Sydney Writers' Festival

BRUCE ELDER (LOCAL)
Bruce Elder has been involved in writing over 60 books and he has worked as a print and radio journalist in both London and Sydney.

He is an award-winning journalist (Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critical Writing 1996) who is currently a full-time employee of The Sydney Morning Herald as well as a weekly guest on the ABC's Tony Delroy Nightlife program which is broadcast on over 150 stations around Australia.

His books include Blood on the Wattle which, in 2000, was nominated as one of the 10 most influential works of non-fiction published in Australia in the twentieth century. He is the Australian editor of Trivial Pursuit and the creator of the 2 million word Walkabout travel site (www.walkabout.com.au) which is also part of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age's website.
www.walkabout.com.au

also appearing at...
138: The Secret Life of Backpackers
273: Colonial Ambition: A Walking Tour of Old Sydney’s Political Sites

IMRAN AHMAD (INTERNATIONAL)
Imran Ahmad was severely traumatised at the age of seven, when Michael Swallow pushed in front of him in the school lunch queue and secured the last plate of fish and chips – leaving Imran no ‘choice’ but a horrid egg flan. He compensated for this loss by subsequently eating fish and chips on every possible occasion for the next 40 years (resulting in a severe reprimand from his cardiologist).

Too lazy to get the grades he needed for medical school, he ended up at Stirling University in Scotland, studying chemistry, learning about Islam and trying to impress women. Ultimately he was quite successful in Chemistry and became quite knowledgeable about Islam as well, but he didn’t impress any women – despite having an Alfa Romeo and a microwave oven (quite possibly the only privately owned microwave on campus at that time).

In careers brochures, he saw people in business suits, travelling and having meetings. (This looked like fun to him, but he wasn't sure what the people in suits actually did.) He persuaded one of those big global companies to hire him into their graduate scheme and he ended up working all over the world.

His book, Unimagined, was selected by no less than three major newspapers (The Independent, The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald) in their ‘books of the year’ lists. The Dutch version was released recently and is called Mohammed, Jezus en James Bond (there being no catchy word for ‘Unimagined’ in Dutch, apparently) and the television series is being developed.

Imran is on the Board of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, which opposes the imposition of theological or regressive cultural values on any individual, group or gender.

His business travels in the 90s included many visits to Sydney, where he was on one occasion bumped from his favourite hotel room because some fella called Jackson had booked – in their entirety – the top four storeys of the Sheraton on the Park. But it got even worse. On Imran’s return from the office one day – and despite him proffering his Sheraton Club International card – a bodyguard thug in a leather jacket wouldn’t let him through the screaming crowd into the hotel, saying: “You’ll have to wait until Michael Jackson arrives.” Imran still gets upset when he remembers this.
www.unimagined.co.uk

also appearing at...
59: Not Another Misery Memoir...
120: An Unimagined Evening with Imran Ahmad in Parramatta