Archives: Authors

The story you are about to read came to Fredrik Haren at 2 a.m. one night in Bangkok. It came like a gift. A gift with a message.
The story came fully developed, ready to be written down. And it demanded to be told.
This book is that story, written down as it was told to the author.
Fredrik Haren lives in Singapore with his wife and three children. His middle child, Maria, had invisible friends until she was five.

Leslie W is the pen name of Kayce Teo.

Born and bred in Singapore, she graduated with a BA in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. She was one of six mentees selected for the Fiction category of the Mentor Access Project, an annual programme initiated by the National Arts Council to develop young and emerging writers in Singapore’s four official languages.

Her debut fantasy novel, The Night of Legends, was written under the mentorship of award-winning writer, Dave Chua.

Sign up for her newsletter at kayceteo.com for writing and life updates.

Born in New Zealand, Vicki always dreamed about travelling the world and writing about her adventures. At the age of nineteen, she set off on a solo expedition to Africa. Falling in love with the continent and the freedom of travel, she felt a yearning to go further and explore even more far-flung corners of the planet.
Vicki’s advertising career helped power her wanderlust even further, taking her from New Zealand, to the concrete jungles of London, Dubai and Singapore. Travel writing soon followed as she chronicled her adventures of more than fifty countries that she had by now visited-from ancient souks in Yemen, to the glaciers of Greenland.
The idea of taking on the formidable task of writing a novel was conceived aboard a glorious dahabiya on the river Nile in Egypt, where the Victoria West series was born.
It was at this point that Vicki decided to bring back the fun and glamour of the old Golden Age detective novel in a new crime series that would put a modern twist on the classic murder mystery-each book set in one of Vicki’s favourite destinations so readers could escape to exotic places and enjoy new cultures . . . all while figuring out whodunnit!

Heidi Shamsuddin was born in Malaysia, and spent part of her childhood growing up in Seattle, Washington and Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. After leaving school, she studied law at Nottingham University, obtained a postgraduate degree in corporate law, and after taking her Bar exams, eventually worked as a maritime lawyer in a London law firm. In 2007, she returned home and began to write fiction.

Heidi is now an award-winning author of stories inspired by Southeast Asia for both children and adults. Her first short story Johan the Honey Hunter, won the regional prize for the Eye Level Children’s Literature Award in 2012. Shortly after, she signed an eight-book contract with Oyez! Books to write The Door Under the Stairs series for children. Since then, she has written and published short stories, readers and picture books including The Malay Tale of the Pig King, which is based on the Malay epic, Hikayat Raja Babi.

In 2017, she was invited as a speaker to the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) in Singapore to talk about the folktales of the region, and in 2018 she was invited to give a TEDx talk at University of Malaya on why we still need our fairy tales. In 2017, her screenplay for Batik Girl won the Intellectual Property Creators’ Challenge (IPCC) Award and was made into an award-winning short animated film by R&D Studio and Tudidut Studio. Batik Girl has gone on to receive the Honorable Mention in Audience Favorites award at the Florida Animation Festival, Best Animated Short Film prize at the Festival de Largos y Cortos de Santiago 2019 in Chile, as well as Gold Medal in the Regional category at the 20th Digicon6 Asia in Japan.

Heidi has recently embarked on a project to collect and adapt the folklore, fairy tales, fables, myths, epics, legends, wonder and magic tales from all around the Nusantara region, with the aim of spreading and disseminating these traditional tales. As a way to reach a wider audience, she began an online project to highlight and discuss these stories on her YouTube channel (Heidi Shamsuddin) and at www.heidishamsuddin.com.

An international correspondent with over 22 years of reporting experience in the region, Romen Bose worked as a Political Communications Consultant for former Malaysian Premier Najib Razak for six years and was a close confidante to decision makers in the upper echelon of the country’s political elite. Before setting up his own consultancy, Romen was head of Asian social media at IHS Markit and worked as a senior foreign correspondent with French news agency AFP based in Kuala Lumpur. He was the founding president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Malaysia and a senior producer with the English service of Al Jazeera International when it opened its regional base in Malaysia. Prior to this, Romen was the Indochina Bureau Chief for Channel News Asia and has also consulted for the United Nations. Romen has also researched and written extensively on the second world war and its impact on Southeast Asia.

Mallika Naguran is an author of adult fiction and children’s books. Born in Singapore, Mallika published her first poem when she was ten. In college she began crafting short stories and circulated them among friends in their self-designed magazine.

Mallika authored the Ramayana: The Quest to Rescue Sita and Peter Pan in the POP! Lit for Kids series published by WS Education (an imprint of World Scientific Publishing) in 2021. She Never Looks Quite Back is her first collection of short stories published by Penguin Random House (SEA). She is currently working on another volume of short stories and two novels: fantasy for young adults and environmental fiction for adults.

Mallika has spent more than a decade writing and editing environmental articles as the founder of Gaia Discovery. She is passionate about wildlife, ethnic musical instruments, and the underwater world. She lives in Tasmania where she loses track of time while walking in forests.

Balvinder Sandhu has been a part of Singapore’s publishing scene for 25 years. She started her career writing for newspapers, then moved on to magazines and, eventually, websites. Her career as a writer and editor has seen her take on topics in the spheres of lifestyle, entertainment, travel, business, technology, health and women’s issues. In recent years, she has created content for a variety of clients too. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Law and is also the author of three books published in Singapore – Financial Fraud (2013), Foreigners Behaving Badly (2013) and Sex Crimes (2014) – which tackled crimes in Singapore that fit the theme of each book. She lives in Melbourne with her husband but goes to Singapore often to catch up with family and friends – and binge on her favourite local foods.

Vincent G. Marasigan lives in Davao City, Philippines, and works as an editor at the City Government of Davao. He has had short stories published in various journals within and outside the Philippines. The Golden Realm is his first novel.

Lope K. Santos was a Filipino Tagalog-language writer and former senator of the Philippines. He is best known for his 1906 socialist novel, Banaag at Sikat and for his contributions for the development of Filipino grammar and Tagalog orthography.
Santos pursued law at the Academia de la Jurisprudencia then at Escuela Derecho de Manila (now Manila Law College Foundation) where he received Bachelor of Arts degree in 1912. In the late 1900s, Santos started writing his own newspaper Ang Kaliwanagan. This was also the time when socialism became an emerging idea in world ideology.
In 1903, Santos started publishing fragments of his first novel, Banaag at Sikat on his weekly labor magazine Muling Pagsilang (The Rebirth) and was completed in 1906. When published in book form, Santos’ Banaag at Sikat was then considered as the first socialist-oriented book in the Philippines which expounded principles of socialism and seek labor reforms from the government. The book was later made an inspiration for the assembly of the 1932 Socialist Party of the Philippines and then the 1946 group Hukbalahap.
In the early 1910s, he started his campaign on promoting a ‘national language for the Philippines’, where he organized various symposia, lectures and headed numerous departments for national language in leading Philippine universities. In 1910, he was elected as governor of the province of Rizal under the Nacionalista Party. In 1918, he was appointed as the first Filipino governor of the newly resurveyed Nueva Vizcaya until 1920. Consequently, he was elected to the 5th Philippine Legislature as senator of the twelfth senatorial district representing provinces having a majority of non-Christian population.
In 1940, Santos published the first grammar book of the ‘national language’, Balarila ng Wikang Pambansa (Grammar of the National Language) which was commissioned by the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa (SWF). The next year, he was appointed by President Manuel L. Quezon as director of SWF until 1946. When the Philippines became a member of the United Nations he was selected to translate the 1935 Constitution for UNESCO. He was also appointed to assist for the translation of inaugural addresses of presidents Jose P. Laurel and Manuel A. Roxas.

Historian Paul French lives in Shanghai, where he is a business adviser and analyst. He frequently comments on China for the English-speaking press around the world. He studied history, economics, and Mandarin at university and has an MPhil in economics from the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.