Founder and choreographer of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan whose brilliantly original dance works and stunning performances now rival the best in the world

A Filipino publisher whose dedication to journalism nurtured business reporting in the Philippines from infancy to robust maturity

A lover of the theater, a prolific stage actor, and a cultural ambassador who uses the stage and his ability to work in both the Chinese and Western mediums for inter-cultural exchange

An Indian author who creatively and cleverly fused indigenous oral histories with contemporary events to explore the bitter and often bloody relationship between tribal communities and India's domineering classes and systems

A writer and journalist whose prose and poetry illustrated plight of Filipinos in a post-colonial society, allowing them to have a better understanding of their national identity

A writer and dissident from Indonesia whose stories, while Indonesian in nature, spoke with eloquence to the universal human condition

A Malaysian editor who used his influence to support the "Fifties Generation" of Malay writers

An esteemed writer who challenged Philippine society’s colonial point of view and restored the poems and stories of vernacular writers to an esteemed place in the Philippine literary canon

A master of the raga who has revealed its beauty to those outside of India by creating new music for dance, radio and films, composing hundreds of songs in both the folk and classical traditions and bringing sitar music to the West