Ak Welsapar was born in 1956 in the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. After six years of membership, he was excluded from the Soviet Writers’ Association following his publication of investigative articles about major ecological problems in Turkmenistan. He left his home country in 1993 and now lives in Sweden, where he is a member of the Swedish Writers’ Association. He has also been an honorary member of the International PEN-Club since 1993. He has published 19 books and received many national and international awards. He writes in Russian, Turkmen and Swedish. His works have been published in a number of languages including Turkmen, Russian, Ukrainian, English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Turkish, Mongolian and a few languages from the former USSR.

He was invited to represent Turkmenistan in the Poetry Parnassus event held at the South Bank in London this summer as part of the Cultural Olympiad and the poem we reproduce is the one he read on that occasion. It was translated into English by Hamid Ismnailov.

Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Communist Bulgaria and emigrated to New Zealand with her family as a teenager in the early 1990s. She graduated from Sofia’s French College and two New Zealand universities, and in 2005 she moved to Scotland. Kapka is the author of the childhood memoir Street Without a Name (Portobello 2008) and the poetry collections Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost (Bloodaxe). She was twice the recipient of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year award in New Zealand for travel journalism, and has penned the odd travel guide. Her novel Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2011) is set in South America, and her new travel memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello, 2011) is about the Argentine tango as a way of life. She lives between Edinburgh and the Highlands, teaches at Strathclyde University, and writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Scottish Review of Books, and Vogue.

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in West Africa. Her first book The Devil that Danced on the Water was runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003. Her novel Ancestor Stones was winner of the 2008 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award and selected by the Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006. In 2007 Vanity Fair named Aminatta as one of Africa's most promising new writers. Her latest book is The Memory of Love. Aminatta has also written for magazines and newspapers, radio and television, and presented television documentaries on Africa's history and art. Aminatta Forna lives in London with her husband. www.aminattaforna.com

Tony Cohan is the Chair of San Miguel PEN's Freedom to Write Committee. We are delighted to welcome him to our featured writer spot for this issue of New Writing, as a contribution to International PEN's Americas campaign. A parallel article by Lucy Popescu on the dangers to journalists in Mexico is featured on the Writers in Prison home page.

We are delighted to open our featured writer page with poems by Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan refugee living in India, who already has links with Scottish PEN, having met Tessa Ransford at the Scottish PEN office on a visit to Edinburgh in 2006.

Tenzin Tsundue's writings have been published by International PEN, Indian PEN, and in Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, The Little Magazine, Outlook, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Better Photography, The Economic Times, Tehelka, The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Today (Singapore), Tibetan Review and Gandhi Marg.

As a poet he represented Tibet in the Second South Asian Literary Conference in New Delhi in January 2005 organized by Sahitya Akademi, Poetry Africa 2005 in Durban and KATHA Asia International Utsav 2006, New Delhi. Both as an activist and a writer, Tsundue fights tooth and nail for the freedom of his country. His writings are published online at www.friendsoftibet.org/tenzin.