Alec Ash

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing, author of Wish Lanterns, literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese published by Picador in 2016.

His articles have appeared in The Economist, Dissent, BBC, Prospect, Foreign Policy and elsewhere. He is a contributor to the book of reportage Chinese Characters and co-editor of the anthology While We're Here.

Born in England, Ash studied English literature at Oxford, where he edited The Isis magazine and hitchiked to Morocco. After graduating he taught in a Tibetan village in west China before moving to Beijing in 2008.

In 2012 he founded a 'writers' colony' of stories from China at the Anthill. He is a regular blogger for the Los Angeles Review of Books and has interviewed over sixt

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Robert Greenberg

Robert M. Greenberg is an American composer, pianist and musicologist. He has composed more than 50 works for a variety of instruments and voices, and has recorded a number of lecture series on music history and music appreciation for The Teaching Company.

Greenberg earned a B.A. in music, magna cum laude, from Princeton University and received a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He has served on the faculties of UC Berkeley, Californiz State University, East Bay, and the San Franciso Conservatory of Music, where he was chairman of the Department of Music History and Literature as well as Director of the Adult Extension Division. Dr. Greenberg is currently Music Historian-in-residence with San Francisco
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Michael Shaw Bond

Michael Bond has been writing on psychology and human behaviour for more than fifteen years as a regular contributor to New Scientist, Nature, Prospect, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, and others. During the Arab Spring, he also served as lead researcher for the Royal Society report on science in Egypt. He lives in London.
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Jhumpa Lahiri

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture.

Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013) was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction.

On January 22, 2015, Lahir
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Amy Tan

Amy Tan (Chinese: 譚恩美; pinyin: Tán Ēnměi; born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose novels include The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish From Drowing, and The Valley of Amazement. She is the author of two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins. Her two children’s books are The Chinese Siamese Cat and The Moon Lady. She is also the co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of The Joy Luck, the librettist of the opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and the creative consultant to the PBS animated series Sagwa the Chinese Chinese Cat.

Tan is an instructor with MasterClass on writing, memory and imagination. She is featured in the American Masters document
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Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.
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Chris Hedges

Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.

Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.
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Alberto Moravia

Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, was one of the leading Italian novelists of the twentieth century whose novels explore matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism. He was also a journalist, playwright, essayist and film critic.
Moravia was an atheist, his writing was marked by its factual, cold, precise style, often depicting the malaise of the bourgeoisie, underpinned by high social and cultural awareness. Moravia believed that writers must, if they were to represent reality, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude, but also that, ultimately, "A writer survives in spite of his beliefs".
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Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash CMG FRSA is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe.
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Fuchsia Dunlop

Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food-writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She is the author of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, an account of her adventures in exploring Chinese food culture, and two critically-acclaimed Chinese cookery books, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, and Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty).

Fuchsia writes for publications including Gourmet, Saveur, and The Financial Times. She is a regular guest on radio and television, and has appeared on shows including Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word, NPR’s All Things Considered and The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. She was named ‘Food Journalist of the Year’ by the British Guild of Food Writers in 2006, and has been shortlist
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Ezra F. Vogel

Ezra Feivel Vogel was an American sociologist who wrote prolifically on modern Japan, China, and Korea. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Vogel was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950 and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Social Relations in 1958 from Harvard.

After two years of field work in Japan, Vogel worked as an assistant professor at Yale University from 1960 to 1961, but returned to Harvard for post-doctoral work on Chinese language and history. He was appointed as a lecturer in 1964, later becoming a tenured professor; he remained at Harvard until his retirement.

Vogel was involved with several research ce
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Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey is the author of historical and mystery fiction set in Asia. She is best known for the Perveen Mistry series published in the United States by Soho Press and in India by Penguin Random House India. In June, 2021, THE BOMBAY PRINCE, third book in the series, releases in the US/Canada and Australia/New Zealand; it will be published by Penguin India later the same month.

THE WIDOWS OF MALABAR HILL, the first Perveen novel, was named a Best Mystery/Thriller of 2018 and also an Amazon Best Mystery/Thriller of 2018. Additionally, the book won the Bruce Alexander Best Historical Mystery Award, the Agatha Award for Best Historical Mystery and the Mary Higgins Clark Award, all in 2019.

The second Perveen novel, THE SATAPUR MOONSTONE, won
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Wu Cheng'en

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Wu Cheng'en (simplified Chinese: 吴承恩; traditional Chinese: 吳承恩; pinyin: Wú Chéng'ēn, ca. 1505–1580 or 1500–1582, courtesy name Ruzhong (汝忠), pen name "Sheyang Hermit," was a Chinese novelist and poet of the Ming Dynasty, best known for being the probable author of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, Journey to the West, also called Monkey.
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Yu Hua

Yu Hua (simplified Chinese: 余华; traditional Chinese: 余華; pinyin: Yú Huá) is a Chinese author, born April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. He practiced dentistry for five years and later turned to fiction writing in 1983 because he didn't like "looking into people’s mouths the whole day." Writing allowed him to be more creative and flexible.[citation needed] He grew up during the Cultural Revolution and many of his stories and novels are marked by this experience. One of the distinctive characteristics of his work is his penchant for detailed descriptions of brutal violence.

Yu Hua has written four novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His most important novels are Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and To Liv
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Sue Prideaux

Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. Prior to taking up writing she trained as an art historian in Florence, Paris, and London.

(from Wikipedia)
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Linda Jaivin

Linda Jaivin is the author of twelve books, including the forthcoming (May 2021) The Shortest History of China and the novel The Empress Lover, published in April 2014 as well as the travel companion Beijing, published in July 2014. Other major publications include the Quarterly Essay: Found in Translation (late 2013), five novels and a novella, a collection of essays (Confessions of an S&M Virgin) and a China memoir (Monkey and the Dragon). Her first novel was the internationally bestselling comic erotic Eat Me. The Empress Lover follows A Most Immoral Woman, which is set in China and Japan in 1904 and based on a true story. She is also a translator from Chinese and a playwright. She was the winner of the 2014 New South Wales Writers Fello
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Helen Garner

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She has published many works of fiction including Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Children's Bach. Her fiction has won numerous awards. She is also one of Australia's most respected non-fiction writers, and received a Walkley Award for journalism in 1993.

Her most recent books are The First Stone, True Stories, My Hard Heart, The Feel of Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation. In 2006 she won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Melbourne.

Praise for Helen Garner's work

'Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.'
Bulletin

'She is outstanding in the accuracy of her observations, the intensity of passio
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Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.

Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the
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Andrea Bajani

Scrittore e giornalista italiano. Autore di romanzi e racconti, ma anche di reportage, opere teatrali e traduzioni di opere dal francese e dall'inglese. Nel 2002 pubblica il suo primo romanzo, Morto un Papa.
Nel 2008 vince il Premio Super Mondello, il Premio Recanati e il Premio Brancati con il romanzo Se consideri le colpe .
Nel 2011 vince il Premio Bagutta con il romanzo Ogni promessa.
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Han Kang

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

소설가 한강

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
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Zhang Yueran

Zhang Yueran (Chinese:张悦然, born 1982) is a Chinese writer. Her main works include short stories and novels. She won the 2001 New Concept Composition Competition organised by Mengya magazine.She is one of a small group of successful Chinese authors known as the "post-'80s" generation.
She began writing at the age of 14, and as a high school student, won first prize in the nationwide New Concept Composition Competition. After studying English and law at Shandong University, she completed a graduate degree in computer science at Singapore University. She is one of the most popular young writers in mainland China today. Her published works include Red Shoes (Hong Xie), Ten Tales of Love (Shi Ai) and Oath Bird (Shi Niao).

张悦然，1982年出生于山东济南，初中于山东大学附
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Erika Fatland

Erika Fatland is a Norwegian anthropologist and writer who has written multiple critically-acclaimed books, including Sovietistan and The Border. Fatland was born in Haugesund, Norway, in 1983, and studied at the University of Oslo and the University of Copenhagen.

Fatland is best known for her travel writing and has written several books: Her first travel book Sovietistan, published in 2015, was an account of her travels through five post-Soviet Central Asian nations, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It has been translated into 12 languages. This was followed by The Border: A Journey Around Russia Through North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Latv
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Parmy Olson

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous and a recipient of the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Security Cannon Award. Olson has been writing about artificial intelligence systems and the money behind them for seven years. Her reporting on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and the subsequent fallout resulted in two Forbes cover stories and two honourable mentions in the SABEW business journalism awards. At the Wall Street Journal she investigated companies that exaggerated their AI capabilities and was the first to report on a secret effort at Google’s top AI lab
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Daniel Lewis

I work as a full-time endowed senior curator of the history of science and technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum & Botanical Gardens in Southern California—and in a related vein—am a writer, college professor, and environmental historian. At the Huntington, I manage the documentary heritage (rare books, archival collections) related to modern (>1800) history of science and technology, working broadly across the natural and physical sciences.

I write mostly about the biological sciences and their intersections with evolution, policy, culture, history, politics, law, and literature. I hold the PhD in History and have had postdocs at Oxford, the Smithsonian, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and elsewhere. My 2012 book (The Feather
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Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He is a correspondent in Washington, D.C. who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2014). Based on eight years of living in Beijing, the book traces the rise of the individual in China, and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. He was the China Correspondent at The New Yorker magazine from 2008 to 2013. He is a contributor to This American Life on public radio, and Frontline, the PBS series. Prior to The New Yorker, he worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for
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Prachi Gupta

Prachi Gupta is an award-winning journalist and former senior reporter at Jezebel. She won a Writers Guild Award for her investigative essay “Stories About My Brother.” Her work was featured in The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Marie Claire, Salon, Elle, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
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Abigail Leonard

Abigail Leonard is an international reporter and news producer, previously based in Tokyo, where she was a frequent contributor to NPR, Time Magazine, and New York Times video. Before moving to Japan, she wrote and produced news documentaries as a staff producer for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned an Overseas Press Club Award, a National Headliner Award, an Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism and a James Beard Media Award Nomination. She now lives in Washington DC with her husband and three children.
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