Archives: Authors

Chitra Sankaran (PhD London), has served as (acting) Head of Department and as Chair of Literature, Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore. She is the Founding and Current President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN) and the Chief Editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism (JSEAE). Her publications include three monographs, ten edited volumes, chapters-in-books and research articles in International Journals such asInterdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, (ISLE), Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ARIEL, Theatre Research International. Her recent publications include a monograph on Women, Subalterns and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction (University of Georgia Press, USA) and a co-authored volume, Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Ecofictions from Vietnam (Penguin Random House SEA).

Bala Shankar has experienced many different professions for sustained periods and in different geographies. He has had careers in corporate, teaching, entrepreneurship and writing. His own new pivots in life and career have prompted him to reflect on the skills journey and its impact.
Bala qualified as a management post-graduate (MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the premier management institutions in the world. He also obtained a Bachelors degree in Statistics. For over twenty five years, his corporate career spanned sales, account management, global account leadership and regional profit center responsibility at a global multinational in the fragrance and flavour business (current turnover of the company USD 2.5 billion) across Asia, the US and Europe. During his experience, he oversaw new market entry, geographical expansion, managed two large global accounts (Unilever, Johnson & Johnson), oversaw transition through a merger and private equity ownership and rolled out a global programme for sales growth.

Joyce graduated from the National University of Singapore with a degree in English and her contemporary YA novel, LAMBS FOR DINNER, was published by the Straits Times Press in 2013 as part of a nationwide competition. She lives in the perennially sunny island-city of Singapore, where she co-runs and publishes her short stories at Muse in Pocket, Pen in Hand and blogs at The Writes of Passage in between writing her next novel and dreaming about mythical worlds.

Audrey Chin is a Southeast Asian writer whose work explores the intersections between gender, faith and culture. Her essays, short stories, novels and contemplative verses have been published in Singapore, India, the UK and the US. She has been shortlisted thrice for the Singapore Literature Prize and is a Fellow of the 2017 International Writers Program in Iowa.

Kopi Soh is the pseudonym of a US based Malaysian author and illustrator best known for her book Oh, I Thought I Was The Only One. She founded the Facebook community ‘Stick It To Me’, currently renamed ‘Kopi Soh’s Positive Healing Doodles’, an initiative centred around producing “healing art” for the terminally sick and needy, and organizes a group of volunteers to produce art for hospitals and charities. Her work with ‘Stick It To Me’ was recognized in the Digi WWWOW Awards 2015, winning an award in the Social Gathering category. She also served as the official illustrator for TEDxWeldQuay2013.
Kopi Soh was also a former manager with a women’s centre, training social workers and counsellors. She counsels victims in Domestic Violence situations and children who have been sexually assaulted. Being a crisis counsellor she was also a Sexual Assault Team Responder for the County of San Diego and in her spare time she teaches social media at a community school for the elderly. Her area of specialty is in working with children, adolescents, couples, seniors, refugees, rape victims, abused kids, victims of domestic violence and families.
Kopi Soh’s first book, Oh, I Thought I Was The Only One, published by Dawning Victory Consultancy in 2012, distributed by MPH, is a self-help book oriented towards creating awareness of common psychological issues, which manifest in daily life. In 2013, Kopi Soh published her second book, Oh . . . I Thought I Was the Only One 2, a sequel focusing on how children experience various stresses in their daily lives and teaching them skills on how to overcome them. Kopi Soh has been accepted into a doctoral program for the year 2020. Her proposed research will be about Flourishing, Happiness and Older Malaysian Women.

Wan Phing Lim was born to Malaysian parents in 1986 in Butterworth, Penang. Her short stories have appeared in Catapult (USA), Ricepaper Magazine (Canada), Lucent Dreaming (UK), Kyoto Journal (Japan) and anthologies by Monsoon Books (UK), Ethos Books (Singapore), Math Paper Press (Singapore) and Fixi Novo
(Malaysia). Her story ‘Snake Bridge Temple’ was selected for Kitaab’s Best Asian Short Stories 2017 and Buku Fixi’s New Malaysian Writing 2017.

Golda Mowe was born and raised in Sibu, Sarawak. Although her first love is Asian History and Culture, she studied accounting concepts and graduated with a B.A. in Commerce from Waseda University, Japan in 1994. She has been interested in writing since she was 12 but did not know how to pursue this passion. In 2004 she decided that she should just dive into the industry and see what happens.
Since then she has published the following books: Iban Dream, published in 2013 by Monsoon Books Singapore, Iban Journey, published in 2015, Iban Woman, published in 2018 by Monsoon Books UK, The Nanobots and Other Stories, published in 2015 by Oyez!Books Kuala Lumpur and The Laughing Monster, published 2018 by Scholastic Singapore.

She is also passionate about local stories told from an indigenous perspective. This was in fact one of the reasons why she started writing the Iban Dream series because she was annoyed that the Iban perspective was not well represented in the English fiction section. Based on the lessons she learned from writing this series, she has put up two free ebooks in Academia.edu to help other indigenous writers write their stories for readers who read in English.

Lee Jeong-Ho is a non-resident James A. Kelly research fellow at Pacific Forum. He is a journalist who worked at Radio Free Asia, Bloomberg News, South China Morning Post, and News1 Korea in Seoul and Washington DC. He believes that the free flow of information is essential to democracy, as it empowers citizens through the dissemination of knowledge.
With academic experiences in South Korea, Australia, and the UK, and having served in the South Korean Air Force, he transitioned from being a military officer to journalism and research. He is also the coauthor of the novel Two Sides of a Lie.

Elaine Chan is a journalist and writer covering Asia and Greater China. She was the Shanghai bureau chief of Bloomberg News and has written and edited for the likes of the South China Morning Post and the Associated Press.
While growing up in her native Singapore, she also trained in Western art and painting. But realizing she’d never be a van Gogh, she decided to pursue journalism, which she believes is society’s conscience. She is also the co-author of the novel Two Sides of a Lie.

Dr Yuhyun Park is the founder of the DQ Institute and a world-leading expert in digital skills and child online safety. She created the Digital Intelligence (DQ) concept and framework, which was officially approved as the world’s first global standard related to digital literacy, digital skills, and digital readiness by the IEEE Standards Board (IEEE 3527.1™). It was originally endorsed by the OECD, IEEE Standards Association, and World Economic Forum in 2018 as the foundation to build global standards and a common language for digital literacy and skills. Dr Park also developed the Child Online Safety Index, which is the world’s first real-time metric tracker to help nations better understand their children’s online safety status, and leads the #DQEveryChild initiative, which is a global digital citizenship movement that has empowered children, families, and teachers in more than 80 countries to date. In addition, she serves in various global leadership positions related to digital economy and education, including as the International Lead for Digital Economy in the G20 Civil Society (2020), head of the EQUALS ITU Digital Skills Coalition, and founder of the Coalition for Digital Intelligence. She has received numerous international awards, including recognition as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Ashoka Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow, and multiple UNESCO prizes. She co authored the Dictionary for Economics, which is the most widely used dictionary for economics in Korea. Her academic experiences include serving as an adjunct professor at Yonsei University in Korea and as a director at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Dr Park completed her Ph.D. degree and post-doctoral studies in biostatistics at Harvard University.