Sydney Writers' Festival

TONY ABBOTT MHR (LOCAL)
The Hon Tony Abbott MP is the elected Member for Warringah. Prior to entering Parliament he was Executive Director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy from 1993-94. From 1990-93 he was press secretary and political advisor to the Leader of the Opposition, Dr John Hewson. His previous career was in journalism, where he wrote as a feature writer for The Bulletin and The Australian.

appearing at...
320: The Future of the Liberal Party

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH (LOCAL)
Randa Abdel-Fattah is 28 years old. She was born in Australia to Palestinian and Egyptian parents. She lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter and juggles working as a lawyer, author and Palestine human rights activist. Randa won the Victorian Premier's Literary Alfred Deakin essay award in 2005.

Her debut novel, Does My Head Look Big In This? was awarded the Australian Industry Book Award for best Australian Book for Young Adult Readers and was long-listed for the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007 and listed as a Notable Book by the Children Book Council in 2006.

Her second novel, Ten Things I Hate About Me was short-listed for the Australian Industry Book Award for best Australian Book for Young Adult Readers, short-listed for the West Australian Young Reader's Book Award and listed as a notable book by the Children's Book Council in 2007.

Her novels have been published and translated in many countries and are currently being taught as part of the school curriculum in Australia and overseas.

Randa's novel, Where The Streets Had A Name, is due to be released in Australia in October this year.

appearing at...
120: An Unimagined Evening with Imran Ahmad in Parramatta

DEBORAH ABELA (LOCAL)
Deborah Abela is the author of the Max Remy Superspy and Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend) series. Max Remy, with her spy partner Linden, fights bad guys from Hollywood to Venice and the heart of the Amazon jungle. Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend) was written with the help of soccer legend Johnny Warren, who sadly died before he could see the first book printed. It is about an 11-year-old called Jasper who dreams of being just such a legend.

www.maxremy.com.au

appearing at...
8: Primary School Days – Parramatta
23: Primary School Days – Sydney

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.

appearing at...
251: Cafe Scientific: The Future of Food

ROBERT ADAMSON (LOCAL)

Robert Adamson is the internationally recognised author of 17 books of poetry and three books of prose, including his highly praised autobiography Inside Out. From 1970 to 1985 he was the driving force behind New Poetry, Australia’s cutting-edge poetry magazine, and in 1987, with Juno Gemes, he established Paper Bark Press.

He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes. In 1990 The Clean Dark won the Kenneth Slessor Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the National Book Council’s Banjo Award, and in 1994 he was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement in literature.

His work has been translated into seven languages. Reading the River, a selection of his poems, was released in 2004 and his most recent collection, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, was The Age Poetry Book of The Year in 2007. It also won the Grace Levin Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry.

Robert Adamson lives with the photographer Juno Gemes on the Hawkesbury River. His new Selected Poems will be published in October this year.

www.robertadamson.com

appearing at...
74: Launch: As We Draw Ourselves
228: The Poetics of Ecology
298: The Sydney Readings: The Countries of Sydney

DEBRA ADELAIDE (LOCAL)
Debra Adelaide is a writer and academic. Her books include The Hotel Albatross and Serpent Dust. Her latest novel is The Household Guide to Dying.

appearing at...
49: An Evening with Debra Adelaide
65: The Final Journey
184: Launch: The Household Guide to Dying
215: Debra Adelaide in Conversation

RICHARD AEDY (LOCAL)
Richard Aedy presents Life Matters on ABC Radio National. He grew up in Sydney and Canberra but has spent much of his adult life overseas. He did his degree and journalism training in New Zealand before moving to the UK. He spent five years in London, most of that time as a producer at the BBC.

Richard returned to Australia a little over 10 years ago and joined Radio National, firstly as executive producer of radio science before returning to broadcasting.

After 20 years in journalism, Richard remains interested in ‘almost everything’ and these wide interests are reflected in his on-air career with ABC Radio National: in 2001 he presented the technology show, The Buzz, before becoming host of the Media Report in 2005. He moved to Life Matters at the beginning of the following year. In between all that, Richard spent three months at Oxford University in 2004 as the ABC's Reuters Foundation Programme Fellow—he wrote a paper on 'Preventing State Failure in Papua New Guinea'.

Richard is married, has two young children and lives in Sydney. This is his second appearance at Sydney Writers’ Festival.

appearing at...
169: The Great Beyond

CESAR LEYCO AGUILA (LOCAL)
Cesar Leyco Aguila moved from the Philippines to Australia over 20 years ago, leaving behind a rich body of work as a journalist (United Press International, The Asian News Service, The Philippines Herald, Philippines Free Press) and as a writer of short stories and poems (the University of Santo Tomas’ prestigious journal, The Varsitarian, Sunday Times Magazine, Kislap, Graphic).

In Australia, Cesar Leyco Aguila joined SBS as a sub-editor before becoming an associate producer of its evening news television programme and radio chief of staff. It was while at SBS that he began work on his first novel, the historical Between Two Worlds.

appearing at...
314: Salu-Salo: in Conversation with Filipino-Australian Writers

MICHAEL MOHAMMED AHMAD (LOCAL)
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the editor, coordinator and publisher of Bankstown Youth Development Service’s (BYDS) Westside magazine. He works closely with BYDS and Giramondo Publishing Company as both a writer and editor, and conducts performance workshops in conflict resolution and dramatic art with BYDS. Mohammed is also completing an arts degree, majoring in English Literature.

In 2004 he wrote, directed and starred in his first professional short work, The Veil, as part of Urban Theatre Project’s (UTP) Short n’ Sharp 3. He then went on to become part of UTP’s 2005 Ensemble. With the success of his 2005 season in UTP’s Fast Cars & Tractor Engines, he also starred in the 2006 state tour of the show.

Early in 2008 Mohammed appeared on the SBS TV series, East West 101 and since then has been working with both BYDS’ U-PLAY and PYT’s Can You Hear Me? in forum theatre tours throughout Sydney and Western Sydney. He has also toured schools with Macquarie Legal Centre, starring in shows about drugs, alcohol and violence. This year Mohammed will star in UTP’s long anticipated Stories of Love & Hate.

appearing at...
1: Launch: Westside 08

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

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

JAMAL AL HALLAQ (LOCAL)
Jamal Al Hallaq was born in Iraq in 1966. He has published several collections of poems.

appearing at...
107: Launch: Poetry Without Borders (Picaro Press)

JIM ALEXANDER (LOCAL)
Jim Alexander is the Chief Executive Officer of Copyright Agency Limited.

appearing at...
341: From Pen to Reader

JON LEE ANDERSON (INTERNATIONAL)
Jon Lee Anderson has been writing for the New Yorker since 1998. He has reported frequently from Iraq and has covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Lebanon. He has also reported from Liberia, Angola, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. He has written numerous profiles of political leaders, including Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet.

Anderson is the author of several books, including Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World and, most recently, The Fall of Baghdad. He is the co-author, with Scott Anderson, of War Zones: Voices from the World’s Killing Grounds and Inside the League.

Anderson began his career in 1979 as a reporter for the English-language weekly The Lima Times, in Lima, Peru. He reported on Central America’s civil wars for Time magazine during the 1980s. He went on to cover the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Uganda, Western Sahara, Sri Lanka, Burma, Israel and Bosnia. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, The Financial Times, The Guardian, El Pais and other journals.

Jon Lee Anderson’s participation in Sydney Writers’ Festival 2008 is supported by La Trobe University.

appearing at...
236: Jon Lee Anderson and Andrew Bacevich in Conversation
290: Jon Lee Anderson on Latin America

KAY ANDERSON (LOCAL)
Kay Anderson is Professor of Cultural Geography at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. For decades, she has been curious about the origins of that habit of categorising people called 'race' and has devoted a life's work to trying to understand its forms and sources. Race and the Crisis of Humanism has won the 2008 Gleebooks Prize.

appearing at...
45: Readings from the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards

YVETTE ANDREWS (LOCAL)
Yvette Andrews is a film maker, musician, community activist, AFL coach, Reg Reagan impersonator and senior bureaucrat. She juggles her various careers as well as looking after her six month old son. The Ernies Book, co-authored with Meredith Burgmann, is her first book.

appearing at...
12: The Ernies Book

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.

appearing at...
251: Cafe Scientific: The Future of Food

VENERO ARMANNO (INTERSTATE)
Venero Armanno is the author of a book of short stories, Jumping at the Moon, and six critically acclaimed novels. These are The Lonely Hunter, Romeo of the Underworld, My Beautiful Friend, Strange Rain, Firehead, The Volcano and Candle Life.

Firehead was shortlisted in the 1999 Queensland Premiers Literary Award for Best Fiction and The Volcano won that award in 2002. The Volcano was also shortlisted for the Courier Mail Best Book of the Year.

Veny’s books have been published in the USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Israel and South Korea. Film producers have also shown interest in his work, with four books being optioned for film adaptation. Also a scriptwriter, Veny trained at the AFTRS in Sydney and TISCH School of the Arts, NYU. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Queensland.

His new book is The Dirty Beat, and it has won rave reviews, including a four-star review in Good Reading Magazine, “This is a lovely rocking rolling swoop of a novel about a muso with a penchant for self-destruction, but in the most engaging way. A blast.”

appearing at...
217: Memory
255: Artistic Passion
272: The Soundtrack of My Life

JAMES ARVANITAKIS (LOCAL)
James Arvanitakis is a lecturer in the humanities at the University of Western Sydney and a member of the university's Centre for Cultural Research.

A former banker, he had an epiphany on the side of a mountain in Bolivia and has since held various positions with human rights based organisations including AID/WATCH and Oxfam Hong Kong, and also founded The Commons Institute. James has worked as a human rights activist throughout the Pacific, Indonesia and Europe and is also a research associate with the Centre for Policy Development. His research focus now includes economic and environmental justice, and is currently investigating different the complex nature of citizenship.

A regular media commentator on ABC and Triple J, James' latest book, The Cultural Commons of Hope, is due to be launched in May 2008.

appearing at...
50: Is There Hope in Sydney?
163: Modern Citizenship

KALINDA ASHTON (INTERSTATE)
Kalinda Ashton is the assistant editor of Overland. Her short stories have been published in Overland, Meanjin and Sleepers Almanac. She has recently submitted a PhD in creative writing at RMIT and an extract from her forthcoming novel will appear in Strange.

appearing at...
170: The Overland Debate: The Future of Australian Fiction
245: From Poetry to Prose

WILL ATKINSON (INTERNATIONAL)
Will Atkinson worked as a bookseller for Waterstones for nine years before arriving at Faber. Having done a variety of different roles in 14 years, he is now Sales and Marketing Director. In 2005 he, along with some of the top names in British independent publishers, formed the Independent Alliance, a consortium which allows them to compete with the larger corporates in terms of access to, and heft into the UK and European markets. In March 2008, he become chair of the Independent Publishers Guild, a body representing over 500 members representing £500m turnover.

appearing at...
341: From Pen to Reader
344: The Future of Reading
278: Stefan Merrill Block in Conversation