Paul Auster is the author of Man in the Dark, Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, and The Book of Illusions, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. More about Paul Auster Siri Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota in 1955 and moved to New York City in 1978. She received a PhD in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of four novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, and The Sorrows of an American, as well as two nonfiction books, A Plea for Eros and Myster- ies of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting. Another work of nonfiction, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, a neurological memoir that explores the mind/body question, will be published in 2010. Hustvedt’s work has appeared in numerous publications around the world including The Yale Review, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Modern Painters, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Liberation. She has also given lectures on art at The Prado Museum in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her work has been translated into twen- ty-nine languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. More about Siri Hustvedt Amitav Ghosh is one of India’s best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alex- andria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France’s top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcut- ta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker, and has two children, Lila and Nayan. He di- vides his time between Kolkata, Goa and Brooklyn. More about Amitav Ghosh Karen Connelly’s first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal — an account of the year she spent in Thailand at seventeen — won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993; at twenty-four, she was the youngest writer ever to win that prize. The Lizard Cage, Connelly’s first novel, was shortlisted for both the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. To write it, she found she had to lock herself in the cage along with the main character. For nine long years she imagined she was trapped in a windowless, 8 x 10 jail cell. “I cried every day for the first four years that I worked on that book,” Connelly said in an interview with Reader’s Digest. “There were times when I thought I would never be free of it.“ She went on to explain what helped to urge her forward, “I came to realize that I was making my contribution to the largely unwritten history of kindness. At least that’s one of my motives–to contribute to the literature of how people retain and nurture their humanity, particularly in diffi- cult situations.” Karen Connelly is currently working on a book of essays set in the refugee camps and among the rebel armies along the Burmese-Thai border. She makes her home in Toronto. More about Karen Connelly Ma Thida is a Burmese fiction writer and physician who was named recipient of Brown Universi- ty’s 2008-09 International Writers Project Fellowship, given to authors facing political harassment, imprisonment or oppression in his or her country of origin. Author of the books The Sunflower and In the Shade of an Indian Almond Tree, among others, Thida has also written many articles and stories about the damage done to her country by successive repressive regimes. In 1993, she was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in Yangon’s Insein Jail for her work to promote dem- ocratic change in Burma. She was released in 1999 on humanitarian grounds because of health problems. Thida will be in residence at Brown throughout the current academic year. Myo Myint Nyein started his media career in 1978 as an editor of Sitpyan magazine. In early 1980, he became an editor of Pay Phoo Hlwar magazine, Mahaythi magazine and Gita Thadinzin journal. Just before the 1988 movement he also worked as co-editor of news magazines, Thadin Hlwar and Thadin. In 1988 he took responsibility as leader of the Information section of Burma’s National League for Democracy, NLD, the main opposition party led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and traveled with her on campaign trips. He managed the publication of party news- letters and other books. After Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, he went back to his former position as editor of Pay Phoo Hlwar magazine. In late 1990, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for publishing a pamphlet featuring a satirical poem entitled “What’s Happening To Us?.” In 1997 he was sentenced to another seven years imprisonment for contrib- uting to clandestine publications while in prison, including a report describing prison conditions to the United Nations. He was honored by a Canadian Journalists’ Freedom of Expression Award in 2001. In February, 2002, he was released from prison. Since then he has worked as an editor of Alindan journal, Teen magazine and Shwe Amyutay magazine, publishers of the serialized The Glass Palace. Nay Win Myint became an established short story writer in 1980. He has published nearly 200 short stories, and is also well known for his novels, works of adolescent literature, travelogues, translations of famous essays and features about the social life and economy of Burma. Two of his short story collections, Twelve Puppet Strings and Sixteen Small Houses, received Burma’s National Literary Award, as did his 2007 novel, Buffalo Fight. In early 2008, he began a series of translations of The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh for Burma’s famous literary magazine, Shwe Amyutay. Vicky Bowman was British Ambassador to Burma from 2002 to 2006, having previously served as Second Secretary there from 1990 to 1993. She speaks Burmese and has translated Burmese short stories and poetry as well as contributing to the Lonely Planet Burmese phrasebook. Still a diplomat in the UK Foreign & Commonwealth, she has also served in Brussels as UK spokesman and Cabinet member of European Commissioner Chris Patten. Currently she is job-sharing as Director, Global and Economic Issues in the FCO, London, working on climate change, energy security, development and the G20 Summit. Vicky married artist Htein Lin in 2006, shortly before leaving Burma. Win Pe was born in Mandalay, Burma, in 1935. At his father’s insistence, he learned to paint and play music before beginning school. He continued his formal studies in Mandalay, and became a student of local artist U Ba Thet. In the early 1960s, Win Pe worked as an illustrator for Peo- ple’s Daily in Mandalay, and served as the principal of the State School of Fine Arts, Music, and Dancing until the early 70s. Later, he became a film director and wrote screenplays and short stories. In 1994, he came to the U.S., where he was a fellow at the University of Iowa’s Internation- al Writers Program before going on to a career as a freelance artist and writer living in New York City. From 1997 until his retirement in 2005, Win Pe was a senior broadcaster and senior editor for Radio Free Asia. Now living in Maryland, he is a full-time painter and writer who is preparing an audio-visual archive of Burmese scholars, politicians, and artists for Open Society Institute’s Burma Project. Win Tun (‘Mr. Burma’) is a political cartoonist who left Burma in 1990 because of harassment and censorship by the Burmese military junta. Relocating in Thailand, he began publishing his cartoons in the Bangkok Post under the pen-name “Mr. Burma.” Under the same name, he has published magazines, journals and books about democracy, human rights and politics, all for clandestine distribution in his homeland. Win Tun came to New York as a refugee in 1995, where he has since worked as a professional artist and graphic designer, and, since 2005, as volunteer art director and animator for Democratic Voice of Burma t.v., based in Norway. He now distributes his political cartoons in Burma via his webpage, http://www.faxtoon.com Maung Maung Aung is a Burmese political cartoonist whose work has appeared in weekly and monthly journals and magazines in Burma since 1970.