Kiran Desai was born in India and received an MFA from Columbia University. Desai first came to literary attention when she was published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Salman Rushdie’s Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing. Her first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, won the Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, which is set in a Himalayan village in the mid-1980s, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Venerable U Gawsita was born in Pegu Division of Burma in 1979 and was ordained as novice at the age of 12. From 2005 to 2007, he studied Buddhism his study at Meggin Monastery in Rangoon where he became one of the leading monks of Saffron Revolution.

Following the protests, almost all his fellow monks from Maggin Monastery were arrested. Since then, U Gawsita has found asylum in the United States and has testified before Congress and met with many political leaders speaking on behalf of those facing oppression in Burma.

Siri Hustvedt has published a book of poems, Reading to You (1982), three novels, The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), and What I Loved (2003), as well as two books of essays, Mysteries of the Rectangle (2005) on painting, and A Plea for Eros (2006) on various subjects. Her novels have been translated into 25 languages.

Joseph Lelyveld is a journalist and author. He was executive editor of the New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. While he was a reporter for the Times, he received the 1971 George Polk Award for Education Reporting and the 1983 award for Foreign Reporting. Among Lelyveld's books is Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1986.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which won several awards and was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2005.

He has published two other works of non-fiction and two novels. His articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Dissent, and other publications.

Orhan Pamuk’s works have been published worldwide in over 40 languages. He is the Nobel-Prize winning author of Snow, Istanbul, and My Name is Red, which won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour, and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award.

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro held the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar from 2000 to 2008. He is also a member of the Sub-Commission for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights. He is the author of many books, articles, and reports, and has taught at the Universidade de São Paulo, Columbia, Notre Dame, Brown, Oxford, and other universities.

Salman Rushdie has won the Booker Prize; the “Booker of Bookers,” the Whitbread Prize; the Writer’s Guild Award; the Aristeion Prize; and major literary awards in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. He was also a founder and first president of the International Parliament of Writers.