Open Public Forum “How and What and Why Do Writers Write?” Speaker: Stephen Fry Stephen Fry is an active player in television, radio, film and writing. He first came to attention in The Cellar Tapes with Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Fry is best known for his role in Blackadder, the lead in the film Wilde, and the host of the quiz show, QI. He also presented a television series Stephen Fry in America in 2008 and frequented radio panel games such as Just a Minute, and as chairman of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. He is also famous for being the narrator of the Harry Potter audio books. Apart from his work in the television and film industry, Fry is also a very accomplished writer of books as well as newspaper and magazine columns and articles. He has written four novels – The Liar, Making History, The Hippopotamus and The Stars’ Tennis Balls, a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo – and an autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. His non-fiction titles included Stephen Fry's Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within and more. Speaker: Frederick Forsyth Frederick Forsyth has been classed as one of the world’s most popular thriller writers since his first novel, The Day of the Jackal, became an instant success in 1970 and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. He followed this up by such other blockbusters as The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, The Veteran and, more recently, The Afghan. Several of his thrillers have been turned into equally successful films. Forsyth’s experience as a journalist, which included time as a correspondent for Reuters in Paris and the former East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, provided him with knowledge of international politics and the world of mercenary soldiers. He was also able to draw on his military background – he became one of the youngest pilots in the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the age of 19, serving from 1956 to 1958. Forty years after his debut, Forsyth is still writing: his latest novel, Cobra, will be released in August 2010. Speaker: Andrew Roberts Andrew Roberts is acclaimed particularly for his books on the Second World War. Masters and Commanders in 2008 won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award. This was followed by The Storm of War, published in 2009, which gives a succinct but dramatic account of the struggle that engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945, and has been short-listed for the British Army Military Book Award for 2010. A review in The Guardian Books of the Year proclaimed that “Andrew Roberts achieves a marvel of concision in producing a splendidly written, comprehensive new history of the greatest conflict in history … particularly good in its insights into Axis strategy”. Among his other books, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999), the authorised biography of the Victorian prime minister the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. His other books include The Art of War, A History of the English-speaking Peoples since 1900, and Hitler and Churchill and more. Moderator: Sir David Tang David Tang was born in Hong Kong as a fourth generation of Cantonese refugees. In a Buddhist family, he was however baptized in order to attend the local Catholic school La Salle. He was then sent off to boarding school in England. He read Philosophy at university and went to Law College. In 1983-84, he taught at Peking University. He is passionate about Chinese and is the founder of China Club in Hong Kong, Peking and Singapore; and Shanghai Tang, and recently, China Tang in London. His other businesses have involved oil exploration, gold mining, cigars, and advisorships to multi-nationals and international brands. He seems to have lived mostly on British Airways between London and Hong Kong, but since becoming 50 years old in 2004, chooses to stay at home in Hong Kong as much as possible with his family and 4 dogs, playing the piano, completing the daily cryptic crossword, and reading voraciously. .