Adam Schwartzman was born in Johannesburg in 1973. After completing degrees in English literature and development studies as Oxford University, he held positions in the South African National Treasury, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. He is the author of three books of poetry – The Good Life, The Dirty Life, and Other Stories; Merrie Afrika!; Book of Stones – as well as the anthology Ten South African Poets. Eddie Signwriter is his first novel. He lives in Istanbul, Turkey, with his wife and daughter.

Aher Arop Bol was born in a Dinka village in the Bahr el Ghazal region of Southern Sudan. The journey described in The Lost Boy is the author’s own. Bol now lives in Pretoria. He runs a spaza shop which enables him to pay his UNISA fees (he is studying law) and maintain his two brothers, with whom he has been reunited, at a boarding school in Uganda.

Alex Perry is Africa Bureau Chief for Time magazine. Born in the US in 1970, he grew up in Britain and read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Trinity college, Oxford. After five years in the British press, he joined the London bureau of Agence France-Press, for whom he covered Britain, the Caribbean and Northern Ireland, and with whom he moved to Hong Kong. There he joined Time in 2001 and has since covered Asia, Iraq and Africa from postings in Hong Kong, New Delhi and Cape Town. He has won a number of awards, among them the Joseph L Galloway War Correspondents Award, the Society of Publishers in Asia Award for Excellence in Reporting, a Special Citation for Reporting in the Henry Luce Awards, runner-up in the South Asia Journalism Association’s Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Story and various Time awards. He is married with two daughters and lives with his family in Cape Town.

Alistair Morgan was born in Johannesburg in 1971. In 2005 he completed a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. His short stories have been published in the Paris Review and Prospect magazine. In 2009 he became the first non-American to win the Plimpton Prize for Fiction and his short story Icebergs was selected for the O. Henry Prize stories and short-listed for the Caine Prize. His debut novel, Sleeper’s Wake, has been published in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Holland and Italy and was short-listed in the Africa region for the 2010 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. He lives in Cape Town.

Allan Boesak, cleric and politician, was born in 1945 in Kakamas, NW Cape and graduated from Bellville Theological Seminary before being ordained in the DRC’s Sendingkerk, later gaining his doctorate from the Kampen Theological Institute in Holland. He was chairman of the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa and later elected President of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. A founding member of the United Democratic Front, he subsequently had a controversial career in politics but remains a widely respected church leader. Allan has written a number of books; the most recent is Running With Horses. He is married with children and lives in Cape Town.

Andrew Brown practises as an advocate in Cape town, and he is a reservist sergeant in the South African Police Service. His first two novels were Inyenzi, about the Rwandan genocide, and the crime thriller Coldsleep Lullaby, which won the 2006 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. His work of non-fiction, Street Blues, about his experiences as a police reservist, was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Award. His married, with three children.

Angela Makholwa is the author of two novels. Red Ink is a psychological crime thriller set in Johannesburg that focuses on a female journalist who decides to write the biography of a convicted serial killer and rapist. The 30th Candle explores the relationship between four university friends, chronicling how their lives are affected by turning thirty.

Ann Donald worked as a newspaper journalist and magazine editor for 21 years, including 10 years at the Pretoria News, editor of Longevity, managing editor of Cosmopolitan, first deputy editor and later the editor of Fairlady magazine, and editor and publisher of Woman's Value/Dit. After leaving Fairlady in 2005, Ann worked as a freelance writer and media consultant, and is still active on both fronts. In 2006 she opened an independent bookshop, Kalk Bay Books, which has become a haven for booklovers, regularly hosting launches, discussions, lecture series, and poetry evenings. In March 2010, Ann took over a restaurant adjacent to the bookshop, now called the Annex, which carries through the book theme from the bookshop and will run programmes of events with a literary flavour.

Antjie Krog is a poet, writer, journalist and teaches at the University of the Western Cape. She has published twelve volumes of poetry in Afrikaans, two volumes in English, and three non-fiction books: Country of my Skull, on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; A Change of Tongue about the transformation in South Africa after ten years and recently Begging to be Black. She has been awarded most of the prestigious awards for non-fiction, translation and poetry available in Afrikaans and English, as well as the Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture for the year 2000 and the Open Society Prize from the Central European University. Her work has been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Serbian and Arabic.

Ari Sitas completed his PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand on the emergence of trade unions and social movements among black urban and migrant workers (1960s-1980s) under the supervision of Eddie and the late David Webster in 1984. He joined the University of Cape Town as a professor in May 2009 after 26 years at the University of Natal, later the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has been a senior fellow and research associate in a number of institutions – the University of California, Berkeley, Ruskin College and Oxford University – and is a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Guest Professor at the Albert-Ludvigs University of Freiburg. Ari is also a writer, dramatist and poet and was a leading intellectual and activist in the Anti-Apartheid movement.

Arthur Attwell was born in Durban in 1976, grew up in Amanzimtoti, White River, and Pretoria, and attended the University of Cape Town. He is the co-founder and CEO of Electric Book Works, a digital publishing and R&D company. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, EBW finds and tests ways to apply digital-publishing best practice in developing countries. Arthur's background is in educational and scholarly publishing, working for two multinational publishers before starting EBW. He was runner-up in the British Council's International Young Publishing Entrepreneur award in 2009 and lives in Cape Town with his wife Michelle Matthews.

Basil van Rooyen, a book publisher for 36 years, is chairman of Troupant, an educational publishing company, and Bookstorm, a general book publishing company. After working for multi-nationals McGraw-Hill and Macmillan as publishing director, he did a management buy-out of a British-owned company in 1990 and ran it as Southern Book Publishers for nine years. Since then he has started up several other publishing houses. He has been chairman of the Publishing Association of South Africa twice, has lectured in publishing studies at Wits University, and is the author of Get Your Book Published in 30 (Relatively) Easy Steps: A Hands-on Guide for South African Authors, another edition of which will be released by Penguin later this year

Ben Williams Ben Williams is the editor of BOOK Southern Africa, a literary network and news source found at www.book.co.za. In addition to chairing a panel at the FLF, Ben will be liveblogging the festival with his BOOK SA team.

Chris Thurman is a lecturer in the English Department at Wits University. He has contributed to The Weekender, The Sunday Independent, The Mail & Guardian and other publications as an arts critic and travel writer, and was awarded the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Thomas Pringle prize for reviews in 2007/8. Since 2009 he has been on the judging panel for the Sunday Times Fiction Award. He is the editor of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa and compiler of Sport versus Art: A South African Contest (Wits University Press, 2010). His other publications include the scholarly volume Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010) and Text Bites, a literary anthology for high school learners (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Christi van der Westhuizen is the author of White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007), a regular columnist in the English and Afrikaans press and a board member of the African Arts Institute. She started her career at Vrye Weekblad and subsequently worked as Beeld’s senior political correspondent in parliament and later as ThisDay's deputy editorial page editor. She is currently Inter Press Service's trade editor for Africa and Europe and "Access to Medicines" editor. While working as senior researcher in International Relations, she edited the 2005 book Gender Instruments in Africa-Critical Perspectives, Future Strategies. She holds a Master’s degree in political economy and South African politics. Among others, she received the Mondi Newspaper Award in 2001 for her political and social commentary.

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944 and now lives in France. He is the author of seven novels, including A Separate Development, winner of the David Higham Prize; Kruger’s Alp, winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and Serenity House, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also a poet, playwright and journalist and now lives in France. His most recent books were My Mother’s Lovers and a collection of short stories, In The Garden of Bad Dreams. His previously banned books A Separate Development and The Love Songs of Nathan J Swirsky were republished this year.

Colleen Higgs  is a writer and publisher. Her writings have appeared in numerous literary and other magazines since 1990. Her collection of poems, Halfborn Woman came out in 2004, while more recently she has had stories published in collections, such as Dinaane (Telegraph Books, 2007) and Just Keep Breathing (Jacana, 2008) and Home, Away (Zebra Press, 2010). While working at the Centre for the Book, among numerous other book development activities, she managed the award-winning Community Publishing Project. She participated in the 2006 British Council sponsored Crossing Borders project. In 2007 she started Modjaji Books, an innovative small press that publishes the writing of Southern African women. She lives in Cape Town with her partner and daughter.

Corina van der Spoel studied literature and has worked in publicity and books for a long time, first with Tafelberg Publishers and later in the UK with an antiquarian book dealer. She has also worked as a journalist here and abroad. She conceived and established the Boekehuis Bookshop in 2000 in Joburg and has managed it ever since. Celebrating its 10th birthday this year, the shop has been voted one of 50 unique bookshops in the world. It has made its mark on the literary landscape as a place where discerning readers love to go. The shop is known for its active discussion programme with authors, great ambience and informed service. Happiness for Corina is to find the right book for the right reader.