Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings' PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers. (from Wikipedia)

Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Isak Dinesen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris and Anaïs Nin. Writer Bertha Harris described her work as "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho. Barnes played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes' death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world. Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work. Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily. Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.

Monica Elizabeth Jolley was an award-winning writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was 53 years old when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections, and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well known writers such as Tim Winton among her students. Her novels explore alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment. Honours: 1987: Western Australian Citizen of the Year 1988: Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to literature 1989: Canada/Australia Literary Award 1997: Australian Living Treasure

Andrée Chedid was a French poet and novelist of Christian Lebanese descent. When she was ten, she was sent to a boarding school, where she learned English and French. At fourteen, she left for Europe. She then returned to Cairo to go to an American university. Her dream was to become a dancer. She got married to a physician when she was twenty-two, with whom she has two children: Louis Chedid, now a famous French singer, and Michèle. Her work questions human condition and what links the individual to the world. Her writing seeks to evoke the Orient, but she focuses more in denouncing the civil war that destroys Lebanon. She has lived in France since 1946. Because of this diverse background, her work is truly multicultural. Her first book was written in English: On the Trails of my Fancy. She has commented about her work that it is an eternal quest for humanity. Andrée Chedid is the grandmother of the French rock star -M- (Louis Chedid's son) for whom she has contributed song lyrics including that of Bonoboo on the album Je dis aime.

Born Jane Sydney Auer, Jane Bowles' total body of work consists of one novel, one play, and six short stories. Yet John Ashbery said of her: "It is to be hoped that she will be recognized for what she is: one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Tennessee Williams called her the most underrated writer of fiction in American literature. During her lifetime and since her death in 1973, she has been considered a writer's writer, little known to the general public but with a loyal following of intensely devoted readers. She was born in New York City on February 22, 1917, the daughter of Sidney Auer and Claire Stajer Auer. Her childhood was spent in Woodmere, Long Island. On her father's death in 1930, Jane and her mother moved back to Manhattan. As an adolescent she developed tuberculosis of the knee. Her mother took her to a sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland, where she was put in traction for many months. During this time she developed an intense love of literature and an equally intense series of obsessions and fears. Upon her return to New York she began to experiment with writing a novel and with sexual adventures with men and women, though primarily with women. In 1937 she met Paul Bowles, and in the following year they were married and set off for a honeymoon in Central America, which was to be, in part, the locale of her novel Two Serious Ladies. The Bowleses went on to Paris, where she started writing and at the same time visited lesbian bars. The marriage remained a sexual marriage for about a year and a half, but after that Jane and Paul lived separate sexual lives. After returning to New York in 1938, the Bowleses went on to Mexico, where Jane continued to work on her novel and also met Helvetia Perkins, who was to become her lover. Two Serious Ladies was published in 1943. The reviews were mostly uncomprehending. Soon, Paul, who had been involved in the editing of Two Serious Ladies, began to write short stories, which were immediately published with great distinction. Jane, having published a few short stories, began to work on a novel, but ran up against a serious writer's block. In 1947 Paul went to Morocco to work on The Sheltering Sky. Jane followed him there the following year. She continued to struggle to work, and published several short stories, including her masterpiece, "Camp Cataract," and began to work seriously on her play In the Summer House. In Tangier, where the Bowleses resided, Jane fell in love with a Moroccan peasant woman. In the Summer House was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Jane returned to Tangier and continued to try to write a novel, but her attention was primarily devoted to her love affair with Cherifa, the Moroccan woman, to affairs with other women and also to a social life in which she did a considerable amount of drinking. In 1957 she suffered a serious stroke, which affected her sight and her capacity to imagine. Nevertheless, notebook after notebook attests to her still continuing struggle to try to write. Her condition worsened, and after hospitalizations in England, New York and Málaga, Spain, she was confined in the Clinica de Los Angeles in Málaga, where she died in 1973. Yet it should be noted that despite this tragic story, her personality captivated many people. She was brilliant and witty, always doing and saying the unexpected thing. She was in every way as surprising as her work, one moment mystical, the next moment hilariously funny. Copyright © 2003, by Millicent Dillon