Booker Prize-winning novelists Arundhati Roy and Anne Enright, wine author Jancis Robinson, travel writer Colin Thubron and Editor of The Times of London James Harding will headline the 2008 Shanghai International Literary Festival, set to take place between 1-16 March.

Now in its sixth year, the Shanghai LitFest was the brainchild of Michelle Garnaut, founder of the M at the Fringe restaurant in Hong Kong, M on the Bund and Glamour Bar in Shanghai, and, opening this summer, Capital M restaurant in Beijing; and Tina Kanagaratnam, CEO of Shanghai-based Asia Media.

The not-for-profit annual festival began in 2003, at M on the Bund, with just a single author – Australian Frank Moorhouse, who held two sessions discussing The Martini in Literature. By 2007, it had grown to encompass 38 authors over three weeks, with headliners – including Gore Vidal, Amy Tan, Kiran Desai and Jan Morris – addressing packed houses at the Glamour Bar.

This year, more than 50 authors will hold talks, seminars and round-tables over a three-week period in March, with topics including the shift of global power from west to east, Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto, the evolution of marketing in the U.S. presidential election system, internet fiction in China, Australian aboriginal culture, media reporting from Baghdad, the life of Madam Chiang Kaishek and urban culture and sexuality in China and Japan. The 2007 Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright will talk about her life in writing and her prize-winning novel, The Gathering.

The 2008 Shanghai Litfest will also feature China book launches for Jiang Rong’s 2007 Asian Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Totem; Lynn Pan’s Shanghai Style: Art of Design Between the Wars; and Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere.