About Hara Kazuo

Born in 1945, Hara Kazuo was influenced as a young man by the protest movements that took place throughout Japan and the world in the late 1960s and 70s. He founded Shisso Productions in 1971 with his wife, producer, and primary collaborator Sachiko Kobayashi. He has published five documentary films thus far, including the award-winning The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, widely recognized as the most important and influential documentary ever made in Japan, Goodbye CP, A Dedicated Life, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, and Watashi no Mishima.

Please note: Hara Kazuo's family name is Hara, given name is Kazuo. Kaya uses the Japanese naming convention in putting his family name first. Following the European convention would reverse the name to Kazuo Hara.

About Brian Castro

Brian Castro was born in 1950 in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage and was sent to a boarding school in Australia in 1961. After earning his Master's degree in American Literature at the University of Sydney, he worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer, and for several years, was the literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine.

His first novel Birds Of Passage (1983) shared the Australian/Vogel literary award and has been translated into French and Chinese. This was followed by Pomeroy (1990; German translation Klett Cotta 1998); Double-Wolf (1991), which won a number of national prizes including the Age Fiction Prize and two Victorian Premier's Literary Awards; and subsequently After China (1992), which again won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and was published in France (Editions de l'Aube) in 2003. His fifth novel, Drift, was published in 1994 and his sixth, Stepper (1997), was awarded the 1997 National Book Council 'Banjo' Prize for Fiction, appearing in German in 1999.

In 2003 Giramondo published his 'fictional autobiography,' Shanghai Dancing, which won the Vance Palmer Prize at the 2003 Victorian Premier's Awards, the Christina Stead Prize at the 2004 NSW Premier’s Awards and was named the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year. His recent novel, The Garden Book, was published by Giramondo in 2005. It was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and it won the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction. The Bath Fugues will be published in June 2009.

He was a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and is currently the Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Brian Castro's website.

Lisa Chen's MOUTH

MOUTH, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice: fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room. In language filled with humor, insight, and hallucinatory wit, Chen uses fables, instructions, poems carved in the loneliness of Angel Island barracks, medical reports, classified ads and reality shows to reach out to “a visitor from the country of you/where I didn’t speak the language.” These are poems to delight in and roll around on your tongue. They are at once a record of and a song for the discarded, overlooked, and unheeded speech that takes place in between the words we manage to speak but that rarely say what we want.

“This book is wild, playful, gorgeous, weird, often hip. Reading it, I kept thinking, I wish I had come up with this phrase, this line, that entire poem, and that one, and that one, and that one...”
— Linh Dinh, author of Jam Alerts

Lisa Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Hanging Loose, ZZYZVA, Prairie Schooner, and Threepenny Review. She lives in New York and works as a media and communications consultant for progressive organizations and campaigns.