2010 Living Writers (Video-Large)

Tessa Hadley is the author of three highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, and The Master Bedroom, as well as a collection of stories, Sunstroke. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

Mark Ravenhill is a British playwright, actor and journalist best known for the plays Shopping & F***ing, Some Explicit Polaroids, and Mother Clapp’s Molly House. In 2008, the Royal Court, the Gate Theatre, the National Theatre, Out of Joint, and Paines Plough collectively staged the 17 plays in his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. He made his acting debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005, performing his own monologue, Product. Educated at Bristol University, Mr. Ravenhill is a frequent contributor to the arts section of the Guardian.

Frances Hwang teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her short story collection, Transparency, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University. Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.

Peter Balakian is the author of many books including a new book of poems, Ziggurat, as well as June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir and was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition. Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and bestseller. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English at Colgate.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad and educated in England. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. V. S. Naipaul has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, In a Free State (winner of the 1971 Booker Prize), A Bend in the River, An Area of Darkness, Among the Believers, and Magic Seeds. His newest book, The Masque of Africa, is due out in October. Sir Vidia Naipaul lives in England with his wife, Nadira Naipaul.

Born in Lahore in 1971, Mohsin Hamid grew up in Pakistan. He attended Princeton University then Harvard Law School, working afterward in New York and London for the prestigious firms of McKinsey & Company then Wolff Olins. His first novel, Moth Smoke, appeared in 2000 and became a cult hit in Pakistan. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) recounts a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York. It became an international bestseller, winning many awards and appearing on the short list for the Man Booker Prize. Mr. Hamid now divides his time between London and Pakistan.

The author of Sightseeing was chosen for the National Book Foundation's inaugural "5 Under 35" program.