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2008 Australian Writers’ Week
Participating writers
Lily Brett was born in Germany and grew up in Melbourne. She is the author of five novels, three collections of essays and seven collections of poetry. Her first book, The Auschwitz Poems won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Award for poetry and both her fiction and poetry have won other major prizes, including the 1995 NSW Premier's Award for Fiction for Just Like That. Her books of essays, In Full View, New York, and Between Mexico and Poland were critical successes, and her more recent novel, Too Many Men which won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2000 was a bestseller both in Australia and in Germany. The sequel, You Gotta Have Balls, was published in 2006. Lily is married to the Australian painter David Rankin and lives in New York.
Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland, stories of people who heroically resisted the Eastern German dictatorship, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Stasiland was shortlisted for numerous awards and in 2004 won the world’s largest non-fiction prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize. It has been published in 18 countries, translated into a dozen languages and is currently being adapted for the stage by The National Theatre, London and for television in Britain. Her next book, a novel, is part love story and part mystery, but, like Stasiland, it examines courage and capitulation in times of terror. Anna grew up in Melbourne and Paris and lives in Sydney.
Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life he was a broadcasting producer, working for the ABC in Sydney. He has lived and worked in London and elsewhere overseas. He has been a fulltime writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his novels, many of which have been translated in a number of European countries. His novel, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a film by Peter Weir and nominated for an Academy Award. He has twice won the Miles Franklin award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 Koch was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.
Christopher Kremmer is one of Australia's most respected and popular writers of narrative non-fiction, whose work has been compared favourably with that of VS Naipaul and William Dalrymple. Educated at the University of Canberra, he spent a decade in Asia working as a foreign correspondent, producing a series of award-winning bestsellers, including The Carpet Wars, Bamboo Palace and his latest book, Inhaling the Mahatma, a personal history of India. Born in Sydney he divides his time between homes in India and Australia's Southern Highlands.
Gail Jones writes powerful stories with settings and themes as diverse as photography and illumination in the nineteenth century, studies of technology in contemporary Japan and Aboriginal reconciliation in present day Australia. Her writing has been richly awarded, including the Nita B Kibble Award, the Western Australian Premier's Fiction and Premier’s prizes, the Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction, the South Australian Festival Award for Literature, as well as a longlisting for the MAN Booker Prize and twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.
Born in London to Australian parents, Nicholas Jose grew up in Australia. He studied at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He has travelled extensively in Europe and Asia and from 1986 to 1990 worked in Shanghai and Beijing, including as Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy. He has held the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide since 2005. From 2002 to 2005 he was President of Sydney PEN and he is General Editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. His novels Avenue of Eternal Peace, The Rose Crossing, The Custodians and The Red Thread have been translated into Chinese by Li Yao.
Ouyang Yu’s literary career began in China where he published poetry, fiction, non-fiction and literary translations. He has published 19 books in Chinese and English in Australia, USA, UK and New Zealand. He arrived in Australia in 1991 and edits Otherland – Australia’s first –and only– Chinese-English journal. Ouyang Yu holds a PhD in Australian Literature from La Trobe University and has recently set up the Australian Studies Centre at Wuhan University, dividing his time between Melbourne and Wuhan. His most recent work is a book of creative non-fiction, On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese and Living Australian, was published in February 2008.