Achebe is famous for his novels describing the effects of Western customs and values on traditional African society. His satire and his keen ear for spoken language have made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English. He was born in Ogidi, Nigeria in 1930, the son of a teacher in a missionary school. After studying English, history and theology at University College in Ibadan he went on to join the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos in 1954. In the 1960s he was the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria, but during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) Achebe chose to work in the Biafran government service. He has since taught at US and Nigerian universities. Since 1990 he has been paralyzed from the waist down after a serious car accident.

Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) was set in the 1890s, when missionaries and colonial government made their intrusion into Igbo society. It has been translated into some 50 languages and was followed by other novels, such as No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), which were concerned with the clash between traditional Igbo life and the colonial powers in the form of missionaries and colonial government. His later books continue the theme of political analysis and reflect his deep personal disappointment with what Nigeria became after independence. Achebe has also written collections of short stories, poetry, and several books for young readers.

His work has been recognized by the award of many prizes, most recently the 2007 Man Booker International award. In 1983, his political stature was acknowledged when he was elected deputy national president of the People’s Redemption Party. As the director of Heineman Educational Books in Nigeria, he has encouraged and published the work of dozens of African writers. In 1984 he founded the bilingual magazine Uwa ndi Igbo, a valuable source for Igbo studies.

John Berger is an art critic, novelist, painter and author. Perhaps best known among his many works are the novel G., winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, and the introductory essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the important BBC series of the same name. Born in London in 1926, Berger was educated in Oxford before serving in the British Army from 1944 to 1946. He then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London, exhibiting work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career. While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing his essays and reviews mainly in the New Statesman.

In 1958 Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time. One month after its release the work was withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The novels immediately succeeding this were The Foot of Clive and Corker’s Freedom; both depicting an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. In 1962 Berger’s distaste for life in Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in France and he subsequently settled in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s.

In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images. In the same year his novel G., a romantic picaresque set in the Europe of 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize. In the 1970s Berger collaborated with the Swiss director Alain Tanner on several films. His major fictional work of the 1980s, the trilogy Into Their Labours (made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag), treats the European peasant experience from its farming roots into contemporary economic and political displacement and urban poverty. Berger’s work also includes poetry, biography and sociological studies. In recent essays he has written of photography, art, politics, and memory.

Mahmoud Darwish was perhaps the most important contemporary Arab poet. He published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Olives, in 1964 when he was 22 and went on to publish more than 35 books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into 35 languages. His poems are known throughout the Arab world.

Darwish was born in 1942 in the vollage of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his political activism in the support of his people he often faced house arrest and imprisonment. Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. He then went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for al-Ahram Newspaper and to Lebanon where he was an editor of the journal of Palestinian Issues and the director of the Palestininan Research Centre. Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine.

He was the editor-in-chief and founder of the prestigious literary review al-Karmel, which he started in 1982 and which resumed publication in January 1997 out of the Sakakini Centre offices in Ramallah. In 1998 he published the collection Sareer el Ghariba (The Stranger’s Bed), his first collection of love poems, and in 2000 Jidariyya (Mural), a book consisting of one poem about his near death experience in 1997.

Mahmoud Darwish won the 2001 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, a prize which recognizes people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression, and was awarded the Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.

Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939. He grew up on his father’s small farm in Northern Ireland but at 12 left home for a Catholic boarding school in the city of Derry, 40 miles away. From 1957 to 1972 he lived in Belfast and then in the Irish Republic where he has made his home. At school, he was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study at Queen’s University, Belfast, have influenced his work. The Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger frame of reference and remains culturally and politically central.

Heaney’s first collection of poems, Eleven Works, was published in 1965 and was followed by several major publications including Selected Poems 1965-1975 and Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, both published in 1980. His early works examine the implications of having been born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, doomed, moreover, to suffer a quartercentury of violence, polarization and distrust. This gave him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry’s responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. These concerns led to his association with Field Day, a theatre company which contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.

In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. He served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 and made a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1996.

English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director and political activist. After publishing poetry as a teenager and acting in school plays, Pinter began his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as an actor. During a writing career spanning over half a century, beginning with his first play, The Room (1957), Pinter wrote 29 stage plays; 26 screenplays and many dramatic sketches, radio and television plays. Although he wrote poetry, fiction, essays, speeches and letters, he is best known as a playwright and screenwriter, especially for The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), all of which he adapted to film, and for his screenplay adaptation of others’ works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions of his own and other’s works.

Thematically ambiguous, Pinter’s dramas raise complex issues of individual human identity oppressed by social forces, the power of language, and the vicissitudes of memory. Although Pinter publicly eschewed applying the term ‘political theatre’ to his own work in 1981, he began writing overtly political plays in the mid-1980s, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. Pinter received several honorary degrees and numerous awards and honours. Academic institutions and performing arts organizations have devoted symposia, festivals, and celebrations to honouring him and his work, in recognition of his cultural influence and achievements across genres and media. In awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, the Swedish Academy cited him for being “generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.” In January 2007 Pinter received the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civil honour.

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before his family settled in North Wales, where he studied at Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech, before reading English at Exeter College, Oxford.

His first children’s book was Count Karlstein (1982, republished in 2002). That was followed by The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in a quartet of books featuring the young Victorian adventurer, Sally Lockhart. His most well-known work is the trilogy His Dark Materials, beginning with Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the USA) in 1995, continuing with The Subtle Knife in 1997, and concluding with The Amber Spyglass in 2000. These books have been honoured by several prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children’s Book Award, and (for The Amber Spyglass) the Whitbread Book of the Year Award – the first time in the history of that prize that it was given to a children’s book. Northern Lights won the Carnegie Medal in 1996, and ten years later it was awarded the Carnegie of Carnegies, chosen by readers from all the books that have won this medal in the 70 years since it was first awarded.

He is currently working on the highly-anticipated The Book of Dust.

Emma Thompson is an Oscar winning actress and writer. She achieved fame in the United States in a series of literary adaptations, notably “Howards End” (1992), for which she won the best actress Academy Award and “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), which earned her the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. She is the only person ever to win both acting and screenplay Oscars. She has appeared in more than 25 films, at least 10 television dramas as well as a host of theatre productions.

Ms Thompson is chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation and an ambassador for Action Aid. She is co-curator of an interactive art installation – Journey – which uses seven transport;containers to illustrate the brutal and harrowing experiences of women;sold into the sex trade.