Sydney Writers' Festival

MICHAEL POLLAN (INTERNATIONAL)
Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs and architecture for the past 20 years. The Omnivore's Dilemma was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire, A Place of my Own and Second Nature.

A long-time contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. His writing on food and agriculture has won numerous awards, including the Reuters/World Conservation Union Global Award in Environmental Journalism, the James Beard Award, and the Genesis Award from the American Humane Association.

In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating was released this year.
www.michaelpollan.com

also appearing at...
155: The Simple Life
212: Michael Pollan in Conversation with Caroline Baum

MARK ADAMS (LOCAL)
Mark Adams is Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Sydney. He has held Professorial appointments at the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, and most recently at UNSW. He also recently finished a six-year term as a member of the Board of Trustees for the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya and has served in an honorary capacity with other major international research organisations. Mark publishes widely with a focus on sustainability and biogeochemistry. He holds editorial responsibilities for journals in the fields of ecology and tree physiology.

Mark has been a QEII Fellow and has received fellowships and awards from the Australian Academy of Science, the University of Canterbury (NZ), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the French National Research Institute (INRA). In 2003, he was one of the half dozen worldwide recipients of a ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize’ from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

A passionate believer in “conservation through use”, Mark enjoys working with postgraduate students and with people who live on and work the land.

INGRID APPELQVIST (LOCAL)
Ingrid Appelqvist is team leader for CSIRO’s ‘designed’ food research program and is determined to give processed foods a good name. Her passion is for searching through the culinary catalogue of nature to come up with new and exotic ways to turn raw fruit and vegies into new-generation processed foods. Her current interests are developing a ‘healthy’ burger and ‘guilt-free’ chocolate that tastes like the real thing. One of the team’s challenges is to find a way to give traditionally fatty foods, such as sausages, the same satisfying ‘mouth feel’ feel but with a far lower fat content.

The daughter of a Maltese mother and a Swedish father, Ingrid did her tertiary studies in Birmingham, then worked with Unilever in the UK. She moved to the Netherlands in 2003, before moving to Australia just over a year ago.

PAUL WILLIS (LOCAL)
Paul Willis is a reporter with the ABC’s top rating TV science show, Catalyst. He got into science as a kid and has never grown out of it. Discovering his first fossil at the age of six, Paul has been hooked on palaeontology ever since. Moving to Australia at the age of nine, Paul went on to study Geology and Zoology at Sydney University before completing a PhD at the University of New South Wales studying fossil crocodiles. During this time he did extensive field work at the most significant fossil sites around Australia.

Paul has been with the ABC since 1997 as a science broadcaster, regularly appearing on radio, TV and writing features for the ABC’s website. He has hosted over 70 public science forums including Café Scientific, and is a familiar voice doing science talkback on ABC radio in Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania. Paul leads a fossil hunting expedition to Antarctica each year. His latest book is Digging Up Deep Time: fossils, dinosaurs and megabeasts from Australia’s distant past.