Archives: Authors

Su-May Tan was born and raised in Malaysia but is currently living on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne. Her debut short story collection Lake Malibu and other stories was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards 2022. Her work has appeared in the Margaret River Short Story Competition, Mascara Literary Review and The Victorian Writer. Having moved to Melbourne in 2012, she often writes on themes of migration and cultural connection. Website: sumaytan.com.

Chris Lee is an entrepreneur, investor, startup advisor, and senior executive in the healthcare industry with extensive international experience. He is one of few Asians to rise to the global executive committee level in two Fortune 500 healthcare companies, with a strong track record in business growth, M&A, new market expansion, and innovation incubation.

Chris grew up in Korea and Japan, and started his career as a medical sales representative in the US, eventually working in more than ten countries across three continents. He was appointed country manager of Bristol-Myers Squibb at age thirty and became the first-ever executive committee member of Asian-descent in Bayer’s 150-year history at age thirty-nine. Chris has deep and extensive healthcare experience, having managed businesses across various healthcare segments in the last three decades, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, consumer health, animal health, and more.

In 2022, Chris founded VentureBlick, an international fundraising platform matching healthcare startups and medical investors. He aims to transform the healthcare fundraising building on his years of accumulated industry experience and professional network.

Chris is an advocate of inclusive leadership and workplace happiness. He wrote two bestselling books, Emotional Management and Marketing Works. He regularly contributes leadership articles to Forbes and actively shares his personal learnings on LinkedIn. He has won multiple leadership awards, including ‘Most Respected CEO’ for three consecutive years (2020-2022) by Great Place to Work, and ‘Executive of the Year 2021’ by Singapore Business Review.

David J. Hirst is the author of nine management books including the Best-Selling ‘How to Communicate with Anyone.’ He was born in England and has degrees from the University of Stafford and Christ Church College, the University of Kent. He currently lives in Malaysia which, after twenty-three years, he calls home. He has a 10 th degree Sifu licence in Malaysian Wing Chun and a Master Practitioner Licence in Neuro-semantics which allows him insights into human behaviour that give his characters their vibrancy. He regularly attends the MY Writers Penang group and on most stormy afternoons he can be found on his Penang balcony with a chilled glass of something nice, working on his next novel.

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.

Rejecting platitudes and theoretical models, Rajeev combines 22 years of global Fortune 100 experience with research-based insights to provide unique and practical approaches to personal leadership, ethics, governance, sustainable business growth, and stewardship. He is the CEO of Stewardship Asia Center, Singapore, and President of Leadership Energy Consulting, Seattle, WA, USA.

Author of the Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller Open Source Leadership (McGraw Hill), Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (Simon & Schuster), Sustainable Sustainability (Penguin Random House), co-author of Be the Change (McGraw Hill) and a contributor for Forbes, he sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on the Human Science of Environmental Action; advises the Government of Malaysia’s Higher Education Leadership Academy; and was recognized among the Top 100 Global Thought leaders for Trustworthy Business.

A high-energy inspirational speaker, Rajeev provides coaching, consulting and advisory services to corporate and public sector clients globally. He has been widely featured in international media such as CNN, Bloomberg TV & Radio, National Public Radio, Harvard Business Review, CNBC, Fast Company, Leader to Leader, American Management Association magazine, Leadership Excellence magazine, The Times of India, The Straits Times, Business Times, and many more.

Before joining SAC and starting LEC, he was the CEO of the Iclif Leadership & Governance Centre. Formerly, he was the Chief Learning Officer of Coca-Cola and Morgan Stanley and has also held senior positions at American Express, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. In his early career, he was a banker and currency trader.

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.