It’s not where you start, it’s how you move forward with purpose.
A programme director at work, a coach by passion, and a writer at heart, Allison abides by the mantra ‘Dream, Do, Deliver’ and hopes to inspire this conviction in her readers and the people she meets to
impact their lives and help them to achieve their goals.
Allison started her career as a news and business editor. After several years, she decided to pursue an MBA with INSEAD Business School to broaden her capabilities and opportunities. Polished in programme management, relationship management, and communications, Allison has launched and scaled various programmes for top multi-national companies. Her goal-oriented focus and execution skills ensured major programmes achieved planned objectives and outcomes within tight timelines, winning her individual and team awards.
Allison is trained with the world’s top coaching organisation Co-Active Training Institute. Passionate about developing people, she is a life coach and helps her clients progress in the areas of relationships, career, and wellness. An avid motivational speaker, Allison has won several speech competitions and was the President of Singapore’s biggest professional public speaking club – Toastmasters Club of Singapore – with over 160 members during her tenure.
Allison Ching currently works and lives in Singapore. In her free time, she writes to evoke joy, poignance, laughter, inspiration, and maybe a little controversy. She is happiest when she is lost in her imagination, wandering among trees, eating spicy local delights, and when she finally masters the piano one day.
Rajeev Peshawaria is the CEO of Stewardship Asia Centre in Singapore and Founder President of the Leadership Energy Consulting Company in Seattle, WA. He served as Chief Learning Officer of Coca-Cola and Morgan Stanley and has held senior positions at American Express, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs, where he helped found the leadership academy Pine Street.
Rajeev’s clients include Allianz, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Great Eastern, HSBC, Indian Railways, Johnson & Johnson, MetLife, Mitsubishi, Maybank, Mohammad bin Rashid School of Government Dubai, Nike, Nestle, Permata Bank Indonesia, PwC, Prudential, Sinarmas Indonesia, US Treasury, US Securities & Exchange Commission, Zurich Insurance and many more. He also serves as guest faculty at leading business schools in the US, Europe and Asia.
In 2014 and 2017 he was named one of Top 100 Global Thought Leaders for Trustworthy Business by ‘Trust Across America.’
He is the author of Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller Open Source Leadership (McGraw Hill 2017), Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (Simon & Schuster 2011), and co-author of Be the Change (McGraw Hill 2014).
He currently splits his time between Singapore and USA.
Claire Betita de Guzman is a Filipina writer based in Singapore and author of five novels: Sudden Superstar, Miss Makeover, Budget is the New Black, Girl Meets World, and No Boyfriend Since Birth, which was adapted into a TV series. A former journalist, she started as a reporter for the broadsheet Today before becoming a lifestyle editor for international and local magazines including Cosmopolitan Philippines and Harper’s Bazaar
Singapore. She works closely with the Migrant Writers of Singapore and has led talks and panels at literary events, including the Singapore Writers Festival and Poetry Festival Singapore. She studied Journalism and graduated cum laude (with honours) at the University of the Philippines. She has taken writing courses at the University of Oxford in England and was a fellow in literary workshops in Europe and Asia, including Miradoux, France, Bali, Indonesia, and Tbilisi, Georgia. She is co-author of a poetry collection, Dreaming of the Divine Downstairs and is co-editor of Get Luckier, an anthology of Philippine-Singapore writings. Find her online at www.clairebetita.com.
Mette Johansson (MBA, CSP, PCC) is a highly awarded author, speaker and consultant. She worked in leadership roles for multinational corporations for fifteen years before founding MetaMind, a training consultancy providing consulting and learning programmes in the people side of leadership skills.
Mette has spoken internationally on Authentic, Inspirational and Inclusive Leadership at a wide variety of global conferences, corporations and business schools. Her clients include Citibank, Airbnb, Microsoft, UPS, Pfizer, Capitaland, and many more. Awards for her activities include the AmCham HERo award, the Asia Women Icon Award, HRM Asia Silver and Bronze, the Golden Door – REX Karmaveer Medal, and APAC insider’s Best Leadership Development Company 2020 and 2022.
Mette is also the founder and relentless driver of the non-profit KeyNote – Women Speakers’ directory, with a mission to bring diversity to speaking stages around the world. She is regularly featured in media in Singapore, from Harper’s Bazaar to Straits Times.
Having lived in ten countries outside her birthplace, Denmark, Mette is a global citizen who speaks fluently in four languages and currently calls Singapore home.
Mica De Leon is a Filipino writer of swoony romance comedy novels and SFF novels. She has won the Don Carlos Palanca Awards For Literature in 2019 and 2022 for her essays on romance, feminism, history, fantasy, and the Filipino identity in the aftermath of Martial Law and the 2022 presidential elections in the Philippines. She likes walking on the beach, dogs, cats, swoony and spicy romance novels, lengthy epic SFF novels, and Taylor Swift.
Connect with her on Instagram and Tiktok: @micadeleonwrites
Charles Waugh is the co-editor and co-translator of two collections of short fiction by Vietnamese writers: Wild Mustard: New Voices from Vietnam (Curbstone 2017) and Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange from Vietnamese Writers (Georgia 2010). He is the fiction associate editor at ISLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment journal, and professor of English at Utah State University, USA.
Ta Duy Anh (1959- ) is unarguably a famous contemporary realist author in Vietnam. He graduated with the highest distinction from the Nguyen Du School of Creative Writing. Ta is a Vietnam Writers’ Association member and served as editor for the Vietnam Writers’ Association Publishing House until he retired in 2020. Ta, a prolific writer, has published across numerous literary genres and won numerous awards for his works in Vietnam. His novel Lão kh? (The Miserable Mr. Kh?) has been translated into French and published in France under the title Sur le dos du baffle (La Frémillerie, 2017), while some of his short stories have been translated into English, French, and German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai. Despite his well-established career as a writer and an editor, some of his works were and have been censored due to political reasons in communist Vietnam. His novel Ði tìm nhân v?t (Looking for a Character) was banned in 2002 as the government condemned it for ‘portraying a dark, negative picture of society.’ Only fifteen years later was the book reassessed and approved for dissemination. Many of his short stories have also been censored. His novel Sinh ra d? ch?t (Born to Die) is permanently banned in Vietnam but was released in the US in 2018. His newest novel, Ð?t m? côi (The Orphaned Land, 2020), is being translated into English and will be published in Europe.
Quan Manh Ha is a professor of American Literature & Ethnic Studies at the University of Montana. His research interests include multiethnic US literature, Vietnam War literature, critical race theory, and literary translation. He is the translator of Other Moons: Vietnamese Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath (Columbia University Press, 2020), Luminous Nights: Pioneering Vietnamese Short Stories (La Frémillerie, France, 2021), and Hanoi at Midnight: Stories by Bao Ninh (Texas Tech University Press, 2022). He believes that literary translation is a political and ethical act. Thus besides publishing several scholarly articles and essays in journals, he is committed to translating Vietnamese literature to promote cross-cultural understanding and global discourse on colonialism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War from all sides of the conflict. His short-story translations have appeared in various journals, including Metamorphoses, Southern Humanities Review, Asian Literature and Translation, CIRQUE: A Literary Journal for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and DELOS.
James Chai is a writer, researcher, and political analyst. His work has been cited internationally by outlets such as CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, NBC, Reuters, The Diplomat, Nikkei Asia, South China Morning Post, Business Times, The Straits Times, Phoenix Weekly, The Paper, Taiwan News and others. As columnist for MalaysiaKini and Sin Chew Daily, Malaysia’s largest English and Mandarin news sites respectively, he has written over 250 articles on Malaysia. He is also a regular guest on TV and radio, internationally for media such as Channel News Asia, NPR, Al Jazeera, WION News India; and locally to Astro Awani, Astro AEC, and BFM. During his time as a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, he has also published papers on Malaysia youths’ political inclinations and the structure of political parties in Malaysia. He is also the author of two book chapters on Malaysia’s fourteenth and fifteenth general elections for the same institution.
He holds a graduate degree from the University of Oxford (Best Student) and a first-class law degree from Queen Mary, University of London. He also graduated top of class in the Malaysian legal qualification exam.
Above all, he believes that the most important thing in life is to do interesting things.
H Y Poon is a civil servant living in Singapore. In a few decades of service, he has held various appointments government agencies working in an eclectic mix of areas such as manpower policy formulation, finance, investment promotion, enterprise development, and biodiversity conservation.
