This evening – and opening event of ALF 2007 – hones in on international writers and poets based in and around Amsterdam.

Guests include US authors Pete Jordan, Julie Phillips and Lynn Kaplanian-Buller, plus novelist Amal Chatterjee (India/UK) and poet Sudeep Sen (India) who will be introducing their literary 'bookazine' Atlas.

International poets from wordsinhere: Kate  Foley (UK), Anna Arov (Russia), Prue Duggan (Aus), Robert Glick (US), Robin Winckel-Mellish (SA) will be there to read from the fifth edition of their just-published Versal literary magazine. And New York artist/inventor Eric Staller (US) who has just published a book of his work, Out of my Mind, will also be doing a presentation – watch out on the night for some of his unique artworks and inventions.

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Lynn Kaplanian-Buller
Lynn Kaplanian-Buller is probably best known as the co-owner of independent bookstore, the American Book Center (in Amsterdam and The Hague). Not so well known perhaps is that she is co-author, together with An Keuning-Tichelaar, of Passing On The Comfort: The War, The Quilts And The Women Who Made A Difference. Tonight she will discuss this inspirational book at ALF.

Passing On The Comfort
Passing On The Comfort tells the powerful and heartwarming story of a Dutch resistance operation during WWII carried out by An Keuning-Tichelaar and her Mennonite minister husband, Herman. With the support of those in the village, the two young newlyweds sheltered hundreds and saved the lives of many Jewish men, women and children in danger from the Nazis. As part of a relief effort, quilts were created by women in North American Mennonite circles and sent to the Netherlands. When, decades later, co-author Kaplanian-Buller, a U.S. citizen living in Amsterdam, found the old quilts, she persuaded An to share her story...

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Julie Phillips
Julie Phillips was born in Seattle, but spent parts of her childhood in California and New Hampshire. She got started writing for Seattle Weekly, then moved to New York, where she wrote about books, film, feminism, and women's sports (including fast-pitch softball and the National Cheerleading Championships) and briefly covered the Yankees for the Village Voice. She has written for Newsday about books, Interview about movies, and Mademoiselle about boyfriends and how to clean your room. Her original articles about feminist science fiction and James Tiptree Jr. appeared in Ms. and the Voice Literary Supplement. She lives in Amsterdam with her husband, an award-winning Dutch and Frisian translator, and their two children.

She is author of the highly-acclaimed biography James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon (St Martin's Press). Sheldon (1915–1987), adopted the persona of science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr.

The book – which she will be introducing tonight – was one of Salon's five best nonfiction books of 2006, made into into Entertainment Weekly's Top 20 and The Village Voice's Top 25. It was cited as one of the best books of 2006 by The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly’s, the Kansas City Star, the Seattle Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement.

James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon
Alice Sheldon was born in Chicago in 1915. As a child, she crossed Africa with her explorer parents. As an adult, she became a painter, a military intelligence officer, a CIA agent, an experimental psychologist. At age 51, Alice Bradley Sheldon made yet another change of career.

James Tiptree Jr. began writing science fiction in 1967. His stories were fast-paced and hard-boiled, his letters funny, frank, and sensitive. No one had ever seen him. No one knew his true identity. There were rumors he was a government spy. It wasn't until 1976 that the cover was blown on his alter ego: Alli Sheldon, a complex woman with an unusual past.

Alli Sheldon's use of a male voice not only demolishes assumptions about writing and gender, it also speaks to the mystery of the writing persona. Why could she only tell the truth about herself when she became someone else?

Further information:

www.julie-phillips.com/

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Pete Jordan
Underground cult hero Pete Jordan (aka 'Dishwasher Pete') spent 12 years on a rather unusual cross-country quest across America. Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (HarperPerennial) is Jordan's amusing memoir of his itinerant dishwashing extravaganza. The Amsterdam-based US author will be sharing his soap-sudded experiences – from washing dishes in a bagel joint in New Mexico to a Mexican joint in Brooklyn, and from an upper-crust ladies club to a crusty hippy commune. Jordan will appear at ALF on the eve of departing for an extensive book tour in the US.

San Francisco Bay Guardian
'Dishwasher is an instant American classic. It should be required reading for every high school student in the nation, paired with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'

Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All
'This is a story of youth (desperate to avoid experience), of work, and of the mad vastness of America, as compelling to my mind as Jack Kerouac's On The Road.'

Publishers Weekly
'The writing is lucid and earnest, and Jordan's passion for dishwashing and, even more so, for blowing-in-the-wind traveling, is infectious. As his quest extends from one year to the next, and he questions the worthiness of his goal to 'bust suds' in all 50 states, he demonstrates an ability to convey his deepest fears without losing the upbeat, fun tone that pervades the entire memoir.'

Further information:

www.dishwasherpete.com/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete

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Versal V
Versal, published annually by wordsinhere, is the only literary magazine of its kind in the Netherlands and publishes new poetry, prose, essays, and art. Versal looks around the globe for both known and new voices, thus bringing international poetry and prose into the living rooms of the Netherlands and simultaneously exporting poetry and prose made here to other countries. In searching for writers with an instinct for language and line break, Versal aims to publish the wide range of literatures being written today.

Note that the official launch of Versal V is on 10 May at the Sugar Factory in Amsterdam 20.00-23.00 (doors open 19.00). Entrance is €5.

Matt Bell, NewPages.com
'Rather than espousing any particular aesthetic ideal or political philosophy, Versal takes the high road by including a collage of styles that represents the diversity of both its writers and the literary scenes from which they hail.'

www.wordsinhere.com/

www.sugarfactory.nl/

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Amal Chatterjee
Amal Chatterjee is the author of the novel Across the Lakes (Phoenix House (UK) & Penguin India, 1998), which was short-listed for the Best Fiction in English Award of Crossword (India) in 1998. The same year, Amal received a Scottish Arts Council Writers' Bursary and in 2001 he was short-listed for a Creative Scotland Award. Amal is also a historian, the author of Representations of India, 1740-1840 (Macmillan & St Martin's Press, 1998) and has lectured on both fiction and history in a number of countries and venues, including at the inaugural Wigtown Scottish Book Town launch, the Anthropological Society of India, the WA Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, plus Leiden, Amsterdam and Edinburgh Universities. Currently a tutor on Oxford University's MSc in Creative Writing Programme, he lives in Amsterdam where he is working on his second novel, an excerpt from which was published in Atlas in 2006. 

Note that Chatterjee will also be leading a workshop on Creative Writing and he and Sudeep Sen (see below) will also be presenting the second edition of Atlas which features an interview with Salman Rushdie and writing from Canada. Both events will take place at the Posthoornkerk on Saturday 19 May.

Further information:

http://amal.tomali.net

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Sudeep Sen
Sudeep Sen is the 2004 recipient of the prestigious 'Pleiades' honour at the world's oldest poetry festival – the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia – for having made 'significant contribution to modern world poetry'. Sen studied at St Columba's School and read literature at Delhi University and in the USA. As an Inlaks Scholar, he completed an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Winner of many international and national prizes, he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA) for poems included in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins). More recently, he has published Postcards from Bangladesh, Prayer Flag, Distracted Geographies, and Rain.

As an invited author representing his country, he has read his work worldwide, and has been translated into several languages including Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. His poetry appears in important international anthologies published by Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Norton, Knopf, Everyman, Macmillan, and Granta; and his other writings have appeared in the TLS, Guardian, Independent, Evening Standard, Financial Times, Scotsman, Herald, London Magazine, Literary Review, among others. Sen was an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the editor of Atlas, editorial director of AarK ARTS, and divides his time between New Delhi and London.

Note that he and Amal Chatterjee will also be presenting second edition of Atlas at the Posthoornkerk on Saturday 19 May which features an interview with Salaman Rushdie plus writing from Canada.

Amit Chaudhuri
'I read Rain with considerable admiration and pleasure. It is a word-perfect collection and its subject matter is both the measure of the rain and the spoken line.'

John Berger, Booker Prize Winner and author of Ways of Seeing
'Sudeep Sen's poems are a present which bring – like all true poetry – so much companionship.'

Evening Standard
'A rich, fluent, cosmopolitan voice.'

John Thieme in Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
'Sen is an eclectic poet whose understated work eschews fashionable trends, while exhibiting considerable technical virtuosity and versatility.'

Gregor Robertson on BBC Radio
'Sen is amongst the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene. A distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well measured and crafted.'

Further information:

www.sudeepsen.net/

Atlas
Atlas – a new international book[maga]zine of 'new writing, art and image' – is  edited by Sudeep Sen. It is published by Aark Arts (UK) and Crossword (India), and advised by a panel of internationally acclaimed prize-winning writers & editors: Peter Bradshaw, Kwame Dawes, John F Deane, Donald Hall, Girish Karnad, Christopher Merrill, Les Murray, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ruth Padel, Peter Porter, Fiona Sampson, Shashi Tharoor, Daniel Weissbort and John Hartley Williams. Apart from carrying cutting-edge original and translated creative writing – poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction; plus occasional in-depth interviews and features; it also features selected portfolios of artists, photographers and filmmakers.

Further information:

www.atlasaarkarts.zoomshare.com/

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Eric Staller
Eric Staller is a American artist and designer living in Amsterdam. He became disillusioned with the art world in the 1980s, feeling that he was preaching to the converted. He wanted to take art out into the streets. His first project was the Lightmobile, a Volkswagen Beetle covered with over 1600 computerised lights. He has since focused on pedal power, being interested in devices that stimulate community, which cars don't. 'People are driving to and from work alone,' he says. 'They go to a fitness facility after work and ride a stationary bike to nowhere while talking to no one. Yet we can have social lives, fit bodies, shared experiences, while going places, and without poisoning the air.'

Out Of My Mind
'9/11 shook loose in me a need to write this memoir. I wanted to give the reader an intimate look at my creative process;to show how my life and loves, my places and times, have been inseparable from my 35 years of art making. Take my book to bed!'

Further information:

www.ericstaller.com/

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