Per Petterson (Norway) shared the 2006 Independent London Foreign Fiction Prize with is translator, Anne Born, for his Out Stealing Horses.

Marilynne Robinson (United States) is the author of Gilead, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, for Housekeeping.

Radhika Jones is managing editor of The Paris Review.

These writers discuss how, and especially, why they invent - and re-invent - cities, towns, countries, and homes, and consider the responsibility of fiction to go beyond the merely real.

Deborah Treisman, New Yorker fiction editor and moderator of the panel.

Arthur Japin (Netherlands) studied theater in Amsterdam and London and spent many years acting on stage, screen, and television. His first novel, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, appeared in thirteen languages and is now being made into an opera and a film.

Daniel Alarcon has been published in The New Yorker, Salon, and Harpers. He was born in Lima and raised in the United States. His short story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Tatyana Tolstoy's work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the New Republic, and other periodicals.

These writers describe lives that are hard and often brief. People survive on the streets and by their wits - generally with a gun in hand or in their face. Though short on romance, there is love, redemption, and an honest attempt to reflect real places and conditions in these books. Their authors discuss the political, social, and economic forces that have shifted the focus in Latin writing from fantastical to the gritty and urban.

Patricia Mello's (Brazil) novels include The Killer, Inferno, and Black Waltz.

Jorge Franco's (Colombia) first novel won the Ciudad de Pereira National Novel Competition. His novel, Rosario Tijeras, was awarded the Hammett International Prize and has been translated into fourteen languages and successfully adapted into a film.

Daniel Alarcon's (Peru/United States) first novel, Lost City Radio, was published this year. The Britiah journal Granta recently name him one of the Best Young American Novelists.

Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico) is a novelist and screenwriter. His most recent colaboration with Alejandro Gonzalez on the film Babel earned him an Academy Award nomination. His novels include The Night Buffalo, A Sweet Scent of Death, and The Guillotine Squad.