Author interviews

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Author Interview: Scott Crawford

John Ross chats with Scott F. Crawford, an American writer based in East Asia. They talk about Scott’s Silk Road Centurion, published by Camphor Press in 2023, a historical adventure set in the Chinese borderlands two millennia ago. * * * Scott, we first met, online at least, five years [...]

Author Interview: Jonathan Lerner

SPOILER ALERT: Plot details of the novel Lily Narcissus are discussed in this interview. Jonathan Lerner lived in Taipei for two years in the late 1950s when his father, a foreign service officer, was stationed there. Later he was involved with the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, and then [...]

Author Interview: Heather Diamond

Heather Diamond is an American writer living in Hong Kong. She is the author of American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition (2011) and Rabbit in the Moon: A Memoir (May, 2021). Rabbit in the Moon describes the author’s multiple mid-life reinventions; moving to Hawaii to complete a Ph.D. program, [...]

Author Interview: John Groot

............ John Groot is the author of Taiwanese Feet: My Walk Around Taiwan. Originally from Canada, since 2001 he has lived in Taiwan. To supplement his travel writing, he teaches English and international communication skills to computer industry workers. From his adopted hometown of Tamsui, New Taipei City, where he lives [...]

Author Interview: Ray Hecht

Ray Hecht was born in Israel, raised in the American Midwest, and lived in China for many years. He now calls Taiwan home. He’s written seven books, including South China Morning Blues (published by Blacksmith Books and reviewed on Bookish Asia back in 2015). His latest work is Always Goodbye, an [...]

Author Interview: Tom Carter

Talented American writer and photographer Tom Carter is one of the great characters of the expat tribe in China. I've always admired the way he throws himself into projects with the kind of tireless passion that makes the Energiser Bunny look lazy. When Carter did a photographic book on the [...]

Author Interview: Alvin Lu

Alvin Lu, a second-generation Taiwanese American who was born and currently lives in San Francisco, is the author of The Hell Screens, a stylish thriller set in Taipei. The protagonist is Chinese-American Cheng-Ming, who is obsessed with a serial rapist-murderer known as the Taxi Driver Killer (aka K), who is terrorizing the [...]

Author Interview: Katy Hui-wen Hung

Katy Hui-wen Hung is co-author of A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai. Co-written with veteran Taiwan writer Steven Crook and published by Rowman & Littlefield, the book is a landmark work, one of the most significant English-language titles on Taiwan published in the last decade. I always have [...]

Author Interview: Tonio Andrade

Tonio Andrade, one of the best historians currently teaching and writing about East Asia,  is a history professor at Emory University (Atlanta) and the author of three outstanding works: How Taiwan Became Chinese (2008), Lost Colony (2011), and The Gunpowder Age (2016). Lost Colony examines the epic clash between Koxinga's Chinese forces [...]

Author Interview: Eric Mader

Arthur Meursault, author of Party Members, talks with Eric Mader, an American expat writer working in Taiwan. Mader's published works include A Taipei Mutt (2002) and more recently Idiocy, Ltd., which has been translated into Chinese. This Author Interview is by far the longest we've had on Bookish Asia so I've switched from having [...]