Who's at the Auckland Writers' Festival?

If you want to know a little more about the people involved in a festival event before deciding to go, read on for short biographies of all the contributors.

Allen Curnow began publishing poetry in the 1930s and has also been an important critic and editor. He has won many awards and honours for his poetry including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Queens Medal for Poetry. His latest collection, The Bells of St Babels, was published by Auckland University Press in February.

Mike Davis teaches in the department of history at the State University of New York. His interests are urban and environmental history and the history of socialism.

Delia Falconer's novel, The Service of Clouds, was short-listed for Australia's Miles Franklin Award and the Age Book of the Year. Falconer teaches at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Richard Flanagan, the winner of several Australian literary awards, is best known for his second novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which was made into a feature film.

Maurice Gee has won the fiction section of the New Zealand Book Awards four times, the Wattie Book of the Year Award and the New Zealand Children's Book of the Year award twice. His latest novel, Ellie and the Shadow Man, will be launched at the festival.

Patricia Grace writes novels and short stories. Her novel Potiki has received national and international awards. Her fifth novel, Dogside Story, will be launched at the festival.

Joanne Harris is half-French and spent most of her childhood holidays immersed in village life in Merac, in north-west France. She is best known for her novel Chocolat, in which a small French town is turned upside down by a mysterious woman who opens a chocolate shop. Harris lives in England.

Stephanie Johnson is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories, one volume of poetry and various plays for stage, radio and screen. Her fourth novel, Belief, will be published later this year. With Peter Wells, Johnson founded the Auckland Writers' Festival. She was the 2000 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow.

Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria and now lives in New Zealand where she is a full-time writer. Her first book of poetry, All Roads Lead to the Sea, won the 1998 Montana award for Best First Book. In 1999 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship.

Douglas lloyd Jenkins is a leading commentator on design. His articles have appeared, among other magazines, in Wallpaper* and he is a regular contributor to Viva in the New Zealand Herald. He is a frontman for The Big Art Trip, a forthcoming television arts programme.

Gordon McLauchlan is a writer, broadcaster and publicity consultant. He has been books editor of the New Zealand Herald and writes a weekly column for the newspaper.

David Malouf is recognised as one of Australia's finest writers. The Great World won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger in 1991, and Remembering Babylon, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, won the inaugural international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Jeffrey Masson is the author of many books about (or against) psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He has also written two best-selling books about the emotional lives of animals: When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love.

Frank Moorhouse is an award-winning fiction writer. His discontinuous narratives, in which characters, and often the stories, overlap, include The Americans, Baby, The Electrical Experience, Tales of Mystery and Romance, and Forty-Seventeen.

Justin Paton is curator of contemporary art at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and editor of Landfall.

Brian Rudman is a New Zealand Herald columnist who has been commenting in print on Auckland affairs since the 1970s.

Edward Rutherfurd's best-selling saga Sarum is based on the history of Salisbury. Ruska tells the sweeping history of Russia and his third novel, London, tells the remarkable story of the greatest city on Earth.

Jane Smiley is the author of 10 works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Moo and A Thousand Acres which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

C.K. Stead has published eight novels, two collections of short stories, 10 collections of poetry, four of literary criticism, and has edited a number of anthologies. His work is represented in most New Zealand anthologies of poetry and short stories, and he has won a number of awards.

Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, began her literary career as a freelance business writer for IBM and Apple computer companies but moved quickly from technical writing to fiction. "Conflicts, tragedies in life, difficulties, a mother who was depressed, a father and a brother who died, being the only Chinese girl in a school, moving every year, graduating from a private school in Switzerland among rich people and not being rich. You know, these are the things that make you either psychotic or a fiction writer."

Chad Taylor lives in Auckland. He is the author of a short-story collection, The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself, and three novels: Pack of Lies, Heaven (now a feature film) and Shirker.

Welsh writer Sarah Waters was inspired to write her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, while working on her PhD thesis on lesbian historical fiction which led her to investigate music-hall life, the Whitstable oyster trade, Victorian fashion and daily life, as well as suffragism and early socialism. She won the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2000 for her second novel, Affinity.

Peter Wells is a short-story writer, essayist, novelist and film-maker. His books include Dangerous Desires which won the 1992 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The Mighty Civic and Desperate Remedies are films he has written and co-directed. He is co-founder of the Auckland Writers' Festival.

Albert Wendt first came to New Zealand from Samoa in 1952. Later he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Pacific Literature at the University of the South Pacific. He has published numerous novels, collections of short stories, most recently The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories, and poetry.

Naomi Wolf is at the forefront of exploding the social myths that conspire to keep women struggling against inequality. She took on the beauty industry in her landmark international best-seller, The Beauty Myth (1991), then focused on politics in her second best-seller, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power (1993). In her latest book, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (1997), Wolf sheds unprecedented light on contemporary female sexual coming-of-age. Wolf was named by Time magazine as one of the 50 most notable leaders under 40.