Tareq Abboushi graduated from William Paterson University with a B.M. in Jazz Piano Performance. He began playing the buzuq in 1997, starting at the National Conservatory of Music in Palestine. He performed with such notable musicians as Simon Shaheen, Omar Farouk Tekbilek and Grammy-Award-Winner Dan Zanes in the USA, Canada, the Middle East and Europe. His teaching profile includes lecture demonstrations at Columbia University, NYU, Juilliard and Agder University among others. He has also composed and performed music for award-winning films. He has recently come back to Palestine after living in New York for 10 years where he has been performing with his band, Shusmo. He currently lives and performs in Ramallah and teaches at The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.

Alaa could have been an important scientist or a famous computer programmer, but whenever he got started he got distracted – by chasing butterflies, or he’d meet interesting people and they’d talk until he forgot his intended career path.

Right now, he spends most of his time in front of a computer screen protesting and fighting for his rights. When questioned about what he does with his time his reply is a lengthy monologue about the coming revolution, his efforts to keep her flames burning. He sees her future unfolding through new technologies, her open source nature, her bloggers and citizen journalists, her manifesto carved in ever-changing wikis and her brightening skies of emails and ideas.

Khalid has played leading roles in two films so far: United 93 and The Kite Runner – both Oscar nominated.

Born in 1980, Khalid was brought up in the UK to Egyptian parents and has dual nationality. After reading English Literature at Queens College, Cambridge, he studied at the École Philippe Gaulier in Paris, then went on to start a career in film as an actor.

Ghada Abdel Aal is a pharmacist and regular columnist for the Egyptian daily newspaper Al Shorouk and the Saudi magazine Rotana . Her satirical novel Aiza Atgawez [ عايزة أتجوز] has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, English and French  and turned into a popular television series, for which she won Best Comedy Script at the Arab Media Cairo Festival.

She curates the humorous online blog www.wanna-b-a-bride.blogspot.com.

Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. He holds a BA from the University of Birzeit, an MA from Bradford University and earned his PhD in Italy.  He is the author of four novels: Shadows in Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000), and The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003 & 2006). He has also published a collection of short stories entitled Everything is Normal. Abu Saif lives in Gaza City and teaches Political Science at al-Azhar University of Gaza. He is the editor-in-chief of Syasat, the journal of the Palestinian Institute of Public Policy. He is a regular contributor to several Palestinian and other Arabic language newspapers, journals and literary supplements. Many of his stories have been translated into English and other European languages.

Susan Abulhawa was born to refugees of the 1967 war and currently lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter. She is the author of Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2009),  founder and president of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to upholding The Right to Play for Palestinian children. Her essays and political commentaries have appeared in print and international news media and she is a contributing author to two anthologies: Shattered Illusions (Amal Press, 2002) and Searching Jenin (Cune Press, 2003).

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the award-winning online publication The Electronic Intifada, established in 2001. He is author of the book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which argues for a single, democratic and decolonized state in historic Palestine. Based in Chicago, he has written hundreds of articles on the question of Palestine, many of which have been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera among others. He is currently working on a new book.

Novelist, critic and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She is the author of two novels: Harbor (Alfred E. Knopf, 2004), winner of the LA Times First Fiction Award and a finalist for the Guardian First Book and Orange Prizes; and The Room and the Chair (Knopf, 2010).  Her work has been critically acclaimed in such publications as Harper’s, Bookforum, NPR, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, The Guardian, The Times of London and translated into Turkish, German and Dutch.  She is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and most recently, a Guggenheim grant for a novel she is currently writing set in Lahore, Pakistan. She has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review since 2005 specializing in reviewing foreign fiction, often from the Muslim world. She lives in Harlem with the novelist Richard Price and their backyard posse of feral cats.

Born in India and raised there and in Sudan at eighteen Meena went to England to study. Her cycle of poems `Letters to Gandhi’ was composed in 2002 in the aftermath of violence in Gujarat. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. Her memoir Fault Lines was selected as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems.  Her volume of essays Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009. She has received  awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and her work has been anthologized and translated into several languages.

Lina Attalah was the chief editor of Egypt Independent, a Cairo-based news website and print newspaper. At university in Cairo, she worked with “Cairo to Camps”, a youth solidarity initiative with Palestinian refugees, which took her to work in camps throughout Lebanon and Jordan, as well as with the Palestinian community in Egypt. She also worked as project manager for a number of research-based projects with multi-media output around the themes of space, mobility and intellectual history.

Asmaa Azaizeh received her BA in Journalism and English Language from Haifa University in 2006. She has worked as a journalist and presenter in various local newspapers and radio stations. Currently, she is a news editor and presenter at Raya FM radio station and a presenter on Palestinian television. She is also active in several cultural activities including editing the poetry section on www.qadita.net.

Asmaa won the Young Writer Award from the Abdel Mohsen Qattan Foundation in 2010 and first volume of poetry, “Liwa” will be published later this year. She has also contributed to and participated in various journals, anthologies and poetry festivals. Her work has been translated into English, German, Persian and Hebrew.

‪Ibtisam Azem is a writer and journalist. She was born in Taybat al-Muthallath and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at Freiburg, Germany, where she completed an MA in Islamic Studies and German and English Literature. 
She works as a producer and correspondent for DW-TV-Arabic in New York. She has published essays and short stories in al-Akhbar, Qantara, and al-Jazeera.net, and she is co-editor and editor of the Arabic page of Jadaliyya. Her first novel, Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief) was published in Beirut by Dar al-Jamal in 2011. Her second novel, Sifr al-Ikhtifaa, is expected in 2013.

 Saleh Bakri is one of the leading actors of his generation. He appeared in Salt of this Sea, The Time That Remains, When I Saw You and most recently Salvio.

Mourid Barghouti is a Palestinian poet. He was born in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah. He has published 12 books of poetry, the most recent of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight, 2005). Other works include Collected Works (1997), and A Small Sun (2003) his first poetry book in English translation. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000 and his poems have been published in Arabic and international literary magazines including Al Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Times Literary Supplement, Pen, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His autobiographical narrative Raaytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), 1997, published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages. The English translation, by Ahdaf Soueif, was published by the American University in Cairo Press as well as by Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London.

Iyad Barghouti is a short story writer and editor at Fasl al-Maqal newspaper. His first collection Qisas Bayna al-Buyout (Stories Between Homes) was published in 2012. He lives in Akka, Palestine.

A writer and broadcaster who began her career at 14, as a critic for various arts publications. She signed her first book deal at 16. She currently presents arts shows and documentaries for BBC Radio 3, 4 and the World Service and writes for The New Statesman, the FT, The Guardian and The Observer. She judged the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2010. Her latest book is Venetian Masters.

Victoria Brittain has worked as a journalist in Africa, Asia and the Middle East for many years. For more than two decades she worked for The Guardian, where she was Associate Foreign Editor in recent years. She also writes for various French media outlets. She has been a consultant to the UN on issues of women and war, and to the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. Most recently she has been a Research Associate at the London School of Economics. She is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a trustee of Widows’ Rights International and Gift for Life, Rwanda. Among her publications is Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment in Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar. Her most recent work, the Meaning of Waiting, in which she describes the lives of the wives of political detainees using their own words set to music has been a major success on the London stage.

All three of her most recent books are translated into Arabic.

Founded Virago Press in 1972 and ten years later became managing director of the publishers Chatto & Windus & The Hogarth Press. She is the author (with Colm Tóibín) of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. In 2006, she published Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, a biography of Vichy figure Louis Darquier, whose daughter was Callil’s therapist. Callil was born in Melbourne, Australia. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1960.

Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has worked in journalism and publishing in the UK, the USA and Australia. As a journalist, she has worked on Private Eye, Time Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph and the Observer and written for the New Statesman, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement; in publishing, she was a reader and editor for Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury.

Her first book, Philosophers of the Earth, published in 1972, looked at some of the pioneers of the environmental movement; her most recent, published in 2009, was a biography of Frances Partridge, the diarist and pacifist who lived through the entire 20th century before dying at the age of 103. Other books include Faces of Hiroshima (1985) an account of some of the survivors of the bombing, and a biography of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook (1992)

She has taught courses on Life Writing for the Arvon Foundation and been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas, and judged many literary prizes including the Booker Prize .

Formerly on the management committee of English PEN, she has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1988 and became Chair of Council in 2008. The RSL, founded by George IV in 1820, awards fellowships to writers of distinction, holds public talks and debates, administers prizes, runs master classes and supports the celebration of good writing and the community of writers both national and international .

Susannah Clapp is the author of With Chatwin (Cape 1997, Vintage 1998), a portrait of Bruce Chatwin. She helped to found the London Review of Books, has worked as a publisher’s reader and editor, as the radio critic of the Sunday Times and as the theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has reviewed novels and non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. She is a regular contributor to Radio 3’s Nightwaves, and has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997. She is currently working on a book about postcards.

Geraldine D’Amico was born in France from a Romanian mother and Ukrainian father, both Jewish. She studied English which she tought in secondary schools and at university and became a literary translator (Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Sam Fuller…). She left Paris with her Sicilian husband to live in Boston where she started teaching French (at Harvard and Babson college). After five years in the US and one in Italy, they finally moved to the UK. She taught French at King’s College, was Cultural Attachee at the French Embassy for five years, worked two years in publishing and has been the director of Jewish Book Week for the last 6 years. The speakers discuss all sort of themes -  identity, exile, the Holocaust, Israel, Palestine – and come from all over the world.

Da Arabian MC’s (Suhell Nafar, Tamer Nafar, Mahmoud Jreri).

Heralded by the major French newspaper Le Monde as “the spokesman of a new generation,” DAM, the first Palestinian hip hop crew and among the first to rap in Arabic, began working together in the late 1990s. Struck by the uncanny resemblance of the reality of the streets in a Tupac video to the streets in their own neighborhood of Lyd, Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar, Mahmoud Jreri were inspired to tell their stories through hip hop.

After their timely song “Min Irhabi” (“Who’s the terrorist”) was downloaded over a million times shortly after its internet release in 2001, DAM became a household name among youth throughout the Middle East. Rolling Stone in France distributed the song free in one of their issues, and the song has been featured in various compilations.

Ten years of performing all over the world has strengthened DAM’s commitment to continue living in their hometown of Lyd – fifteen minutes from Tel Aviv – working to provide the youth of the city and neighboring communities with programs and opportunities that have otherwise been denied to Palestinian citizens of Israel. In addition, they have conducted workshops for young people from the West Bank to the US, Canada, and Europe.

DAM’s music is a unique fusion of east and west, combining Arabic percussion rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, and urban hip hop. Their work has been influenced by artists as varied as Ghassan Kanafani, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji al Ali, Tupac, Biggie, Public Enemy, MBS, K’naan, and Pharoahe Monch.

“IHDA” (“Dedication”), DAM’s long-awaited first international album, was released in 2007, and DAM has seen its songs and members featured in films such as “Ford Transit” (Dir. Hany Abu Assad) “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” (Dir. Morgan Spurlock), “Salt of this Sea” (Dir. Annemarie Jacir), and “Local Angel” and “Forgiveness” (Dir. Udi Aloni). DAM’s history and influence on the Arab hip hop scene is detailed in the feature-length documentary “Slingshot Hip Hop” (Dir. Jackie Reem Salloum). The group has also been featured in Vibe, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Q, Basement, Reuters, and The New York Times, and has appeared on MTV, CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

www.damrap.com

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction based in London. Her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies including those published by Granta and the British Council. She was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Award 2005 and has won and been nominated for various international short story awards. Her first novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, December 2011) that follows the lives of the children of the former exiled leadership who returned to Gaza with the peace deals of the 1990s was recently published to widespread acclaim and reviewed positively by The Independent, the Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror, the Times Literary Supplement as well as other British and Middle Eastern newspapers with The Times describing it as “A punchy first novel… beautifully observed… the plot races and the voices are strong.” Dabbagh has lived in various Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the West Bank. She has recently been working on the script and dialogue for a fiction feature film by the Director Azza el Hassan.

Ahmad Dahbour, a poet and critic, was born in Haifa, but was forced into in exile in 1948. Dahbour worked as a political editor for the Palestinian Broadcasting Agency in Syria in 1972 and has worked in Palestinian media since. He returned to Palestine and lived for a while in Gaza City where he worked as a Director General in the Ministry of Culture. He has published ten volumes of poetry and was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry in 1998, and the Palestinian “Order of Merit and Excellence” in 2013. He lives now in Ramallah.

William Dalrymple is the author of six acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize in 1994 and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling From the Holy Mountain (1997); White Mughals (2002), which won Britain’s most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson, and The Last Mughal (2006) which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Statesman and The Guardian.

Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written 8 novels, a collection of short stories, a memoir of his parents, and 4 books for children.  His first novel The Commitments (1987) was made into a very successful film, directed by Alan Parker. Several other of his books have been made into successful films. His novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, won the Booker Prize in 1993.  His other novels include The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996) and A Star Called Henry (1999).

Falastine Dwikat is a Palestinian poet from Nablus. She is a graduate of an-Najah National University and is currently earning her MA in Applied Linguistics and Translation. She is the programme manager of the Research Journalism Initiative (RJI) at an-Najah. Her work with “Poetry of Witness” has created a meaningful bridge with students in US classrooms. Falastine has several articles published online and she is about to publish her first collection of selected poems.

Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It , The Ongoing Moment and, most recently, a novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. His many awards include the Somersert Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. A new collection of essays,Working the Room, will be published by Canongate in November.

Jillian Edelstein is a London based, award winning photographer. She was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa and her portraits have appeared in several major publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally at venues including the National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers Gallery, The Royal Academy New Art Space, the Tom Blau Gallery in London, the Recontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France and the Bensusan Museum, Johannesburg.

www.jillianedelstein.co.uk

Omar El-Khairy is a writer for stage and screen. He is a graduate of both the Royal Court and the Soho Young Writers’ Programmes and a fellow of the Old Vic New Voices T. S. Eliot UK/US Exchange. He is the Leverhulme Associate Playwright for 2013 at the Bush Theatre. He is also co-founder of the international theatre and film collective Paper Tiger. His first play Given the Times was commissioned for a rehearsed reading at the Finborough Theatre as part of Vibrant – A Festival of Finborough Playwrights, while his last play Sour Lips was commissioned as part of the Counter-Culture season at Ovalhouse and co-produced with Paper Tiger. Other collaborations include Theatre 503, the Arcola, the Lyric, the Unicorn, and the Orange Tree. For screen, his short Tunnels is in post-production with Idioms Film in the West Bank, and he is now developing his first feature length screenplay, Sheikh. He is also a contributing editor of Mute Magazine, blogger for The Disorder of Things, and holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the LSE.

Sahar Elmougy is an Egyptian novelist and short story writer. She has written several books including Daria, Aliha Saghira (Little Gods), Noon – which won the 2007 Cavafis prize.

She is also a gender and creative writing trainer and published the gender training manual Developing the Emotional Intelligence in Children in 2004.

Eskenderella was formed in 2005 by Hazem Shahin. The band started by singing covers of Sheikh Sayyed Darwish, Sheikh Imam and Ziad Rahbany songs. Later the band formed their own repertoire of songs composed by Hazem Shahin with lyrics by a number of poets such as Fuad Haddad, Salah Jaheen, Naguib Shehab al-Din, Amin Haddad, Tamim al-Barghouti, Ahmad Haddad and others. The name Eskenderella is taken from a poem by Khamees Ezz al-Arab which carries the same title.

The band consists of oud players: Hazem Shahin, Ashraf Nagaty, Hassan al-Manialawy, Islam Abdel Aziz; pianist Youssef al-Shere’i; percussionists Hany Bedeir and Amir Ezzat; and singers: Hazem Shahin, Ashraf Nagaty, Hassan al-Manialawy, Islam Abdel Aziz, May Haddad, Aya Hemeda, Salma Haddad, Alia Shaheen and Samia Jaheen.

Amr Ezzat is a blogger, journalist and political activist. He records his impressions in his blog, What Seems to Me, writing about politics and daily life, attempting to be philosophical, recording his tastes in art, his thoughts. Or a mix of the above.

He studied philosophy after engineering. He worked as a journalist for a couple of years after working as an engineer for a couple. He moved between several newspapers – al Badil, al Shorouk and al Masry al Youm. He tries to keep his writing a blend of information, impressions, experiences and cultural and social analyses.

He’s a founding member of Rabta: the Progressive Revolutionary Youth from February 2011. Before that he was a member of the group, Al Bosla (Compass), who published a magazine of the same name. In 2005 they began thinking about founding a democratic socialist group in Egypt. Right now he works as a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and is particularly interested in the relationship between religion and social and political issues.

Adam Foulds has produced three books in the last five years. The novel, The Truth about These Strange Times (2007) won the Betty Trask award and made him the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Broken Words (2008), a narrative poem, was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys award and won the Costa Prize in poetry. In 2009, his novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel Hideous Kinky, published in 1991. Hideous Kinky was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. In 1993 she was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. She has since written five more novels, Peerless Flats, Gaglow, The Wild, The Sea House, and most recently Love Falls, which was published in June 2007. She lives in London with her husband and three children.

(Poet. Scholar. Lover of Life.)  | An HBO Def Poet with a Master’s in Education, a Mexican and a Muslim, a Khalil Gibran meets Pablo Neruda in a lyrical break dance cypher, Mark Gonzales lives in the center of intersections. From Palestinian refugee camps, universities in Beirut, foster homes in Portugal, to cities across the Americas, he transcends citizenship identity to break borders and wage beauty across continents through culture. He is respected internationally for his creative approaches to suicide prevention, human rights and human development via performance, photojournalism, and narrative therapy.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of seven novels which include Paradise, Admiring Silence and By the Sea. Paradise was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes.By The Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and won the Radio France International ‘Temoin du Monde’ Prize. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and lives in Canerbury, Kent. He teaches at the University of Kent. His most recent novel is Desertion (2005), shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Amin Haddad is an Egyptian poet. He has published several collections of poetry: The Scent of Loved Ones (Reehet el Habayeb 1990), The Sweet Taste of Life (Halawet el Roah 1998), In Death, We Will Live On (Fel Moat Han’eesh 2003), Replaced Identity (Badal Faqid 2008) From Homeland to Heaven (Min Al Watan lel Ganna 2012). Island of the living (Gezeeret El Ahyaa), Time passed us by (Elwaqt Saraqna), Freedom Comes From the Martyrs (El Horreya min El shohadaa) are all forthcoming.

He is the founder of El-Share3 (the street) – a group of poets and musicians – which h both manages and participates in. He edited Ibn ‘Aroos – a magazine dedicated to Egyptian colloquial poetry in the nineties as well as writing the dubbing scripts for several major Disney films. During the revolution he has written several songs that have been performed by revolutionary bands and he was award the Kavafis prize for poetry in 2011.

Tarik Hamdan, Palestinian poet and musician, born in 1982. his first poetry book Once When I was a Sperm was published in 2010. His poems have been translated into English, Spanish and Korean. He is the Editor in Chief of Filstin Ashabab – a monthly arts and literature magazine for young artists and writers. He is active in diverse media and art projects in Palestine, and the Arab world.

The author of breaking poems, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award, and the Arab American Book award for Poetry 2009.Her other books are Zaatar Diva (2006), Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996) and Drops of This Story (1996). Her work has been widely anthologized and adapted for the theatre. Her produced plays include Blood Trinity and breaking letter(s), and she wrote the libretto for the multi-media performance Re-Orientalism. An original writer and performer in the Tony award-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selections, Salt of The Sea.

Mohammad Hanif’s first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It won the Commonwealth Best First Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt Award in India.

Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan. After graduating from  the Pakistan Air Force Academy he quit  to pursue a career in journalism. He worked for Newsline as a senior reporter. Later he joined the BBC and became the head of its Urdu Service in London. He has contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Urdu literary journal Aaj. He has written plays for the stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama, the feature film The Long Night and the stage play The Dictator’s Wife. Hanif is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme. He is currently a special correspondent for BBC Urdu and lives in Karachi.

Jeremy Harding has been a contributor to the London Review of Books for 25 years. His first pieces were about the unfinished wars of liberation in Eritrea, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. Small Wars, Small Mercies: Journeys in Africa’s Disputed Nations was published with Penguin in 1994. He joined the LRB as an editor two years later. In 2000 his long report for the paper on unauthorised migration and refugee routes to the European Union won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism. The piece has now been updated with new material from Europe and the US/Mexican frontier for his most recent book, Border Vigils (2012). He has worked in the Balkans, West Africa and the Middle East. In conjunction with the Palestine Festival of Literature he has run writing workshops in Birzeit and Ramallah. His memoir, Mother Countr,y is a record of his search for his two elusive mothers, adoptive and biological. His translations of Rimbaud are published in Penguin Classics.

Bio coming soon.

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, the author of four literary biographies. A lifelong Londoner, Selina was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Oxford University. Her first job was at Hatchard’s bookshop, after which she worked for fourteen years on the Daily Telegraph and for eight years was literary editor of Harper’s & Queen. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly and has been a judge of the Booker, Whitbread, British Academy, Ondaatje and Duff Cooper Prizes, and of the UK Biographers’ Award. She has written biographies of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehman.

Alaa Hlehel was born in 1974 in the village of Jish. He lives in Acre. He completed a BA in Communications and Fine Arts at Haifa University and has a diploma in Screenwriting. He is the editor of www.qadita.net, an Arabic website for culture and politics.

Hlehel has published one novel, The Circus (2001), and two collections of short stories: Stories at the Time of Need (2004) and The Father, the Son and the Lost Ghost (2008). His stories have been translated into English, French and German.

Hlehel has written and directed two short films, Confessions with Chocolate andCome to the Hummus, and wrote the screenplay for The Inheritance, currently in pre-production. He is working on a mockumentary about the Transfer.

Hlehel’s plays include Breaking News; DYAB, Johha & El-Bahlool, The Sultan Boot and Haidestan. His play The Absolutely Devoted Soldier was presented in Germany in 2008. He has translated plays by Pinter, Goldoni and Levin into Arabic.

Hlehel was selected as one of the Beirut 39 in 2009. He has won a number of awards, including the Theatre Award from the Qattan Foundation; The A-Safir Newspaper Prize for short stories; the Young Writer award for The Circus in 2001 and again for Stories at the time of Need in 2002; The Inheritance won first place in the “Adam Flint Script Competition” at the 2004 International Student Film Festival in Tel-Aviv.

Rachel Holmes most recent book, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Times of Saartjie Baartman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. She is currently writing a life of Eleanor Marx. Rachel is Head of Literature and the Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre, London, and runs the annual London Literature Festival. She is a founder and patron of FOTAC UK, which supports the Treatment Action Campaign in the fight for HIV and AIDS in South Africa, and Chair of Africa Beyond, celebrating African artists in the UK.

She was named as one of the 50 women to watch by the Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership Programme.

Othman Hussein was born in Rafah, Gaza. He has a BA in Arabic Literature from the University of Alexandria, and an MA from the American World University. He worked for several years as a cultural journalist in Abu Dhabi, where he issued the cultural supplement of the al-Itihad Newspaper. He permanently returned to Palestine in 1991, where he worked as a Secretary of the Union of Palestinian Writers. He established the literary quarterly, Ashtar, in 1993, which has published fourteen issues so far. He has produced several collections of poetry including: The Sailor Apologizes for Drowning, Who Would Cut off the Head of the Sea, He Has You and Things are Left to Get Blue. Hussein has participated in many local, Arab and international poetry events and is currently working as the Director of the Cultural Department in the Palestinian Planning Center.

Aamer Hussein was born and brought up in Karachi, but spent his early teens at high school in the mountains of South India before moving to London, aged 15. All three countries he has lived in have influenced his fiction. A graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Hussein abandoned a research degree to begin writing fiction in the 80s. His first book, Mirror to the Sun (1993) included several  fictions that had been previously anthologised. Four collections of stories followed: This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002); Cactus Town: New and Selected Stories, (2003) , and Insomnia (2007). He has  published two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). Recent stories have appeared in Granta, Moth, The New Statesman and Asymptote. A new collection, The Man from Beni Mora, is published in Pakistan this year. He is working on his first collection in Urdu (his mother tongue). He is currently Professorial Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Ian Jack is a writer and editor who has a weekly column in the Guardian. From 1995 to 2007 he edited the literary magazine Granta and from 1991 to 2005 the Independent on Sunday, of which he was a co-founder. He began his career as journalist on newspapers in Scotland and for sixteen years worked at the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, mainly in the Indian Subcontinent. He has reviewed books for many periodicals, including the New York Times and the London Review of Books. His own books are Before the Oil Ran Out (1987) and The Crash That Stopped Britain (2001).

Bio coming soon

May Jayyusi obtained a BA honors in Philosophy from University College, London and MSc. in Film and Communications from Boston University, Boston. She writes on philosophy and politics, and was a Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Research fellow (1994-1998), and has been a recipient of an International Collaborative Research Grant Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, New York. She is also member of an international research team working to produce “A Micro-History of Palestinian Life in the Twentieth Century” based on personal accounts. She has translated into English a number of Arabic novels and collections of poetry, including works by Ibrahim al-Koni, Ghassan Kanafani, Muhammad al-Maghout and Ibrahim Nasrallah. Jayyusi has been executive director of Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy since 1995.

Amani Juneidi is a short story writer and novelist, and holds a B.A. degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Jordan and a diploma in education. She worked as a teacher of Arabic language in the Ministry of Education in Palestine, a director of a school and is currently working in the Department of Literature at the Ministry of Culture. She also is an editor of the cultural page in the Democracy Journal published in Ramallah. Some of her works include A Woman with a Taste of Strawberry (Ugarit, 2005) and An Intelligent Man and Dim Women (Dar Shurouq, 2007).

Remi Kanazi is a Palestinian-American poet and writer. He is the co-founder of PoeticInjustice.net and the editor of Poets For Palestine, an anthology of poetry, spoken word, hip hop, and art. His political commentary has been featured in print and online media throughout the world. He has performed poetry across North America and has appeared in the New York Arab American Comedy Festival. He is a recurring writer in residence for the Palestine Writing Workshop as well as a member of its advisory committee. His first collection of Poetry, Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine, was released in 2011.

Ghada Karmi is a leading British-Palestinian academic and writer. Currently she is a Research Fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in England. She is a frequent media commentator on Middle Eastern issues.

A physician by training, she became an expert on medieval Arabic/Islamic medicine, which involved her in teaching and research at two universities in Syria and Jordan.

Her memoir, In Search of Fatima; a Palestinian story (Verso Press, 2002), has gained wide acclaim, and was re-issued in 2009. Her most recent book is Married to another man: Israel’s dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007). She is currently working on a history of medieval Arabic medicine to be published by Bloomsbury in 2012.

Mercedes Kemp was born and grew up in Southern Spain. For the past thirty years she has lived in West Cornwall. Since 2001 she has worked in close collaboration with Bill Mitchell, developing storylines and text for site specific pieces in Malta, Cyprus, France and Britain. She is a core member of WILDWORKS.

As well as the production of text and story line, her role within WILDWORKS involves creating and maintaining relationships with host communities, exploring their relationships with place and memory and adapting text to fit each new location.

Her method involves a kind of eclectic ethnographic research into a variety of sources: archives, libraries, cemeteries, village halls, bus stops, local historians, town gossips, snapshots, old photographs, conversations, and, above all, a close observation of the process of memory and its effect on the value that people place on their environments.

Her freelance work includes commissions for The Eden Project, The Guardian and BBC Radio 3. She worked as a writer for Kneehigh Theatre in Strange Cargo, Manel’s Mango, Shop of Stories, Doubtful Island, Island of Dreams and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. She is a founding member of the writing and performing collective Scavel an Gow. Mercedes is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at University College Falmouth.

Maya Khaldi, born 1987 in Jerusalem, Palestine graduated with a BM in professional music (vocal performance and music education) from Berklee College of Music in 2011, where she also performed with the Middle Eastern Ensemble. Khaldi teaches music theory and conducts three outreach choirs with The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Since she got back from Boston, Maya performed several Jazz fusion gigs with fellow Palestinian musicians and is currently working on a repertoire of Latin and Arabic jazz with guitarists Hisham Abu Jabal and Ashraf Dabbah. Maya has also been thinking for some time now how she could fuse between two oral practices; her passion for cooking and her appetite for singing other than singing while cooking, any advice?

An American writer and poet. She has taught at Yale and Barnard Colleges, among others. Her poetry has been published in Parnassus, Mississppi Review, Graham House Review, Ararat, and other journals. She is the author of the novels Zabelle (1998) and Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003). She is currently dividing her time between writing her third novel and working as the New York City coordinator for CODEPINK WOMEN FOR PEACE, a women-initiated grassroots peace & social movement known for its use of direct action and street theatre.

M. Lynx Qualey studied Russian literature in NYC and the Russian Far East, but her life changed course when she discovered, in April 2001, a new and more enjoyable self in Cairo. Now, she writes about Arabic literature and translation issues; edits books and stories; and teaches creative and critical writing.  She blogs daily at arablit.wordpress.com.

Jamal Mahjoub’s stories and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Zeit and other publications around the world. His novels have been widely translated and won a number of awards including, the Guardian/Heinemann African Short Story Prize, the NH Vargas Llosa prize and the Etonnants Voyageurs Prize. He is a contributing editor at Guernica Magazine and has recently begun a new life in crime fiction as Parker Bilal – The Golden Scales was published by Bloomsbury in 2012.

Crime novelist and playwright, is the creator of the Kurt Wallander detective novels which have been published in 33 countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe. A political dimension is always present in his writing. He has received major literary prizes and generated numerous international film and television adaptations. He was born in Stockholm and now lives between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as the director of Teatro Avenida.

John was born in 1956 and raised in Hertfordshire. He read American Studies at Hull from 1979. His first foray into journalism was at Worldwide Television News (now APTN), where, within a year, he had progressed from a temporary job in their London newsroom, via freelancing as a script writer, to editorial roles on various desks.

In 1986 he was sent to Lebanon on his first foreign assignment. His life was changed forever when he was abducted, along with teacher Brian Keenan and held hostage until August 1991. He endured 1,943 days of squalid captivity and had to deal with physical and mental torture, boredom, self-doubt and despair. The film Blind Flight was subsequently made based on his and Keenan’s experiences.

He relived his experiences in Lebanon in the number one best-seller Some Other Rainbow, published by Bantam Press, which was co-authored by Jill Morrell, who had campaigned for the hostages’ release. His other books are Between Extremes, his and Brian Keenan’s account of their journey to Patagonia in 1998, which was another best-seller, and A Ghost Upon Your Path: An Irish Journey, published in 2002.

In 2004, John returned to Beirut to make Out of the Shadows for ITV: a personal and emotional journey documenting his quest to confront the ghosts of his past. He has also presented the six-part ITV series It Ain’t Necessarily So (which found him travelling across the Middle East in search of archaeological evidence for key Bible stories) andFaultlines, which explored the roots of conflict.

Recent television includes a major series for Al Jazeera International, which aired throughout 2007. God’s Business examined the financial realities of the world’s major religions. Art of Faith, which examined the architecture and art of the three Abrahamic faiths aired in spring 2008 on Sky Arts. Art of Faith II, looking at the art and architecture of the eastern traditions aired in 2010.

He is currently writing a book about the experience since 1948 of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, the one in five Israelis who are Arabs.

He is Patron of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and has been awarded an Honorary D.Litt from Hull and the CBE.

Ritu Menon is co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s oldest feminist press, and founder-director of Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, which between them have published many of the most important texts in women’s studies in India. She has written several books, among them the path-breaking Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition; and edited several anthologies of writing by Indian women. She is also a Founder Member of Women’s WORLD (International) and Women’s WORLD (India), free-speech networks of writers and publishers that work on gender-based censorship across the world. Since 2000, the India network has worked with over 300 women writers from five South Asian countries.

Claire’s debut novel, When the World Was Steady (1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1999, she published The Last Life, a story of three generations of a French-Algerian family, which won Britain’s Encore Award. Her 2001 work, The Hunters, consists of two novellas. Her most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

From Athens, Greece, Mikelis is an oud and piano performer. Since 2000, he has been studying Arab music with his mentor Simon Shaheen. Mikelis’ oud playing interprets Arab idioms with Turkish styling and reflects Greek influences. As a virtuoso oud player, Mikelis has contributed to many recordings, including Zikryayat’s “Live at Lotus” (2006), Mitz’s “New Work” (2007) and the soundtrack for the feature film Jimmy Carter: Man From the Plains.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India. His first book, published in 1995, was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. His novel The Romantics(2000) was published in eleven European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His most recent books are An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Beyond. He also contributes literary and political essays for the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Outlook Magazine and New Yorker among other American, British, and Indian publications.

China Miéville is the author of several novels, including The City & the City and Railsea, one collection of short fiction and one book of non-fiction, on international law. His novels have won the Hugo, Arthur C Clarke and World Fantasy awards. He has long been active in movements for social justice and the Palestinian solidarity movement.’

[photo credit: Katie Cooke]

Deborah Moggach’s many screenplays include the recent TV adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank and the film Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, for which she was awarded a BAFTA nomination. She is the author of 16 successful novels including, most recently,These Foolish Things, Tulip Fever and In the Dark. She lives in London.

Taha Muhammad Ali was forced with his family into a year-long exile, when their village was destroyed by the Israeli army in 1948. He was seventeen. They eventually managed to come back and settle just five kilometres away from Saffuriyya, in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. For the next fifty years, Ali would sell souvenirs during the day to tourists from his shop in Nazareth. At night, however, he would study poetry; everything from classical Arabic to contemporary American free verse. In the 1950s Ali published his first short stories, but his poems did not begin to appear in Arabic periodicals until the 1970s. Muhammad Ali’s books of poetry include Fourth Qasida (1983), Fooling the Killers (1989), and Fire in the Convent Garden (1992).

‏Born in the village of Talfeet in Nablus in 1971, recieved a BA in Arabic Literature and an MA in  International Relations, both from Bir Zeit University is currently an editor at “Ayam” newspaper and at the Palestine Center for Israeli Studies, “Madar”.  Is also Editor in Chief of the Periodical Siyasat

‏He wrote Alexander’s Premonitions published in 2003 and The Biography of a Sweating Scorpion which won the Abdel Mohsen Qattan Foundation prize for 2007 and which has been translated into French and Italian

Hisham Naffa’a is a journalist, author and Palestinian political activist who was born in Beit Jin, in 1970. He has published hundreds of articles of opinion in the Palestinian and Arab press. In 2012, his novel “Fragile Collapses” was published by Raya Publishing House in Haifa. Naffa’a is currently working as an editor at Al-Itihad Newspaper in Haifa.

Khaled Najar was born in Tunis in 1949. He is descended from a Bedouin family from the south of the country. At the end of the 1960′s he released his first poems and began to work as a journalist. He wrote for various Arabic newspapers and magazines, including Almostaqbal and Al Watan Al-Arabi, as well as Alhayat, and was a member of the editorial team of Akbar El Adab in Cairo. In addition to this he undertook journalistic work for UNESCO in Paris.

Najar is a knowledgeable connoisseur of Arabic as well as of Occidental culture and is recognised as the most lyrical poet of Tunisia’s francophone literature. As yet however he has only released one collection of poetry, the «Poèmes pour un ange perdu» (1990; t: Poems for a lost angel). While most definitely anchored in the Arabic tradition, the volume is influenced greatly by French literature and presents concentrated, melodious pieces of work. With their seminal utilisation of imagery from nature – sand, wind, sun, water, night are all regularly used terms – they would, through their lightness and harmonic alliance of opposites, call to mind haikus, were it not for their dramatically inscribed feeling of sacrifice and yearning. Najar’s poems have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Danish and Italian. He himself has emerged as a productive translator and, amongst others, he has translated poems by Lorca, Valéry, Ungaretti, Saint John Perse, André Velter, Lorand Gaspar, Michel Butor, Jean Marie Le Clèzio, Etel Adnan,  Georges Schehadé and Etel Adnan into Arabic. Many of his translations have been released as monographs.

In 1991 Najar founded the Tawbaad publisihing house, which produces the bilingual newspaper «Le Livre des questions» and, with the help of renowned authors such as Adonis or Michel Butor, presents literary texts and cultural debates in Arabic and French. Without fear of polemic confrontation the publication presents Arabic and European perspectives next to each other.

The author has undertaken numerous trips throughout North America, Europe and the Orient, which he has catalogued in reports such as »Les solitudes de Coghnawagha« (t: Forms of loneliness in Coghnawagha), which deals with Native Americans. In addition to this he has conducted interviews with writers such as Alberto Moravia, Nagib Mahfouz, Jean Grojean and Yannis Ritsos. Najar lives in Tunis and Amsterdam.

Sonia Nimr writes books for children and youth both in Arabic and English. She received her PhD from Exeter University in 1990 in Oral History. Currently she teaches at Bir Zeit University, Department of Cultural Studies. Her English books include A Little Piece of Ground which she wrote with Elizabeth Laird (2004), and Ghaddar the Ghoul (2007). In 2004 she was on the Honours List of the IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, for a story in Arabic called Begins and Ends With Lies(2003). She lives in Ramallah with her young son and husband.

Amir Nizar Zuabi is a theatre director and playwright, and a founding member of Shiber Hur Theatre. He has directed a number of plays, including I am Yusuf and this is my Brother (Shiber Hur Theater Company, Haifa & The Young Vic Theater, London), Stories Under Occupation(Kasaba Theatre, Ramallah), When the World was Green (The Young Vic Theater, London), The Mural by Mahmoud Darwish (The National Palestinian Theatre, Jerusalem), Burning of the Temple, The Story of the Fall (Midan Theater, Haifa), War is More (Shiber Hur Theater Company, Haifa), Samson and Delilah (Flanders Opera, Antwerp), among others.

Andrew O’Hagan was first recognised as a literary talent in 1995 when he published his first book, The Missing, to considerable critical acclaim and the book was shortlisted for three literary awards. O’Hagan’s debut novel Our Fathers (1999) was also nominated several awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the IMPAC Literary Award. To affirm this success, Granta selected O’Hagan’s work for inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists. He is also a contributing editor to both the London Review of Books and Granta, and writes occasional articles for the mainstream press, including a regular film column for Esquire.

Ursula Owen has been an influential figure in the worlds of literature and free expression since the 1970s. She was a founder director of Virago Press, was for two years Cultural Policy Advisor to the Labour Party, and, as Editor and Chief Executive, revitalised Index on Censorship. From 2003 to 2009 Ursula was Project Director for the Free Word Centre, taking it through from an idea to a concrete reality with premises in London. She is now Founder Trustee of Free Word She is on the board of the Southbank Centre and a Trustee of English Touring Opera and World Film Collective. She lives in London.

Michael established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty Python, as well as The Missionary, A Private Function, an award-winning performance as the hapless Ken in A Fish Called Wanda, American Friends and Fierce Creatures. His television credits include two films for the BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, the plays East of Ipswich and Number 27, and Alan Bleasdale’s GBH. He has written books to accompany his seven very successful travel series Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe. He is also the author of a number of children’s stories, The Play, The Weekend and the novel Hemingway’s Chair. In 2006 the first volume of his Diaries, 1969–1979 spent many weeks on the bestseller lists.

Richard Price, novelist and screenwriter, was born and raised in the Bronx.

From the early 1970’s, Price earned his reputation as one of New York’s preeminent writers with The Wanderers (1974), Blood Brothers (1976), Ladies’ Man (1978), The Breaks (1983), Clockers (1992), which was nominated for the National Book Critic Circle Award, Freedomland (1998), and Samaritan (2003).

In addition to his literary career, Price has also written numerous screenplays including “The Color of Money,” (1982) which was nominated for an Academy Award in Screenwriting, “Sea of Love,”(1989) and “Ransom” (1996). In his most recent book, Lush Life (2008), Price continues to peel back the layers of his beloved city to examine the crustier side of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, standing in direct opposition to the glamorous faux-bohos who recently put the area back on the trendy map.

Richard Price was the recipient of the 1999 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, he won an Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire, and in 2009 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in New York.

Alexandra Pringle is Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury Publishing. She began her career in publishing at Virago Press in 1978, becoming Editorial Director in 1984. In 1990 she joined Hamish Hamilton as Editorial Director and four years later left publishing to become a literary agent. She joined Bloomsbury in 1999. Her list of authors includes Donna Tartt, Hanan al-Shaykh, Barbara Trapido, Kamila Shamsie, Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Said, Esther Freud, Leila Aboulela, William Boyd, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Anne Michaels, John Berger, Ronan Bennett, Colum McCann and Romesh Gunesekera. She is a Director of the Management Board, Bloomsbury Book Publishing Company Limited, and a Trustee of Index-on-Censorship. She lives in London.

Born in Cairo in 1976, Rakha earned a BA in English and philosophy from Hull University, England. From 1998 to the present, he has worked as reporter, copy editor and cultural editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper. On sabbatical for a year (2008-2009) he worked as a features writer at the Abu Dhabi-based daily, The National. He has published seven books in Arabic and the eighth, his second novel, is forthcoming with Dar al Saqi in October, 2012.

Al Salam made it their responsibility to push the development national and patriotic musical traditions of Palestine, to make it new, in both the music and the conception of the songs. Their first work was an operetta, al Salam, which received both national and international media coverage. It was performed in five languages and they hope to one day be able to perform it in all the world’s languages with artists from around the globe.

Eugene Schoulgin is International Secretary and Chairman of the Board of International PEN and an author of Norweigan-Russian origin. He began his career as a writer in 1970 with his first novel The Rabbit Cage; since then he has published both short stories and novels, most notably the best-selling trilogy of novels Memories of Mirella (nominated for the Nordic Literary Award), Federico – Federico! and Salto Mortale.

Since 1994, Eugene has divided his time between writing and working for the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN which he chaired from 2000 to 2004. With this committee he has visited many countries and helped set up PEN Centres in some of the more troubled regions of the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah He is a founder of the pioneering human rights organisation, Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and the author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. Shehadeh is the author of the highly praised Strangers in the House (2002), When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege(2003) and Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007), published by Profile Books, for which he won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2008.

Hala Shrouf is a Palestinian poet, and holds a BA in English Literature and Translation from Birzeit University. She has worked as a teacher at the Ministry of Education and has taught the deaf at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. She is now working at the Tamer Institute for Community Education. Shrouf won the the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer Award in 2004 and published her collection of poems, I Will Follow the Cloud, in 2005. Her work has been translated into several languages including English, French, Spanish and Swedish. Palestinian newspapers regularly publish Shrouf’s work.

South African born Gillian Slovo is the author of  twelve novels and her best selling family memoir Every Secret Thing which tells the story of life with parents who helped bring change to South Africa.    Her novel, Red Dust,    about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission won the RFI Temoin du Monde prize in France,  and was  made into a  feature  film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her novel  Ice Road was short- listed for the Orange Prize. She is  a recipient of an Amnesty  Media Award and co-compiler  of   the Tricycle production “Guantanamo- Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,”  which was put on world wide. She assembled, from spoken evidence,  the verbatim inserts for  the Tricycle’s , ‘Women, Power and Politics,’ season and also The Riots,  a verbatim piece about the riots that rocked England in 2011 and which played at the Tricycle and in Tottenham’s Bernie Grants Art Centre.  Gillian’s ghosted, The General, (Ahmed Errachidi’s account of his five plus years in Guantanamo)  as well as the paperback edition of her twelfth novel, An Honourable Man, have recently been published.  Gillian is also  President of English PEN.

Jesse Soodalter, MD is an artist and hematologist based in Chicago. She has been active in the struggle for Palestinian justice for a decade, in countries from Australia to England to the U.S. Her academic research focuses on individual and cultural thinking about death, and the potential of art to facilitate existential engagement with mortality. She is particularly interested in exploring Palestinians’ perspectives on these topics.

Stormtrap Asifeh is a producer/composer/MC from Palestine. His lyrics deal with different themes inspired mainly by his personal experiences in Palestine and life abroad. Stormtrap’s music consists of rap vocals, electronics, field recordings, samples, hip-hop beats, and experimental material.

The author of five novels, New Boy, Are You Experienced?, The Love Hexagon, Bad Influence and Whatever Makes You Happy, which have been translated into twenty languages. He also works as a journalist and screenwriter. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

Tashweesh is an audio-visual performance group that brings together the different practices and interests of artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme, boikutt, and Basel Abbas (Aswat), using sound, music, image and text. The result is an exploration and collision between sound and video field recordings, archive material, vocals, breaks and soundscapes. The artists have also collaborated and performed together, individually and as Ramallah Underground, since 2003 in various venues and festivals around the world. PalFest is proud to present their first full performance as Tashweesh.

www.tashweesh.com

M.G. Vassanji is one of only of two writers to have won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, twice: in 1994 for The Book of Secrets and in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. His latest work, The Assassin’s Song, was also short-listed for the prize in 2007. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He attended MIT and U Penn before moving to Canada in 1978, having specialized in theoretical nuclear physics. In 1989 he published his first novel, The Gunny Sack, which won the Commonwealth Regional Prize. Vassanji is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir of his travels in India, and a biography of Mordecai Richler. In 2005, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. He lives in Toronto.

Alice Walker’s writings include several novels, volumes of poetry and short stories.  Her most acclaimed work of fiction, The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie by director Steven Spielberg.

Walker is also widely known for her activism on feminist/womanist causes, environemtnal issues and economic injustice.  In 1989 and 1992, she wrote two books, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, in which she discussed female circumcision in Africa.

Born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice was the eighth and last child of parents who were sharecroppers. At the age of  eight, Alice lost her sight in one eye when an older brother shot her by accident with a BB gun. In high school, she was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a “rehabilitation scholarship” made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. It was there that she met Martin Luther King, whom she credits for her decision to start work as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student.

Tom Warner was born in Mansfield and currently lives in Norwich. He has previously won an Eric Gregory Award, a Faber New Poets Award, the Escalator Prize and the Plough Prize. A pamphlet of Tom’s poetry was published by Faber & Faber in 2010. He’s currently working on a translation of Syrian poet, Nouri Al-Jarrah, supported by Arts Council England.

Wildworks is an international company of artists, musicians & theatre makers who create unique landscape theatre in challenging places and with extraordinary communities. Their productions have been sited in old quarries, derelict mines, shipyards, abandoned department stores, a Napoleonic citadel, a Royal Palace, the Green Line in Nicosia… They have worked with gospel choirs, drama groups, North African migrants, cake-makers, ex-miners, a young hip-hop group, abseilers and a Hell’s Angels chapter.

They bring the seeds of a story to a site and weave in the strands that tie people and place together.

www.wildworks.biz

Hyam Yared     Hyam Yared was born in Beirut in 1975, and continues to live there as an increasingly celebrated Francophone writer. In 2010, Hyam was selected by Hay Festivals/Bloomsbury as one of the 39 best young Arab writers from around the world. She has participated in literary events all over the world, most recently the Liverpool Biennale. A short story, “Layla’s Belly” has been translated from the original French in Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World (Bloomsbury: 2010)   Sous la tonnelle, Hyam’s second novel, won the Phoenix Award 2009. The book has received major press coverage, and has been featured on TV and radio programmes in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Lebanon. After being shortlisted for the Prix du roman arabe 2010, awarded by the IMA (Arab World Institute) in Paris, the book was a finalist for the Prix des cinq continents, awarded by OIF (International Organization of Francophony). Hyam’s first collection of poetry Reflets de lune was awarded a gold medal at the 4^th Francophone Games in Ottawa-Hull Quebec. Her second collection, Blessures de l’eau, published in 2004 also by Dar An Nahar in Beirut, has been translated into English by Richard Burns, Melanie Rein and American poet Jack Hirschman.

Naître si mourir is her third collection of poetry, published in France by L’idée bleue.

Robin Yassin-Kassab’s first novel, The Road from Damascus, was published by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) in 2008. He has worked as a journalist and an English teacher in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Oman. He is currently living in Scotland and working on his second novel.

Gary Younge is an award-wining New York-based journalist and author who is a columnist for The Guardian and The Nation. In 2009 won the prestigious British James Cameron award for his coverage of the 2008 presidential election and the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his work. He has won several other awards for his reporting on issues of race in Britain and the US and been awarded two honorary doctorates. His third and most recent book, Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? offers a searing analysis and a timely overview of identity, affiliation and solidarity and a challenge to those seeking to build a politics that respect both universal humanism and human difference. His previous books include Stranger in a Strange Land, Encounters in the Disunited States, a compilation of his writings from the US and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s journey through the Deep South in which he retraced the route of the civil rights Freedom Riders. Formerly the Belle Zeller visiting professor of public policy and social administration at Brooklyn College, Gary Younge grew up near London and read French and Russian at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before going on to study Journalism at City University, London. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Nora Younis currently works as a civil society expert for the Regional Center of UNDP, after years of working in journalism and human rights as well as blogging. She covered the Middle East for the Washington Post and a number of American and Asian organizations before joining a-Masry al-Youm in Cairo, where she helped establish the newspaper’s website and served as the managing editor. She was responsible for founding the first video journalism and web television unit, as well as the first social media department in a news organization. Her expertise in mainstream journalism interweaves with her experience as an activist and prominent blogger skilled in the use of new media tools, for which she was awarded the Human Rights First Award in 2008. She has experience in producing low-budget documentary films, which culminated in the production of Reporting Revolution. The film screened at festivals in Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Seoul in 2012 and revolves around several young journalists who reported on the most important scenes of the Egyptian Revolution while it took place, and their struggle between their professional responsibility and their support for the revolution they had long dreamed of. Younis was born in Cairo and studied English Literature at Ain Shams University. She is the mother of a three-year old boy: Morad.

Nariman Youssef is a translator and researcher, currently writing a PhD thesis on the history of literary translation as a site of intersection between Arab and European projects of modernity in the early twentieth century. She has translated The American Granddaughter (Bloomsbury, 2010), a novel by Inaam Kachachi dealing with the war on Iraq, and contributed poetry translations to festivals and anthologies. Nariman’s personal response to the first days of the Egyptian revolution was published in October 2011 as part of the e-book series “Brain Shots: Summer of Unrest”. Having grown up in Cairo, and spent ten years from 2001 moving between various UK cities, she now lives in Cairo again while completing her PhD at the University of Manchester.

Basel Zayed is a musician and singer, was born in Jerusalem 1979. He is known for his distinctive vocal style, versatility, and musical compositions.  Basel is the founder of the Turab (Soil), one of the most active bands in Palestine today, formed in 2004 to develop the modern Palestinian song. Turab tries to tackle the complexities of politics, life under occupation, love, social justice and daily life through instrumental pieces and songs, and have released three albums so far: This is the Night (2006), Adam (2010) and Jerusalem (2011).

Khaled al Khamissi is an Egyptian Novelist. Al Khamissi is a holder of BA Political Science from Cairo University and MBA in Political Science from Sorbonne, Paris. He has written two novels: Taxi, 2007 which was been translated into more than 20 languages, was a bestseller in Egypt and some European countries. Noah’s Arc (2009) was translated into French and German. Al Khamissi currently writes a weekly column for Al Shorouk newspaper in Egypt.

Hanan al-Shaykh was born and educated in Beirut and Cairo. Her work explicitly challenges the roles of women in the traditional social structures of the Arab Middle East. Through her writing, she challenges notions of war and violence, sexuality, obedience, modesty, and familial relations. Much of her work has been translated into English, including, Women of Sand and Myrrh, The Story of Zahra, Beirut Blues, Only in London, I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops. She has written four plays, the last one being “A Fly on the Wall” inspired by the barrier wall in Bethlehem.