics and English language teaching/learning since 1980. His research interest also includes English pragmatics. He is currently a Vice Rector at Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha in Bali.
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Kirpal Singh is Associate Professor of English Literature & Creative Thinking at Singapore Management University. He is currently Vice-President of the American Creativity Association and a member of Singapore’s ARTSFUND Committee. He has held visiting appointments and lectured in many universities around the world, including Cambridge, Warwick, Hull, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Carnegie-Mellon, Drexel, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, College of William & Mary, Iowa, Utah, Toronto, Melbourne, Muenster, Bonn, Tubigen, Philippines, Delhi, International Islamic University (Malaysia), Victoria University Wellington, and has read at numerous international Arts/Literary festivals including Edinburgh, Toronto, Cambridge, Hong Kong, Mexico, Adelaide, Perth, Malaysia, and Singapore. He has authored or edited 16 books, among his latest, Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans: Creativity Across Cultures, and Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature.
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Regis Stella is from the island of Bougainville. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of New South Wales and has lectured at the University of Papua New Guinea and. He holds an Honorary Fellowship in Writing from Iowa. He is author of Forms and Styles of Banoni Music (Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1990) and compiler of Moments in Melanesia (Oxford University Press, 1994).
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Terry (Sui Han) Yip is Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her A. M. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A. and has been teaching comparative literature at HKBU since 1985. Her research interests include Romanticism, Chinese-Western literary relations, modern Chinese literature, British modernist literature, and women/gender and self in Chinese and Western literature.
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Thanet Aphornsuvan is Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand. He graduated from Binghamton University, New York, in 1991 in U.S. History and is a member of the International Contributing Editors of the Journal of American History. He was previously Visiting Professor at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore, UCLA, U.S.A., and at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He has published books and articles on Thai politics and society and American intellectual history. His most recent publication is a monograph entitled Rebellion in Southern Thailand: Contending Histories.