Regular contributors


Rosie Milne

Asian Books Blog was created by Rosie Milne in 2013 as a platform to share English language news about literature and publishing in Asia. Rosie is a writer currently living in Singapore. She has previously lived in Tokyo and Hong Kong. She has written for a variety of publications in the UK and Asia, and is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books.

Her four novels are: How To Change Your Life, Holding the Baby, Olivia & Sophia, and, the most recent, Circumstance.
Elaine Chiew
Elaine Chiew writes the Lion City Lit column. She edited Cooked Up: Food Fiction From Around the World (New Internationalist, 2015). She has won prizes for her short fiction and has also been shortlisted in numerous competitions. Her most recent stories can be found in Potomac Review,  Singapore Love Stories (Monsoon Books, 2016), and Heartsick Diaspora (Myriad 2019). She is currently based in Singapore, from where she runs the IG live chat @booksbualbual. 
Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman writes the On translation column. She translates full-time from Chinese, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry, by authors such as Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Dorothy Tse, Xinran, Xu Xiaobin, Yan Ge, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. In 2015, she won a Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize, and in 2014, she won first prize in the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section. She gives regular talks and workshops on translation. 

Along with Eric Abrahamsen, Dave Haysom and Helen Wang, she runs the READ PAPER REPUBLIC project, posting and promoting free-to-view short stories translated from Chinese. She has contributed to literary magazines such as AsianCha, Chutzpah, and Words Without Borders, and tweets, with Helen Wang, as China Fiction Book Club @cfbcuk. She was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors, UK) from 2014-2017.

Theophilus Kwek
Theophilus Kwek is the Poetry Editor of the Asian Books Blog. His poetry collections Circle Line (2014) and Giving Ground (2016) were both shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, and his pamphlet, The First Five Storms, won the New Poets' Prize (2017). His work has appeared in The Guardian, The London Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. His most recent collection, Moving House, was published in 2020 by Carcanet Press.



Aurelia Paul 
Aurelia Paul is Managing Editor of Asian Books Blog. She writes articles covering Chinese (pre-modern), Mongolian, Singaporean, and North Korean literatures. Aurelia has BAs in Chinese Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from Boston University. Aurelia previously worked for a Taiwan-based company promoting Chinese language and cultural learning to a global audience. She is now training to be a lawyer.


Paul French
Paul French lived and worked in Shanghai for many years and published his first book on Asia in 1998. Since then another 14 have followed! French’s 2018 book City of Devils was his much-anticipated second literary non-fiction book and was a Kirkus Book of the Year. Devils followed Midnight in Peking, which was a New York Times Bestseller.

Noelle Q. de Jesus  
Noelle Q. de Jesus is a Filipino writer who was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and now lives in Singapore. She is the author of Cursed and Other Stories (Penguin Random House SEA, 2019) and Blood Collected Stories (Ethos Books Singapore, 2015), which will have a French edition coming out of Editions Do in the fall of 2020. She has an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University. 



Matthew Legare
Matthew Legare has always loved reading, writing, and history. He has combined his passions to tell stories set during little-known, but fascinating, events of the past. His style is a smooth blend of old pulp magazines and contemporary thrillers, which makes for a pulsating read. In addition to fiction, he's a big reader of history books, particularly Asian, European, and American history. Matthew would love to hear from his readers! Please contact him at https://matthewlegare.com or @mlegareauthor.


Write for us!

If you are an expert in the field of Asian literature would like to contribute to Asian Books Blog, please email Aurelia Paul at aureliap@bu.edu