The Auckland Writers and Readers Festival has attracted some big literary names:
Antony Beevor
Former soldier Antony Beevor's books include The Spanish Civil War, Inside the British Army, Crete: the Battle and the Resistance and Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper).
The best-seller Stalingrad won the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1999, and is in nineteen foreign editions. Berlin The Downfall 1945 was published last year.
Sarah Dunant
Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant is the author of eight novels, creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe, featured in Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993) (winner of the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award) and Under My Skin (1995). She is a patron of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a reviewer and regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's Night Waves.
Novels include Transgressions (1997) and Mapping the Edge (1999), which are being adapted as films. Her new novel, The Birth of Venus, is a tale of art, passion, politics and danger, set in Renaissance Florence.
Linda Grant
Linda Grant's first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham First Novel Award. Remind Me Who I am Again, an account of her mother's decline into dementia, was MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in the last years of the British Mandate, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel is Still Here.
William Dalrymple
When William Dalrymple read an article about the opening of the Karakoram Highway between Pakistan and China, it prompted him to realise his childhood dream of following in Marco Polo's footsteps along the Silk Road. The result was the novel In Xanadu. His latest book, White Mughals, is about a passionate love affair that crossed cultural, religious and political boundaries in 18th-century India.
Rick Moody
Rick Moody's brooding novel The Ice Storm was adapted for film and his short-story collection Demonology was a critical hit. His 1997 novel Purple America is a look at families, contemporary America and the nature of writing. His new book, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, is an account of the acute depression that threatened his life during his 20s.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen has published three novels, including the bestseller The Corrections. He has also written for the New Yorker and Harper's, where his essay "Perchance to Dream" appeared in 1996. It is an impassioned manifesto calling for a kind of New Novel - socially engaged, full of compelling characters and fun to read.
Jeffery Deaver
The best-selling author of 18 novels, Deaver has been nominated for five Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony award, and is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year.
The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme. A Maiden's Grave was made into an HBO film retitled Dead Silence, staring James Garner and Marlee Matlin.
His new book is The Vanished Man.
Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, May 15-18, 2003