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Leslie Chang is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in American History and Literature. For a decade she was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Beijing specialising in stories that explored how socioeconomic change is transforming institutions and individuals. In Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008), Chang tells the story of China’s 130 million migrant workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang is married to Peter Hessler. They live in Colorado. Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. At the age of six, he moved to New Jersey with his parents. He earned his MFA from Cornell University, New York. His work has appeared in: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, African Voices, Best American Fiction (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000) and The O’Henry Prize Stories 2009; and was included in the ‘20 Writers for the 21st Century’ issue of The New Yorker (1999). Díaz received a Pushcart Prize for his story “Invierno”. Díaz’s story collection, Drown, is in its 23rd printing. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and remained on The New York Times and independent bookstore bestseller lists for two years. Díaz is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and teaches creative writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Shamini Flint lives in Singapore with her husband and two children. She began her career in law in Malaysia and also worked at an international law firm in Singapore. She travelled extensively around Asia for her work, before resigning to be a stay-at-home mum, writer, part-time lecturer and environmental activist. She writes children’s books with cultural and environmental themes including Jungle Blues and Turtle Takes a Trip as well as the Sasha series of children’s books. Her books for young readers include, Ten, set in a small, seaside town in Malaysia, which is a touching, multi-cultural story of the universality of human values, and The Seeds of Time, about two ordinary children on a quest to save the planet. Morris Gleitzman was born in England in 1953 and moved to Australia with his family in 1969. He studied journalism and began his writing career as a screenwriter for television comedy. Gleitzman’s first book, The Other Facts of Life, started out as a screenplay which he turned into a novel. Gleitzman found he could get closer to the characters’ thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film and so began his career as a novelist. His other books for children, to name but a handful, include: Two Weeks with the Queen (1989), Misery Guts (1991), Second Childhood (1995), Water Wings (1997), and Boy Overboard (2002), all of which have been adapted for the stage. His most recent books include; Once (2006), Give Peas a Chance (2008) and Then (2009), which was awarded the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award: Younger Readers. Gleitzman’s books are aimed primarily at readers aged 8 to 12 and he is known for his tough subjects, presented in a humorous and offbeat style. He is also a well-know columnist and writes regularly for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Melbourne Age, and for Young Telegraph. Emily Gravett was born in Brighton. After leaving school Ms Gravett spent 8 years living on the road pondering her future before getting a place on the BA illustration course at Brighton University. Wolves was published to great acclaim in 2005, winning many prizes including the Kate Greenaway Medal and marking the beginning of an internationally stellar career creating extraordinary books for children. Her recent book Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears won the Kate Greenaway Medal again, and her latest work, Monkey and Me has also been shortlisted. Ms Gravett now lives back in Brighton with her daughter, partner and two pet rats. Gaby Halberstam was born and raised in Africa until her family moved to England when she was fifteen. After earning a degree in English at Oxford University, she went on to qualify as a lawyer and worked at a London city firm before she decided to become a full-time author. Her first novel, Blue Sky Freedom, received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Children's Book of the Year. Her second book, The Red Dress, was published in 2009. Both stories are based in South Africa, with the setting and plot drawn from her childhood memories and from what she learned about the apartheid system. Hyejin Kim is a writer, education consultant and occasional lecturer who currently lives in Derek Landy, an author and screenwriter, lives near Dublin. Before writing his children's story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, he wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous horror film. "I think my career-guidance teacher is spinning in her grave," he says, "or she would be if she were dead". The first book of the series, Skulduggery Pleasant, was published in 2007 and won the 2008 Young Teen Fiction Book Award. This was followed by Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing With Fire in 2008 and Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones in 2009. Two of his screenplays that have been made into films, Dead Bodies and Boy Eats Girl, have won and been nominated respectively for IFTA awards. As a black belt in Kenpo Karate, he has taught countless children how to defend themselves, in the hopes of building his own private munchkin army. Mo Zhi Hong lives in Auckland but grew up in Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, China, the USA and New Zealand. In the dot-com boom he developed software in New York, and later taught in China. His first novel The Year of the Shanghai Shark won The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009 Best First Book for South East Asia and Pacific. Darren Shan was born in London and moved to Ireland at the age of six. He began writing for fun in his teenage years. He enjoyed his first taste of literary success at aged 15, as a runner-up in a TV script-writing competition for RTE in Ireland, with a dark comedy script entitled A Day in the Morgue. Although he quite liked the idea of writing a children's book one day, Mr. Shan considered himself an adult writer first and foremost. In fact, his initial breakthrough was with an adult book, under his real name of Darren O'Shaughnessy. Then, in 2000, his first children’s book, Cirque Du Freak was published. It was the first in a twelve book series entitled The Saga of Darren Shan and it attracted rave reviews and much media attention. His latest work is The Demonata, a ten-book series which will take readers into new realms and universes, all of them populated or threatened by demons.His adventures have been read by millions of people around the world in several different languages, yet much of his life remains shrouded in mystery. He lives in seclusion in the depths of Ireland. And he never drinks blood. Or so he claims. Alexander McCall Smith has written more than 60 books, including specialist academic titles, short story collections, and a number of immensely popular children's books. But he is best known for his internationally acclaimed No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which rapidly rose to the top of bestseller lists throughout the world. The fifth novel in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, received the Saga Award for Wit in the |
8-18 March 2011
2010 Authors
