Amit Chaudhuri is, according to the Guardian, 'one of the leading novelists of his generation'. His latest book is The Immortals, his fifth novel. He is also an internationally acclaimed essayist and musician. Among the prizes he has won are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi award. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Arshia Sattar has a Ph.D. from the Dept of South Asian languages and civilizations at the University Of Chicago. Her translations from Sanskrit of tales from the Kathasaritsagara and the Valmiki Ramayana have been published by Penguin books.

Shobhaa De is one of India’s top best-selling authors. De gave a new definition to the mass market best seller with her breakthrough, bold and highly individualistic style that spoke a new language. Spouse – The Truth about Marriage was considered a publishing phenomenon in India. Four of her titles, namely, Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, Sultry Days, and Second Thoughts are course material in the University of London. De writes prolifically for Indian and International publications.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and writer based in Bangalore. He is the author most recently of India after Gandhi, which was chosen as a book of the year by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Outlook. In 2008 he was named as one of the one hundred most influential intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy magazine.

Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist and writer of children’s books. She is also a painter and illustrator. Born in Paris, of an Ivorian father and a French mother, she was brought up in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). She has a doctorate in African American Studies from the Sorbonne, Paris IV and has travelled extensively in West Africa, Europe, USA and Latin America. She has published several books and her novel Reine Pokou (Queen Pokou) was awarded the prestigious literary prize “Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire” in 2005. She is Head of French Studies in the School of Literature & Language Studies, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Angela Makholwa is an ambitious, highly successful business-owner and author, based in Johannesburg. Angela has worked as a magazine journalist and also as a public relations consultant for several agencies. In 2002 she established her own public relations company, Britespark Communications. She is a versatile author who has one published novel, Red Ink (2007), a gripping psychological thriller, and her second novel, Thirtieth Candle, is due to be published in June 2009. Set in Johannesburg, Thirtieth Candle is a ‘chick lit’ novel about the lives of four interesting, successful women.

Pnina Fenster has been the editor of GLAMOUR magazine since its launch in South Africa in 2004. Prior to this, she was the launch and ongoing editor of the South African edition of Marie Claire magazine. Pnina began her career as a magazine features writer and stylist, subsequently becoming a columnist at the Sunday Times. Before moving into editing, she was an award-winning freelance journalist and her short stories have been included in top literary journals and anthologies of women’s writing.

Zukiswa Wanner is the author of 2007 K.Sello Duiker Award-nominated The Madams (Oshun 2006), Behind Every Successful Man (Kwela 2008) and Exiled in Our Own Land whose expected date of publishing is 2010. She has contributed a short story to the Home Away collection which will also be published in 2010 by Struik, a section of whose proceeds will go to victims of xenophobic violence. For two years, she has been a mentor for the Wits mentor-protégé program and in addition to being a blogger for the online literary journal African Writing, she also writes for broadcast.

Mandla Langa was born in March 1950. He went into exile in 1976 and has lived all over Africa, Hungary and the UK. He has published Tenderness of Blood (Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1987), A Rainbow on a Paper Sky (Kliptown Books, London, 1989), The Naked Song and Other Stories (David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 1997), The Memory of Stones (DPP, 2000) and The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (Picador, Africa, October 2008), which won him the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. He chairs the board of MultiChoice South Africa and is married to June Josephs; they have two daughters.

Jacob Dlamini is currently a PhD student in History at Yale University. He is also a seasoned journalist and has worked for South Africa's leading newspapers, The Weekender, The Sunday Times and Business Day where he was political editor. He reported on South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 for The Sunday Times and covered Mozambique's first post-independence and post-civil war elections, also in 1994, for The Sunday Times. He has studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and at Bard College in the US. He is currently doing a PhD at Yale on histories of conservation in South Africa.

Sarah Nuttall is Associate Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) and the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. She is co-editor, most recently, of Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis and Load Shedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa.

Since his participation in Dokumenta X in Kassel in 1997, solo shows of Kentridge's work have been shown in many museums and galleries around the world, starting with the MCA San Diego (1998), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1999). In 1998 a survey exhibition of his work was hosted by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, continuing to museums in throughout Europe during 1998/1999. 2001 saw the launch of a substantial survey show of Kentridge’s work in Washington, traveling thereafter to cities in the US and South Africa. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated a new retrospective exhibition of his work for the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in January 2004, which went on to museums in Europe, Canada, Australia and South Africa. 2009 marked the start of a new large touring exhibition, beginning in San Francisco, travelling to museums in Texas, Florida, and MoMA, New York, before continuing to Europe.

The shadow oratorio Confessions of Zeno was commissioned for Documenta XI in 2002. The installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon was presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale. April 2005 saw the premiere of a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) at the Théâtre de La Monnaie in Brussels, with William Kentridge directing and René Jacobs as conductor, touring to cities including New York, Naples, and Johannesburg. In October 2005, the Deutsche Bank Guggenheim in Berlin presented Black Box / Chambre Noire, a miniature theatre piece with mechanized puppets, projection and original music by Philip Miller.

William Kentridge received the Carnegie Medal for the Carnegie International 1999/2000; the Goslar Kaisserring in 2003; and the Oskar Kokoschka Award (2008). He has received honorary doctorates from a number of universities internationally.

Leon de Kock is a scholar, poet and translator based in Johannesburg. He is Head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. His books include a critical monograph on missionary colonialism in 19th-century South Africa, Civilising Barbarians (Wits University Press), a translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s blockbuster Afrikaans novel of the 1990s, Triomf (published in Johannesburg, London and New York), and two volumes of poetry. His third volume of poetry, Talking To Me Talking To You, is due at Umuzi in 2010, and his new work of verse adaptation, Intimately Absent (a rendering of Cas Vos’s Intieme Afwesige, based on the Abelard and Heloise saga), is due at Protea Book House, also in 2010.

Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile is South Africa’s National Poet Laureate.

He studied Literature and Creative Writing in the United States. He has taught at a number of universities in the United States and in Africa including the University of Denver, Wayne State University, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and the universities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Fort Hare. His poetry collections include My Name is Afrika, Heartprints, When the Clouds Clear, To the Bitter End, If I Could Sing and This Way I Salute You. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award, the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Poetry Award and the Herman Charles Bosman Prize. In 2008 he was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga: Silver (OIS).

Ingrid de Kok has published four volumes of poetry, most recently Seasonal Fires: new and selected work (Umuzi, South Africa and Seven Stories Press, New York City, 2006). Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies around the world, is taught in universities in South Africa, Europe, Canada, the United States and elsewhere and has been translated into eight languages. She has been awarded a range of fellowships, including one at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, and been a writer in residence at various institutions. She is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Andre Odendaal is a historian whose current position is CEO of Western Province Cricket Association (the province which plays at Newlands in Cape Town). He is the author of inter alia Cricket in Isolation: The politics of race and cricket in South Africa and The Story of an African Game: Black cricketers in South Africa and the unmasking of one of cricket’s greatest myths, 1850s – 2003. In his position as WPCA CEO, he oversees the operations of the Sahara Park Newlands stadium as well as the Nashua Cape Cobras, one of the six professional teams in South African domestic cricket.

Libby Meintjes is Senior Lecturer and Head of Translation Studies in the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has been involved in training translators for over twenty-five years and has published in the field of translation, semiotics and ideology. She is currently working in the area of translation in fiction and self-translation with specific reference to South African literature.

Stephen Gelb is an economist with more than 20 years of experience in South African economic policy issues. He studied economics in Cape Town and Toronto annd was an activist in the Canadian anti-apartheid movement between 1976 and 1984. Returning to South Africa in 1984, he was an advisor to COSATU, the South African Council of Churches and the UDF on economic policy issues until 1990. Stephen then worked as an advisor to the ANC government during the early 1990’s. He has been a consultant to a number of South African government departments and agencies, including the treasury, the Department of Trade & Industry, the Office of the Deputy President and NEDLAC. He worked with the Office of the President from 1999, as leader of a major study of domestic fixed investment in South Africa, and was research coordinator in the Government’s MAP Technical Team between November 2000 and July 2001. He has taught at various universities including York University (Toronto), The New School for Social Research (New York City), the University of Durban-Westville, KZN and currently the University of the Witwatersrand where he is visiting Professor in Development Studies. Stephen also spent more than 4 years at the Development Bank of Southern Africa.