Archives: Authors

Ahmad Rizaq lives in the skyscraper-fenced compact community of Jakarta. His wordsmith journey started as a digital storyteller with a focus on crafting marketing pitches, and he has bent all multimedia elements, from blogging and social media to e-commerce and visual copywriting. His childhood dream was to become a fiction writer, and on one reflective night, he rediscovered that dream. He is now making his debut with “Little Lovely Lily.”
Connect with him on Instagram: @ahmadwrizaq

American Suzanne Kamata has lived in Japan for over thirty years. Her writing has appeared in The Best Asian Short Stories in 2017, 2022 and 2023 and The Best Asian Travel Writing 2020, The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing, Telltale Food: Writings from the Fay Khoo Award 2017-2019 and numerous other anthologies. She is the author of a previous short story collection, The Beautiful One Has Come (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2011) which won a Nautilus Silver Award, and a Next Generation Indie Best award; the young adult novels Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible (GemmaMedia, 2013), named an Honor Book by the Asian American Pacific Librarians Association, and Indigo Girl (GemmaMedia, 2019) a Freeman Honor Book. Her most recent novel is The Baseball Widow (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2021). She is an associate professor at Naruto University of Education.

Larry Nyanti hails from Borneo, grew up in Baton Rouge, and briefly studied creative writing in Dublin. He lives in sunny Kota Kinabalu, where he practices and teaches medicine. A Rei of Sunshine is his debut novel.

Suzanne Scott Tomita was born in Tunisia and raised in Venezuela, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, and Australia. Her writing includes personal essays on the topic of motherhood, mid-life, and marriage published in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail. She has published on the topic of home and belonging in Expat Living Singapore.

Suzanne has a PhD in Education from The University of British Columbia. In 2014, Suzanne completed The Writer’s Studio (TWS) Creative Writing Certificate at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada where she studied with writers Kevin Chong and Wayde Compton. At TWS she wrote the beginnings of her debut novel, a selected chapter of which is published in Emerge, SFU Publications.

Set during the racial tensions of post-colonial Singapore, and contemporary London, Until Even the Angels, is the story of an unlikely friendship between Mei Mei Goh, the domestic servant girl to the wealthy Hamilton family, and young Honour Hamilton. This literary crime novel questions the meaning of motherhood, childhood, belonging, and memory.

Suzanne completed an advanced fiction course with author Claire Keegan in 2023 at the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between the National Arts Council of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. When she’s not reading or writing, Suzanne walks Singapore’s nature parks and visits museums imagining characters for her next novel. She lives in Singapore with her family.

Leslie Lopez, a Malaysian citizen, has reported extensively on political and economic affairs in the region since the mid-1980s.
After brief stints with two local newspapers in Malaysia, Mr Lopez, 60, served as the Reuters correspondent covering Malaysia and Brunei before moving to Jakarta as the Indonesian bureau chief for the Business Times of Singapore. He returned to Malaysia to head The Asian Wall Street Journal news bureau in Kuala Lumpur in 1996. During his 10 years with this publication, Mr Lopez won awards for his reporting on the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the aftermath of Asia’s deadly financial tsunami. He also led the paper’s regional coverage on the growing threat from Islamic terrorists, breaking dozens of exclusive pieces that have helped bring greater understanding of the problems posed by religious militancy.
Mr Lopez joined The Straits Times of Singapore as the paper’s Senior Regional Correspondent in early 2007. His coverage of regional political and economic issues won him the award for Best Story for three years running. In 2009, Singapore Press Holdings, the island state’s largest news organisation, named him Journalist of the Year.
In 2012, Mr Lopez joined The Edge media group to push the organisation’s regional presence through The Edge Review, a weekly all-digital political and business publication specialising in key news developments in Southeast Asia. The Edge Review quickly stamped its mark as a premier publication, wining top awards for its business and political reporting on the region from the prestigious Society of Publishers Asia (Sopa).
Mr Lopez, who lives in Kuala Lumpur and travels regularly on reporting assignments, is currently writing for Singapore’s CNA Digital.

Friska Wirya is the powerhouse behind Fresh by Friska, a sought-after change management and transformation advisor partnering with leaders of global organisations to safeguard and accelerate their transformations.
A multi-hyphenate, Friska is a multiple award-winning Top 50 Global Change Management Thought Leader, Top 50 Asia Pacific Business Influencer, TEDx speaker and in-demand leadership facilitator who has spoken for the likes of Salesforce, Culture Amp, F5, Worley, UN Women and Microsoft. The first edition of her book, The Future Fit Organisation, achieved 3 best seller categories in 3 days, reaching #1 in Business Organisational Change and is stocked in bookstores across Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Puty Puar is a mother currently living in Bekasi, Indonesia. She works freelance as an illustrator, content creator, and book author. She integrates her blog and social media to deliver heartwarming and relatable visual content that aligns with her purpose, empowering women from within and her belief in the collective power of women to create massive and long-lasting impacts. She also shares her experiences through sharing sessions, talk shows, and workshops.
She is the founder and executive director of Buibu Baca Buku, a community that aims to empower women, especially mothers, through literacy and reading habits.
In 2018, Puty won The JCS International Young Creative Award, a part of The International Emmy Award 2018. In 2023, she received The Good Chat, a fellowship for Southeast Asia community leaders and influencers to mainstream climate conversation to support their countries’ climate goals. She’s currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in Sustainable Development.

Kantarin Leelahuta is a Thai novelist who made her writing debut in 2005 at the age of 12. Since then, she has published over seventy titles under her pen name ‘Pretty Princess’ including ONE NIGHT STAND, which was adapted for a TV Series in 2023. On top of that, she has had many more book-to-TV adaptations including Oh My Boss (2021); Girl Next Room (2020); and Boy For Rent (2019). Kantarin graduated from Thammasat University with a Bachelor of Arts, Journalism major. She’s always known writing was her calling, and never hesitated to answer. Her next milestone is to publish her 100th book someday. She is currently residing in Singapore and missing her 20 cats back in Bangkok dearly.

Baison is a novelist in Thailand. Born into a family of readers, she had never known a time that she wasn’t reading. She began writing in 2005 and her first novel was gaining a lot of attention. She is also known for a TV scriptwriter for P.S. I hate you, which was based on her novel. Baison lives in Bangkok with her family.

TULIP graduated from Chiang Mai University in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts, English major. Over the years, she has translated seventeen released titles—Four Eng-Thai books and Thirteen Thai-Eng books, such as They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera (Eng-Thai) and Cutie Pie by BamBam (Thai-Eng), which has been adapted into a series. She currently enjoys working from home as a freelance translator while feeding stray cats.

Earl Valencia is a venture-backed startup founder, investor and corporate innovation executive that has worked in Silicon Valley, New York and Southeast Asia. In 2023, he was appointed by the President of the Philippines as an Executive Member of the National Innovation Council representing the Business Sector.
He spent his time in Wall Street in the data team of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, and a Managing Director of Digital at Charles Schwab. He also spent several years in enterprise tech working at the Emerging Technology and Innovation teams at Cisco, VMWare and Dell EMC.
He was the VP of Corporate Development and Innovation at Smart-PLDT at 29, and became one of the youngest executives in the entire Philippines during his time. He also co-founded IdeaSpace, the leading incubator and accelerator based in Manila and QBO, the public-private innovation center of the Philippines, both with a combined 100+ incubated companies.
For his contributions to emerging market innovation, he was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, and awarded by the President of the Philippines as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men and Women of the country. He was also featured in the NASDAQ Times Square Billboard for being selected in NASDAQ Centers Milestone Makers program.
Earl started at the University of the Philippines and completed his degree in Electrical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude, from Boston University. He also has a Masters in Systems Engineering from Cornell University, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is currently an adjunct faculty for global leadership at the Jack Welch College of Business and Technology at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut and the Asian Institute of Management.

Dan Gonzales is a writer by nature with venture capital and startup experience. Fascinated by how entrepreneurs think and what gets them to perform, Dan developed close ties with the Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists at VU Venture Partners. He holds a BA in English from University of California, Riverside. He hosts The Startup Mindsets Podcast, a platform that dives deep into how entrepreneurs make decisions and can run successful businesses.
Dan has invested in several early stage startups including Akash Systems, Contraline, Fan Controlled Sports & Entertainment.

Dan worked as an executive assistant to Kaila Methven, an award winning fashion designer and celebrity.