Archives: Authors

Matthew S. Friedman is the founder and CEO of The Mekong Club. Matthew is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and philanthropy advisor and has worked for the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, and the United Nations. He is considered the leading catalyst of the anti-slavery movement in Asia’s business sector by captains of industry. His expertise has been recognized globally, and he has advised heads of governments and intelligence agencies. Matthew is also a popular motivational speaker who has given over 1,200 presentations to over 95,000 people in twenty nations. He is the author of fourteen books.

Sylvia Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, author, TV host, and philanthropy advisor. She has led philanthropic initiatives in Asia for some of the world’s wealthiest families. She is a trailblazer in the fight against human trafficking, and her three-part documentary series on the subject won her the prestigious 2013 International Human Rights Press Award. Sylvia is the author of five books, including Fearless: A Guide to Freedom and Fulfilling Your Fullest Potential, A Long Road to Justice, and Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women, the only journalistic account of historical Japanese military sex slavery during WWII. She is a highly sought after inspirational keynote speaker.

Jose Elvin Bueno is a Filipino-American fictionist, playwright, and novelist.
He was the recipient of the Grand Prize in the 63rd Palanca Awards for Literature for his novel of Subversivo, Inc.
He currently lives in New York.

Anjana Rai Chaudhuri was born in Kolkata, India, and obtained a PhD in Chemistry from the United States. She lived in America for six years, married her Singaporean husband there, finally settling in Singapore. Anjana worked for many years as a research scientist in premier universities (including the University of Oxford, UK) and is the author of a science book chapter, fourteen research papers and review articles published in prestigious chemistry journals. Anjana’s love of English Literature led to a BA in English Language and Literature from the Singapore University of Social Sciences in 2012. She is a double gold medal winner, for her master’s in chemistry and BA in Literature, respectively. Motivated by her husband’s diagnosis of chronic leukaemia, Anjana became a founder/moderator of cancer patient support groups, volunteering at the Singapore General Hospital, which led to the hospital awarding her an inspirational caregiver award. Her work with cancer patients led to two publications, one in the prestigious British Medical Journal. Anjana is the author of three works of fiction. Her first novel, a historical romance, The Scent of Frangipani, was published in 2019 by Monsoon Books, UK.

Chi P. Pham is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first Ph.D. degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature in University of California, Riverside (USA). She is the secretary of the Association for the Study of Literature and Ecology in ASEAN (ASLE-ASEAN). Her publications include, Aesthetic Experience in Ramayana Epic (Hanoi National University Press, 2015); Literature and Nation-building in Vietnam: The Invisibilization of the Indians (Routledge, 2021). She is also the co-editor of Reading South Vietnam’s Writers: The Reception of Western Thought in Journalism and Literature (Springer Nature, 2023). She has edited four collections of Indian and South East Asian folktales in Vietnamese translation, and has co-edited a collection of Vietnamese environmental short stories in English translation entitled Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction with Chitra Sankaran (Penguin Random House, 2021). She has also co-edited Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies with Chitra Sankaran and Gurpreet Kaur (Vernon Press, 2019) and The Vietnamese Literature: Readings from the Inside (special issue in SUVANNABHUMI Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14.1, 2022) with Uma Jayaraman. Her latest publications in the field of Environmental Humanities include “Political Orientation in Ecocriticism: National Allegory in Vietnamese Ecofiction by Tr?n Duy Phiên.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 24.5 (2022) and Environment and Narrative in Vietnam(co-edited with Ursula K. Heise, co-author of one chapter, and single author of another chapter) contracted for publication by Palgrave Macmillan.

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.