The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature, is the first and only Literary festival

Literary festival

A literary festival, also known as a book festival or writers' festival, is a regular gathering of writers and readers, typically on an annual basis in a particular city...

 in the UK dedicated to writing about Asia.

The Festival focuses on the newest and best books about Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

 or Asians in an annual series of talks and discussions. Featured are fiction and non-fiction, written by Asians or non-Asians, covering a broad selection of Asian countries from the Persian Gulf

Persian Gulf

The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers...

 in the West, to Indonesia in the East.

Believing that the most accessible way to understand a culture is through its literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature offers a forum for the people of Britain to gain greater understanding of Asian cultures and of the Asian communities around them at home.

Introduction and History

The first Asia House Festival of Asian Literature was held at Asia House

Asia House

Asia House, is a non-profit, non-political Pan-Asian organisation in the UK. It was founded in 1996 by a small group led by Sir Peter Wakefield, a former diplomat who died aged 89 in December 2010...

 in Central London, in May 2007. Founded by Adrienne Loftus Parkins, its current Director, it grew as a natural progression of an on-going literature programme which has been running at Asia House since 2001. The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

 has been the media partner of the Festival since its inception. The Festival is also supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council England

Arts Council England

Arts Council England was formed in 1994 when the Arts Council of Great Britain was divided into three separate bodies for England, Scotland and Wales. It is a non-departmental public body of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport...

. The Asia House produces the Festival in partnership with The Asian Word.

The Festival showcases both high-profile and emerging authors. Since its inception, the Festival has hosted authors such as: veteran writer/broadcaster Sir Mark Tully

Mark Tully

Sir William "Mark" Tully, OBE is the former Chief of Bureau, BBC, New Delhi. He worked for BBC for a period of 30 years before resigning in July 1994. He held the position of Chief of Bureau, BBC, Delhi for 20 years. Since 1994 he has been working as a freelance journalist and broadcaster based in...

, Man Booker Prize

Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...

 winners Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award...

 and Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga is an Indian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.-Early life and education:...

, Tash Aw

Tash Aw

Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi is a Malaysian writer currently living in London.- Biography :...

, Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh , is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books.He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce...

, Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo born 1973) is a Chinese novelist and filmmaker, who uses film and literary language to explore themes of alienation, memory, personal journeys, daily tragedies and develops her own vision of China's past and its future in a global environment....

, Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera FRSL is a British author with a Sri Lankan background.-Life and work:Born in Colombo in 1954, Romesh Gunesekera explores aspects of his native island.He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, moving to England in 1971...

, Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani novelist who writes in the English language. She was brought up in Karachi and attended Karachi Grammar School....

, Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a Pakistani-American author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, published in the United States by W. W...

, Nadeem Aslam

Nadeem Aslam

Nadeem Aslam is a prize-winning British Pakistani novelist.-Biography:Aslam moved with his family to England aged 14, when his father, a Communist, fled President Zia's regime. The family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire...

, Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani author best known for his novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist .- Biography :...

, Mohammed Hanif

Mohammed Hanif

Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani writer and journalist.-Life:He was born in Okara. He graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as a pilot officer, but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism...

, Sarfraz Manzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor is a journalist, documentary maker, and broadcaster. He is a regularly contributor to The Guardian, presenter of documentaries on BBC Radio 4, and a cultural commentator who appears on programmes such as Newsnight Review and Saturday Review. His first book, Greetings from Bury Park...

, Michael Wood, Will Hutton

Will Hutton

William Nicolas Hutton is an English writer, weekly columnist and former editor-in-chief for The Observer. He is currently Principal of Hertford College, Oxford and Chair of the Big Innovation Centre , an initiative from The Work Foundation , having been Chief Executive of The Work Foundation from...

, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh , is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.-Life:Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St...

, former UN Under-Secretary of State Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician and a Member of Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala...

, Xue Xinran, Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri is an internationally recognised Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.-Life:...

, Charles Allen

Charles Allen

Charles Allen may refer to:* Charles Allen , Canadian hurdler* Charles Allen , previously Chief Executive of ITV plc., and prior to that Granada plc.* Charles Allen , Massachusetts judge...

, John Gittings

John Gittings

John Gittings is a journalist and author who is mainly known for his work on modern China and the Cold War. From 1983 to 2003, he worked at The Guardian as assistant foreign editor and chief foreign leader-writer....

, Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian

Ma Jian

Ma Jian may refer to:* Ma Jian , Chinese basketball player* Ma Jian , Chinese writer* Muhammad Ma Jian, Confucian scholar who became an Islamic jurist...

, and Hardeep Singh Kohli

Hardeep Singh Kohli

Hardeep Singh Kohli is a British writer and radio and television presenter.-Background:Kohli was born in London and moved to Glasgow in Scotland when he was four. His parents came to the UK from India in the 1960s. The family's roots lie in the Punjab. His mother was a social worker, and his...

.

‘Festival Features’

Features include "Meet the Author" receptions after each event, Panel Discussions, Poetry, Podcast

Podcast

A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

 of all events, and a Children in Asia Series, .

Themes

Overall themes for 2010 relate to Change and Adaptation to 21st century issues, whether they be political, economic, social or cultural.

Debates and discussions in 2010 cover conflict in Kashmir

Kashmir

Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...

, democracy and freedom in Asia, Afghanistan

Afghanistan

Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...

, migration and displacement, Persian Gulf economies, and the development of Pakistani fiction.

Authors

The Festival has grown to include events for both adults and children and encompassing music, travel, politics, business, cooking as well as fiction.
Authors appearing in 2010 are: Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto born, Fatima Murtaza Bhutto on 29 May 1982, is a Pakistani poet and writer. She is granddaughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the niece of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and daughter of Murtaza Bhutto....

, William Dalrymple, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown MBE is a Ugandan-born British journalist and author, who describes herself as a "leftie liberal, anti-racist, feminist, Muslim, part-Pakistani...a very responsible person"...

, Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni is an author and award-winning foreign correspondent. She is a regular contributor to The Times, Vanity Fair,The Evening Standard and The Guardian.Di Giovanni grew up in Caldwell, New Jersey....

, Chang-rae Lee

Chang-Rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.-Early life:...

, Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi

Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghan writer and film-maker.-Life:He was born in 1962 in Kabul to a senior public servant and attended high school in Lycée Esteqlal...

, Peter Marsden, Daljit Nagra

Daljit Nagra

Daljit Nagra is a British poet whose debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! — a title alluding to W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We have come through! and by epigraph also to Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' — was published by Faber in February 2007...

, Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi

-Life and education:Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan. She was born to a Pakistani father and a British mother. Her father moved to Hatfield, Hertfordshire in England when she was a few months old. She did not revisit Pakistan until after the publication of her first book of poems - The...

, Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a Scottish Muslim, poet, artist and documentary film-maker.- Family and background:She was born in Lahore to Pakistani parents. She was brought up in Glasgow where her family moved when she was less than a year old...

, Kavita Jindal, Hirsh Sawhney, Glen Peters, Diane Wei Liang, Michael Booth

Michael Booth

Michael Booth is an English food and travel writer and journalist who writes regularly for a variety of newspapers and magazines including the Independent on Sunday, Condé Nast Traveller, Monocle and Time Out, among many other publications at home and abroad...

, John Kampfner

John Kampfner

John Paul Kampfner is a British journalist who was editor of the weekly political magazine the New Statesman between 2005 and 2008...

, Humphrey Hawksley

Humphrey Hawksley

-Education:Hawksley was educated at the Junior and Senior schools of St. Lawrence College, an independent school for boys , in the coastal seaside town of Ramsgate in Kent, in south east England.-Life and career:...

, Basharat Peer, Victoria Schofield, Justine Hardy, Jaspreet Singh

Jaspreet Singh

Jaspreet Singh is a Canadian writer.He grew up in India and moved to Canada in 1990. Singh is the author of the novel Chef , and Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, a collection of linked stories. He is a former research scientist who holds a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University...

, Neel Mukherjee, Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer based in Chennai. Born in Madras, India, to a Welsh mother and Gujarati father, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her first poetry collection, Countries of the Body, won the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection...

, Nitasha Kaul, Azadeh Moaveni

Azadeh Moaveni

- Education :Moaveni grew up in San Jose, California, and studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo.- Career :...

, Persian Gulf experts Christopher Davidson and Jim Krane, Ali Sethi, Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein

Aamer Hussein is a Pakistani short story writer and critic.-Early life and education:He grew up in Karachi, where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother's family in India. He studied in Ootacamund, South India, for two years before...

, Francis Pike and 2008 Man Asian Prize winner Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco

Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer from Manila and the Man Asian Literary Prize grand prize winner for 2008 known for his novel Ilustrado.-Personal Life and Education:...

.

Children's Authors and Artists

Elizabeth Laird

Elizabeth Laird

Elizabeth Laird is an author of many books for children, including picture books and books for older children. Her novels include Red Sky in the Morning, Secrets of the Fearless and Kiss the Dust.-Biography:...

, Seema Anand, Nilesh Mistry and Prodeepta Das.

Dates

The 2010 Asia House Festival of Asian Literature will run from 5–27 May 2010 at Asia House. Pre Festival events take place in March, April and June, 2010.

Authors

Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron

Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, CBE is a British travel writer and novelist.In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books...

, Zaiba Malik, Nikesh Shukla, Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi writer and novelist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.- Education :...

, Ching-He Huang, Wendy Law Yone, Moni Mohsin

Moni Mohsin

Moni Mohsin is a Pakistani writer based partly in the United Kingdom.She grew up in Lahore, and describes herself as being from a family of "educated, westernised people"...

, Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk

-Biography:Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. She is the author of six novels....

, Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati is an Iranian-born British poet.-Life and career:She was born in Tehran, Iran in 1944. She grew up on the Isle of Wight and was educated in Switzerland at the University of Neuchâtel, and in London at the Drama Centre and the School of Oriental and African Studies...

, Ziba Karbassi, Stephen Watts, Mirza Waheed, Roma Tearne

Roma Tearne

Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan born artist and writer. Her first novel, Mosquito, has been shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Book Awards first Novel prize.-Art:...

, Daisy Hasan

Daisy Hasan

Daisy Hasan is an Indian-English author from Shillong, Meghalaya and is the author of The To-Let House. It was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008....

, Tamara Chalabi, Ali Allawi

Ali Allawi

Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi was Minister of Trade and Minister of Defense in the cabinet appointed by the Interim Iraq Governing Council from September 2003 until 2004, and subsequently Minister of Finance in the Iraqi Transitional Government between 2005 and 2006. A Shia Muslim, Allawi was part of the...

, Angela Saini

Angela Saini

Angela Saini is a British science journalist and author. Her first book Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World was published on 3 March 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, and by Hachette in the Indian sub-continent in April 2011.She has been published in Science, Wired, The...

, Amanda Devi, Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian novelist based in the United Kingdom.- Career :From 1980 to 1982, Gurnah lectured at the Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD in 1982...

, Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair is an Indian English author and associate professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus in Denmark...

, and Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi CBE is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. The themes of his work have touched on topics of race, nationalism, immigration, and sexuality...

.

The 2011 Asia House Festival of Asian Literature will run from 10-26 May at Asia House.

Asia House

Asia House

Asia House

Asia House, is a non-profit, non-political Pan-Asian organisation in the UK. It was founded in 1996 by a small group led by Sir Peter Wakefield, a former diplomat who died aged 89 in December 2010...

is the home of The Festival of Asian Literature. Founded in 1996, it is the leading Pan-Asian organisation in the UK. A non-profit, non-political body, its geographical remit extends from the Persian Gulf

Persian Gulf

The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers...

 in the West to Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

 in the East.

Its mission is to “engage with the Century of Asia” by promoting a greater understanding of the distinctive and varied cultures, arts, religions and commercial opportunities presented by the growing and vibrant countries of Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

.

Based in a listed John Adam

John Adam (architect)

John Adam was a Scottish architect. Born in Linktown of Abbotshall, now part of Kirkcaldy, Fife, he was the eldest son of architect and entrepreneur William Adam. His younger brothers Robert and James Adam also became architects.The Adam family moved to Edinburgh in 1728, as William Adam's career...

 style 18th century townhouse in Marylebone

Marylebone

Marylebone is an affluent inner-city area of central London, located within the City of Westminster. It is sometimes written as St. Marylebone or Mary-le-bone....

, Central London

Central London

Central London is the innermost part of London, England. There is no official or commonly accepted definition of its area, but its characteristics are understood to include a high density built environment, high land values, an elevated daytime population and a concentration of regionally,...

, featuring a Gallery, Library, Café, and three Fine Rooms, it provides a focal point for people to meet and exchange ideas.