Hanif Kureishi lives in London and has written six novels, three works of non-fiction and nine plays and screenplays. His new novel, Something to Tell You, has received critical acclaim as Kureishi again explores the themes of sex, love and religion that have been at the heart of his most celebrated works.

Something to Tell You is described by the Guardian as a “return to the 1970s, and the territory of his enduringly lovable The Buddha of Suburbia… His narrator is an analyst looking back on the violence, confusion and first love of his youth, while deeply engaged in contemporary politics and culture: Kureishi’s London landscape is a vivid kaleidoscope of larger-than-life characters.”

The Financial Times was also full of praise: “Hanif Kureishi has written a subtle and strikingly topical novel… [his] skilful anatomisation of how it feels to be an atheist Muslim in contemporary England punctures many a stereotype… Something to Tell You has much to tell us, and does it extraordinarily well.” Meanwhile, the Independent said: “Kureishi – a great comic writer, and a peerless connoisseur of the human mystery… delivers a prose, and a perspective, that throbs with unruly life.”

www.hanifkureishi.com

“There is more that is worth thinking about in Hanif Kureishi’s new book than in the work of almost any other current British novelist.”
The Evening Standard

Links:

• Full profile on Contemporary Writers
• Interview in The Telegraph, with the option to listen to Hanif reading an extract from Something To Tell You

Video:

Hanif Kureishi on The Book Show (Sky Arts)

Sarah Waters’ first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was published in February 1998 and the Telegraph claimed “this could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson”. It was also adapted by Andrew Davies for BBC drama in 2002.

Her second novel, Affinity (1999), prompted A N Wilson to hail Sarah as “such a brilliant writer that her readers would believe anything she told them”, while the Guardian predicted Affinity to be “the very type of book which may turn out to be the signature of late 20th-Century fiction in Britain”. Sarah was awarded the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for Affinity, as well being runner-up for the Welsh Book Of the Year Award, all in 2000. Affinity was also shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and dramatised on ITV earlier this year.

Sarah’s third and fourth novels, Fingersmith and Night Watch, were both shortlisted for both the Orange and Man Booker Prizes. Fingersmith won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002. It was dramatised as a major 3-part BBC1 drama starring Charles Dance and Imelda Staunton in 2005.

Sarah’s new novel, The Little Stranger, will be published by Virago in June this year.

www.sarahwaters.com

“One of the best storytellers alive”
The Independent

“This outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet of women’s struggles for various kinds of liberation.”
The Times

Links:

• Sarah Waters feature in the Guardian about writing Night Watch
• Sarah Waters feature in the Independent
• Sarah Waters interview for Powells Bookshop

Video:

Sarah Waters interviewed at Brighton Book Festival 2006:

Sarah Waters on The Book Show (Sky Arts):

Her follow up, a biography of Chairman Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story was published in 2005, co-written by her historian husband Jon Halliday, and also received worldwide critical acclaim.

Revered for her evocation of Mao and communist China, Jung was surprisingly born into a family of devout Communists and grew up in a walled housing compound with a maid and driver – something foreign to most in China. However, her unflinching look at her own, her grandmother’s and her mother’s experience under Mao’s rule, Wild Swans reveals how the daughter of two respected Communist Party officials became disillusioned with the establishment as a result of her father speaking up against Mao. Exploring warlord marriages, war and revolution, the book is a fantastical tale yet as far from fantasy as reality will allow.

A former barefoot doctor, steelworker and electrician, in 1982 Jung became the first individual from the People’s Republic of China to earn a PhD from a British university. The control that communism, and Maoism in particular, exerts over its people is the cornerstone of all her work to date, particularly in her biography of Mao. Her knowledge of he former leader goes far beyond the opinionated, having researched the man for 12 years – interviewing those who either had his ear or felt his touch including George Bush, Sr., Henry Kissinger, and the Dalai Lama. Jung has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and will be immortalised for her outspoken views of the country of her birth.

We’re very proud to welcome Jung Chang to Port Eliot, knowing full well that her books and contribution as chronicler of modern day China will live on well beyond these times. She will be talking about her personal life and writing.

Links:

• The Guardian interview with Jung Chang
• Times review of Mao: The Unknown Story
• 2005 interview with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Video:

Jung Chang on The Book Show (Sky Arts)

Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland and now lives in North London. He is the author of nine books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Essays in Love (1993), How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), The Art of Travel (2002) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006). His latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, will be published in April 2009 and explores the “beauty, interest and occasional horror of the modern world of work.” At this year’s festival, Alain will be solving your work problems live on stage, drawing from his extensive travels and study undertaken for the writing of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. “Most literary festivals feel like work,” he says. “Port Eliot is like messing about in a garden at play – and from this informality comes the particular zaniness and inventiveness that is the festival’s hallmark. It’s always a joy to come.”

Alain de Botton is also the founder of The School of Life; a new social enterprise based in central London, offering a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well. “This is the sort of place that can make you genuinely wise, rather than merely smart. In its spirit, it achieves everything I’ve been trying to do with my own writing for the past 15 years,” he says.

www.alaindebotton.com

“All de Botton’s books, fiction and non-fiction, deal with how thought and specifically philosophy might help us deal better with the challenges of quotidian life – returning philosophy to its simple, sound origins.”
Annette Kobak, Times Literary Supplement

Links:

• Alain de Botton talks to Monocle magazine about urban development monstrosities:
• Interview in The Idler
• TV and audio clips

Video:

Excerpt from a film about Status Anxiety

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House is a study of the Constance Kent case and has been recognised for both its thoughtful re-examination of the murder and its portrait of Victorian life.

“Summerscale has constructed nothing less than a masterpiece… The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is at one and the same time a crime thriller, a sociological history, a biography and a fascinating essay on the nature of investigation… My shelves are stacked with books about crime, but none more satisfying than this,” enthused the Mail on Sunday’s Craig Brown. The New York Times Book Review shared his enthusiasm: “Summerscale smartly uses an energetic narrative voice and a suspenseful pace, among other novelistic devices, to make her factual material read with the urgency of a work of fiction. Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society…The author’s startling final twist both vindicates her fallen hero and advances an ‘aggressive’ attack on moral hypocrasy in his day and ours.”

Kate is also the former literary editor of the Telegraph and her writing has appeared in the Guardian and the Independent. She was a Booker Prize judge in 2001.

Alongside journalist Louise Carpenter, Kate will be creating a mysterious and intriguing happening to take place inside the wonderful Port Eliot House at this year’s festival.

www.mrwhicher.com

“Summerscale has produced not only a dazzling non-fiction thriller, but also an acute work of literary and social history.”
The Daily Express

Links:

• The Prince of Sleuths: The policeman investigating a horrific murder case in 1860 provided the template for the archetypal detective hero. Kate Summerscale tracks down the clues.
• Q&A with Kate Summerscale

Video:

Kate Summerscale on Book Zone:

A Richard and Judy book club discussing The Suspicions of Mr Whicher:

Glyn’s work has been shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Many of his plays have been staged in the UK and USA, including The Lifeblood, which won British Theatre Guide’s ‘Best Play’ Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, and Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008.

His latest collection is Hide Now. He’ll be joining Untitled Books’ Literary Lonely Hearts Club to read a selection of his poetry.

“[Maxwell’s] astonishing technical facility can make syllables, vowels and consonants do absolutely anything. His energetic voice riffs through evasively ordinary speech taking on love, politics, comedy and bizarre narratives in brilliantly elaborate syntax and forms”
– The Independent

www.glynmaxwell.com

Rana’s second novel Solo was published earlier this year to widespread praise. He now lives permanently in Delhi, and writes for several periodicals, including the Guardian, New Statesman and BBC radio. At this year’s festival, Rana will be reading and talking as part of Untitled Books’ Literary Lonely Hearts Club.

“Only the most gifted writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jonathan Safran-Foer, can hold the surreal and the real in satisfying equilibrium. This elite now welcomes Rana Dasgupta to its ranks.”
– Time Out

www.ranadasgupta.com

She has had two collections of poetry published by Carcanet. Her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes (published in 2002 when she was only 15) is a topical, zesty and formally delightful collection of poems built on the traditions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006 to critical acclaim. Caroline’s third book will be published by Carcanet in November 2009.

Caroline’s poems have been published in several anthologies, including Oxford Poetry 2008, and are published regularly in PN Review, Poetry Review, The North magazine. Several of her poems and a commissioned short story, Sucking Eggs, have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 3.

In recent years, Caroline has given poetry readings at Latitude Festival, the Manchester Literature Festival, the Wellcome Collection (with Don Paterson), the Royal Festival Hall (with Elaine Feinstein), St Hilda’s College (with Wendy Cope), the Wordsworth Trust (with Gillian Allnutt), Cheltenham Festival (with Clare Pollard) and Ledbury Festival, amongst others.

www.carolinebird.co.uk

Alexander is an author, illustrator and homeless worker. His first book, Stuart: a Life Backwards, was a Sunday Times bestseller, the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the biography category.

The book, which he also illustrated, is an especially moving biography detailing the true story of Stuart Shorter, a person nobody wanted to know – the nutter, the beggar, the addict, the offender. Alexander was working in a hostel for the homeless to support his PhD in the Philosophy of Quantum Physics when he met Stuart. The two of them form an unlikely relationship and the story unfolds – on Stuart’s request – backwards.

www.alexandermasters.net

“He has, without patronising, given a voice to the ‘underclass’; at the same time, without preaching, he shows us the value of even the most damaged of human lives. A powerful book, humane, instructive and entirely original”
The Sunday Telegraph

“Stuart does not like the manuscript. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort to write a biography of this annoying man who now sits squeezed into my armchair, his ugly mug pushed forward in objection.”
Extract from Stuart: a Life Backwards.

Lammas (the festival of the first wheat harvest of the year) is approaching on 1 August, so she’ll be dressed as the Corn Mother and will speak about old harvest customs and other aspects of this ancient Celtic festival. She’ll also be joining Simon Costin at his Museum of British Folklore caravan.

www.stonewylde.com