Archives: Authors

Jin Young Lim is a PhD student at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to that he was a Schwarzman Scholar class of ‘22 at Tsinghua University and Program Coordinator at the Berggruen Institute’s China Center. He is the co-founder of Spawo Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to nurturing holistic education, sustainability, health and wellness, and culture in the Himalayas. Jin Young completed his undergraduate dual-degree from Waseda University and Peking University, majoring in liberal arts and international politics. He has led multiple mindfulness-based expeditions to the Himalayas and has been engaging in various contemplative practices throughout his life. During his free time, he moonlights as a writer, Taijiquan instructor, yoga teacher, Pu’er tea enthusiast, and content creator.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) and his elder sister, Mary Anne Lamb, collaborated on three books for children, of which Tales from Shakespeare is the best known. It was the first book to clarify Shakespeare’s stories and played a major part in raising people’s awareness of the great playwright.

San Lin Tun is a poet, writer, lyricist, literary translator, literary guide, writing coach and editor. He was a former short story instructor and literary translator of Hidden Words/Hidden Worlds short story project and a former coordinator-translator of My Yangon My Home Art and Heritage Festival and a former translator of Gothe Institute Yangon web page.
His writings appeared in local and international publications such as Asia Literary Review, Borderless, Countercurrent, Global Poemic, Kitaab, Litehouse, Litterateur, Mad in Asia Pacific, Mekong Review, Myanmar Times, My Yangon Magazine, Myanmore, New Asian Writing Anthology (NAW), PIX, Ponder Savant, Pure Haiku, South East of Now, Strukturriss, Trouvaille and several others.
He was an editorial member of Beyond Words issue 5, a guest fiction editor of Ambrosial Literary Garland online magazine, a guest editor of Open Leaf Press Review and a reader at Prism International.
His academic qualifications are a certificate in AmPox.3, a certificate in Start Writing Fiction, B.E (Metallurgy) and M.A (BDh). He is the first prize winner of poetry of Wales National Day in 2015. His other keen interests are photography, playing guitar and drawing cartoons.
His debut novel “An English Writer” is at Goodnovel and he is now working on his second novel titled “A Classroom for Mr K.T”.
He lives in Yangon with his wife and two sons.
Blog – www.writersanlintun.blogspot.com

Emily Lim-Leh’s foray in chapter book writing started in 2024 with her historical fiction book Little Hero, which ranked #1 Amazon Singapore Children’s Books bestseller and #1 Straits Times Children’s Books bestseller. Little Hero and Little Hero’s Wish are inspired by her family’s lived experiences in 1940s and 1950s post-war Singapore.

The backstory of Emily’s writing journey began in 1998 when she lost her voice to a rare voice affliction, Spasmodic Dysphonia. In her search for her lost voice, Emily found a new God-given voice in writing. In 2007, she was a winner of Singapore Book Council’s First Time Writers Initiative with her debut book Prince Bear & Pauper Bear, a story about a teddy bear without a mouth who could not speak. Today, she is a multi-award-winning author of over 50 children’s books. Her awards include:
• 3-time winner of the IPPY Awards, the world’s largest book awards,
• 4-time winner of U.S.-based Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards,
• Mediacorp’s Singapore Woman Award Honoree, for inspiring readers through her books,
• Public Service Medal (Covid-19) from the Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore, for her voluntary book projects for the community.

Emily blogs about books and writing at her blog mummumstheword.wordpress.com

Jansen Lim is the author of two fiction novels: The Ties That Bite and In Rio You Love a Little More. His essays and feature articles have appeared in a range of publications from travel and lifestyle magazines to The Straits Times. He has also worked as a global project manager, lecturer, and videographer, and he lives in Singapore.

Kenneth Yu is an award-winning author from the Philippines whose short fiction has seen publication in his home country as well as overseas in the USA, Canada, Malaysia, and Taiwan. His work has been lauded and recognized by renowned speculative fiction editor Ellen Datlow, bestselling author Neil Gaiman, and popular fiction podcaster LeVar Burton. In the 2010s, he was a major contributor to the growth and current popularity of genre fiction produced by Filipino writers. He was a judge at the 41st Philippine National Book Awards, is a staunch reading advocate, and has ceaselessly pushed literacy to the Filipino youth. He was born, raised, and currently resides in Metro Manila.

Douglas James Limpe Candano holds a BA in Development Studies from the Ateneo de Manila University (Development Studies Departmental Award, Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts in Fiction), and a Masters of Urban Planning degree from McGill University. His fiction has won several national level awards, including the Philippines Free Press Literary Award and the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature, and have been published and anthologized in numerous publications and books in the Philippines. He has also written for film and theater, co-writing Orphea, which premiered during the 2020 Berlinale, and Love is a Dog From Hell – the closing film of the 2022 Berlin Critics Week, as well as the maximalist musical Super Macho Anti Kristo! (SMAK!): A Headless 100-Act Opera to Mend All Broken Bicycles of the Universe According to Jarry and Rizal, which had a run at Berlin’s iconic Volksbühne Theater in 2022. Aside from a side career as one of the country’s top competitive eaters, he works as a freelance research consultant for development programs, having worked for initiatives of bilateral and multilateral development institutions, National Government Agencies, Corporate Foundations, and Civil Society Organizations. He lives in Metro Manila.

An internationally recognised author, Malachi Edwin Vethamani is a fictionist, poet, editor, critic, bibliographer and academic. His publications include five collections of poems, The Seven O’clock Tree (2022), Love and Loss (2022), Rambutan Kisses (2022), Life Happens (2017) and Complicated Lives (2016)). Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories (2018) was his debut collection of stories. His stories have also been published in ‘Queer Southeast Asia Literary Journal’ (2020), Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian short Stories (2020), ‘Creative Flight Literary Journal’ (2020), ‘Business Mirror’ (2018), ‘Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts’ (2017) and the ‘Literary Page, New Straits Times’ (1995, 1996). A theatrical adaptation of three of his stories from Coitus Interruptus and Other Stories were reworked as monologues and performed as ‘Love Matters’ by Playpen Performing Arts Trust in Mumbai in 2017 and 2018. His short story ‘Best Man’s Kiss was reworked into a short play for an event called ‘Inqueerable’ organized by Queer Ink in Mumbai in 2019. He has edited five anthologies of Malaysian Literature in English: The Year of the Rat and Other Poems (2022), Malaysian Millennial Voices (2021), Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (2018), Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories (2020). The Malaysian Publishers Association awarded Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems the Malaysian Book Award 2020 for the English Language category and Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories was shortlisted for the Malaysian Book Award 2023 for the English Language category. He is Emeritus Professor with the University of Nottingham and Founding Editor of Men Matters Online Journal.

Yeoh Jo-Ann grew up in Malaysia and lives in Singapore. As a teenager, she dreamt of being a cat or a rock star, but instead spent most of her adult life working in publishing, somehow ending up as the features editor of a women’s magazine before giving it up for a career in digital marketing. Her first novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in Singapore in 2018 and has been translated into German (Kroner, 2022). Her short stories have been included in Singaporean anthologies such as Best Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three, and in 2020, her short story Dog Tiger Horse won the Boston Review’s annual Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. She is currently working on her third novel and hopes to finish it before she turns into some sort of cabbage.

Tan Jit Seng is an award-winning creative director of an advertising agency. He started out as the co-creator of Malaysia’s first English comic book, Heroines of Darkness, and a children’s book writer before publishing a compilation of short stories, Get Spooked: Terrifying Tales Untold. In 2022, he published Abandoned Gods and a year following that, he completed his latest novel, Horror, He Wrote.