Archives: Authors

Ben Bland is Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute. Ben was previously an award-winning correspondent for the Financial Times in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. His first book, Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow, was acclaimed as a ‘prescient, rollicking read’ by the Financial Times, a ‘David versus Goliath tale’ by the Sydney Morning Herald, and ‘lively’ and ‘illuminating’ by the Times Literary Supplement.
The Lowy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan international policy think tank. The Institute provides high-quality research and distinctive perspectives on the issues and trends shaping Australia’s role in the world.
The Lowy Institute Papers are peer-reviewed essays and research papers on key international issues affecting Australia and the world.
For a discussion on Man of Contradictions with Ben Bland and leading Indonesia experts, visit the Lowy Institute’s daily commentary and analysis site, The Interpreter: lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/debate/manof-contradictions.

Koh Buck Song (family name: Koh) is a Singaporean brand adviser and the author and editor of more than 30 books, including one on Singapore’s country brand – Brand Singapore: Nation Branding In A World Disrupted By Covid-19 (third edition, 2021, with a Chinese translation published in China, 2012). He has advised foreign governments on building their nation brands, and has spoken extensively on country branding internationally, including in London, Oxford, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Chicago (Illinois), Phuentsholing (Bhutan), Tahiti, Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne.
An avid traveller, he has visited more than 80 countries and territories, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. An artist of haiga, a modern interpretation of the 16thcentury Japanese art form of ink sketches combined with haiku poetry, he has held several exhibitions in Singapore and Laos. This book features a haiga artwork for each of the 13 countries visited. He read English at Cambridge University in the UK and has a master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School, USA. As an adjunct editor at Singapore’s Centre for Liveable Cities, he has authored and edited reports on the annual World Cities Summit since 2014. Previously, he was a columnist and political and arts journalist with Singapore’s main English daily The Straits Times, and head of global media relations and strategic planning at the Singapore Economic Development Board. As head of public affairs (Southeast Asia) with the communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton, he advised the Singapore government on many aspects of urban development, including the global launch of Gardens by the Bay and the National Gallery Singapore.

Barrie Sherwood was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Canada. His previous works include the novels The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa and Speed of Lightness, and a collection of short stories, The Angel Tiger. He lives in Singapore.

Grace Chia is an author of over ten books of prose and poetry. She has been nominated for the Mslexia Novel Competition and Epigram Books Fiction Prize longlists and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize (Poetry) and Singapore Book Awards, the latter for her Penguin Random House SEA novel, The Arches of Gerrard Street. Her other novels are The Wanderlusters and White Cloud Mountain. Her poetry collections are Mother of All Questions, Cordelia, and Womango, from which her poems have been used in classroom teaching. In her free time, she enjoys baking or watching cat videos.

Robin Hemley (Robinhemley.com) was born in New York to a literary family. His parents were both writers and publishers and translators of the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. He grew up in the Midwestern U.S. and studied as a high school student in Osaka, Japan. At Indiana University, he majored in Comparative Literature and also studied Japanese and other subjects in the East Asian Languages and Culture Department. He received his MFA at The Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1980’s. Since then, he has been a professor at a number of universities, including The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Western Washington University, St. Lawrence University, where he was then inaugural Viebranz Chair in Creative Writing, The University of Utah, The University of Iowa, where he directed the Nonfiction Writing Program for 9 years, Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he was Faculty Chair, and most recently at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where he was the inaugural Director of the Writers’ Centre and where he is currently Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence. He frequently gives writing workshops around the world. He is likewise a Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at RMIT University in Melbourne.
He has published fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction and his work has been published in many of the leading journals in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore, The Philippines, China, Iceland, and Ukraine. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Independent Press Book Award, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, an Editor’s Choice Award from The American Library Association, the Governor’s Award from the State of Washington, and many others. He has been a Fellow at the Bellagio Center for the Arts at Lake Como, Italy, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The MacDowell Colony, Varuna Writers Centre, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Hermitage, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and many others. He is the Founder and past President of NonfictioNOW, the leading international conference for literary nonfiction. He is a Contributing Editor of The Iowa Review, and Fourth Genre and with the writer Xu Xi, he organizes writing retreats and workshops through Authors at Large (AAlauthors.com).

Rudolf Beger is a German national, is a former chairman of trend-setting conferences at Management Centre Europe (Brussels) and Zentrum für Unternehmensführung (Zurich) and a speaker at industry conferences (Financial Times, UK Celebrity Speakers, pp). Rudolf wrote standard-setting books on corporate communication (in German (Gabler Verlag, 1989), and in English: Present-Day Corporate Communication, www.springer.com, 2018); he is also the author of a romantic novel entitled Dreisam, published by Fouquet’s Literatur-Verlag (out of business), 2003 (currently translated into English for publication). In 2020, Rudolf will complete a highly topical 450-pages political thriller entitled The Lobbyist on the automotive industry (for publication). Rudolf wrote numerous articles, papers and White Papers on EU industrial policy, and was a writer for German antique magazines. His artistic works were shown in ca. 40 solo- and group exhibitions all over the world. In 2011, he won the 1st Prize for his artistic work by the Monaco State Ministry/UNESCO.

Saraphun Wongngernyuang is a Thai national, is an enthusiastic lifelong learner about happiness. She has experience in the practice of Buddhism and Christianity since her youth and continues to learn about the philosophy of happiness from various sources, including New Age, Taoism, Zen Buddhism and Confucius. For seven years she has been studying and training the subject of happiness at the Institute for the Study of Human Happiness
(Happy Science). Occasionally she speaks on the topics of self-development and happiness in public lectures and seminars organized by the Institute, namely “Tips for Happiness”, “Creating the Best Couple Relationships”, “Zen Self-Reflection” and “The Noble Eightfold Path”. In 2019 she translated a self-help book entitled Tips to Find Happiness by the Japanese author Ryuho Okawa, IRH Press Publisher, from English into Thai. She writes and has editorial experience with culinary and restaurant reviews on a restaurant review website Top25restaurants (www.top25restaurants.com/bangkok). Sara published an academic research paper on the preservation of Western (Portuguese) Catholicism in Thailand, entitled “The Virgin Mary in the Encounter of Cultures: Preserving Transcultural Heritage in the Immaculate Conception Community, Bangkok”, published in a book entitled Preserving Transcultural Heritage: Your Way or My Way, Caleidoscópio, University of Lisbon, Portugal (2018).

HRH PRINCESS VIBHAVA DIRANGSIT NÉE PRINCESS VIBHAVADI RAJANI is a Thai writer and a member of the Thai royal family well known for her fiction writing and her developmental work in rural Thailand.

Nilanjana Sengupta, an author based in Singapore. Her publications include, A Gentleman’s Word: The Legacy of Subhas Chandra Bose in Southeast Asia (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2012), The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Singapore, My Country: Biography of M Bala Subramanion (World Scientific Press, 2016) and The Votive Pen: Writings on Edwin Thumboo (Penguin Random House, 2020). Sengupta also writes for The Straits Times and for publications of the National Heritage Board, Singapore. Her books have been critically acclaimed, adopted for university courses and translated into multiple languages. She has been associated with the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute as well as NUS in various research capacities.

Paul Callan is the author of three previous historical novels. The Dulang Washer was published by MPH of Malaysia in 2012, and was long-listed for the IMPAC award (Malaysia Tatler wrote: “[It] kept me engrossed for seven hours straight.”). Shadows beneath the Fronds was published by MPH in 2013 (Book Review: “A very good book that tells the reality of the lives of the Tamils in [Malaysia]”). Epigram Books published his third novel, The Brigadier’s Daughter, in July 2017. (Malaysia Tatler described it as “The Book of Love.”)