Keynote Speakers

Ross Gibson

Ross Gibson makes books, films and art installations. Recent works include the book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, the video installation 'Street X-Rays' and the interactive audiovisual environment BYSTANDER (a collaboration with Kate Richards). He is the Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Ivor Indyk

Ph.D, University of London, 1980
BA Hons (1st class honours and University Medal in English and Australian Literature), University of Sydney, 1972

Ivor Indyk is founding editor and publisher of HEAT magazine and the award-winning Giramondo book imprint, and Whitlam Chair and head of the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf, and essays on many aspects of Australian literature, art and architecture. At Giramondo he has published a number of works which play more or less freely with the notion of non-fiction, including those by Brian Castro, John Hughes, Beverley Farmer, Gerald Murnane, and this year, Antigone Kefala, Dmetri Kakmi, Robert Gray and Kim Cheng Boey.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim (1944) was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wein International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998).

Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program "Now" in February 2002. She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an "elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today."

She has published a second novel, Sister Swing (Marshall Cavendish, 2006). Lim's co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many volumes and two special issues of journals, including the recent collections Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and the special issue of Ariel (2001) on microstates.

Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her recent honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women's Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, and educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. His best-known works are probably his two memoirs, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" and "Things My Mother Never Told Me."

Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. He lives in south London, with his wife and three children.