Archives: Authors

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.

After graduating from the London School of Economics with a law degree and later called to the Bar in both the United Kingdom and Malaysia, Ong Chin Huat studied History of Art at the British Institute of Florence in Italy. Deciding to pursue a career in journalism, he became the first Chinese person to work at the Hong Kong Tatler as the Social Editor. After a stint as a columnist at the South China Morning Post, he started his own PR Consultancy specialising in fashion and luxury goods. He has been a judge for the Miss Asia Pageant in Hong Kong, Miss Charm de Chine in Shanghai and Mrs.International Global Grand Final in Kuala Lumpur. Currently, he is a freelance writer, fashion stylist and TV Host and has contributed to The Star, Life Inspired, Luxurious Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Design Anthology, Elle and Conde Nast Traveller among others. He hosted a TV Show called ‘Hong Kong High Life’ on ATV Hong Kong as well as a talk show named ‘Driven’ on TheStarTV.com. Voted as one of Hong Kong’s Best Dressed Personalities by the Hong Kong Fashion Designer’s Association, he has met and interviewed everyone from movie stars and business tycoons to politicians and world-class athletes.

You can follow him on Instagram at @chinhuat_ong

Allison Heiliczer is an American psychotherapist who has been living in Asia for over a decade. She is the founder of Rethink the Couch and works with adult individuals and couples in Singapore and around the world. Heiliczer was the former Head of Corporate Psychology at OT&P’s clinics in Hong Kong.
While the hundreds of individuals and couples she has supported in clinical and private practice settings face various challenges, the common thread is they are navigating relationship and work issues.
She graduated summa cum laude from New York University (NYU) with a Bachelor of Science, a master’s also from NYU, and a second Master’s in Counselling from Monash University (Australia). Heiliczer is the first therapist in Asia to be certified in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), a transformative form of couple’s therapy, pioneered by New York Times bestselling author
Terry Real. In addition, she is an ICF-certified coach and has offered extensive coach trainings with executives and at leading multinational corporations.

Dr. Sumit Agarwal

Dr. Agarwal is the Low Tuck Kwong Professor at the School of Business and Professor in the departments of Economics, Finance and Real Estate at the National University of Singapore. Previously, he held positions as a Professor of Finance at Georgetown University, senior financial economist in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a senior vice president and credit risk management executive in the Small Business Risk Solutions Group of Bank of America.

Dr. Agarwal’s research interests include issues relating to financial institutions, household finance, behavioral finance, international finance, real estate markets, urban economics and capital markets. He has published over eighty research articles in journals like the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking among others. Additionally, he has co-written a book titled Kiasunomics and co-edited a collected volume on Household Credit Usage: Personal Debt and Mortgages.

He is the co-editor of Real Estate Economics and an association editor at Management Science and Journal of Financial Services Research. He writes regular op-ed’s in the Straits Times and Forbes and is featured on various media outlets like the BBC, CNBC, and Fox on issues relating to finance, banking, and real estate markets. Sumit’s research is widely cited in leading newspapers and magazines like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and the U.S Presidents Report to Congress. He also runs a blog on household financial decision making called Smart Finance.
Dr. Agarwal has won various prestigious awards like the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Outstanding Researcher Award at the National University of Singapore, the Paul Samuelson TIAA-CREF certificate of excellence, the Terker Family Prizes in Investment Research Award from the Wharton School of Business, the Glucksman Institute Research Award from New York University and grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the NBER/Sloan Foundation.

Dr. Agarwal has been invited to present his research at many renowned universities such Columbia University, Northwestern University, University of California Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maryland, as well as institutions and central banks namely the IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank, European Union, Dutch Central Bank, Riksbank, OCC, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He has consulted with the World Bank, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, OCC, the Reserve Bank of India and Bank of America.

He has also served as an adjunct professor and a scholar at the finance department at George Washington University, DePaul University, the Indian School of Business, HKUST, BIS and the World Bank. Agarwal received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Dr. Long Wang

Dr. Wang is an assistant professor in the School of Economics at the Fudan University. His research interests lie in urban economics?, environmental economics, and Chinese economy. Dr. Wang received a Ph.D. in Real Estate from the National University of Singapore in 2018. He received a M.A in Economics in 2013, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics in 2010 from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. He has published in leading academic journals such as The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Real Estate Economics, and Journal of Real Estate Research. He is the Associate Editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Dr. Yang Yang

Dr. Yang is an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on urban economics, real estate, and sustainability. She holds a Ph.D. in Real Estate from the National University of Singapore (2018), an M.Sc. in Urban Land Economics (2014), and a B.Comm. with Honours in Finance and Real Estate (2012) from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, such as The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Real Estate Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Energy Economics.

Dr. Yang is the principal investigator of several Hong Kong GRC projects and the National Natural Science Foundation of China’s Young Scientists Fund. She is the Associate Editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics, an Academic Editor for PLOS One, and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Real Estate Literature.

Apinuch Petcharapiracht (also known under the pen name ‘Moonscape’) is a Chinese-Thai writer who leads a peaceful life with her cat and dog in Phetchaburi, Thailand. Her dream is to see the marriage equality bill turn into an actual law, and allow her to legally marry her girlfriend at last. She wrote Juveniles and Other Stories based on her grim memories from her childhood that have been buried, unforgotten, for one and a half decades.

Her most recent work, Death and the Maiden, was published with Penguin Random House SEA.