Chang’an: a Story of China & Japan

Wena Poon is an American novelist and photographer. Her first novel Alex y Robert, about a Texan woman bullfighter in Spain, was adapted by the BBC and broadcast as a 10-episode Radio 4 series. Her play The Wood Orchid, about the Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan, was professionally staged in Westminster Abbey, London by the Bush Theatre. Author of 13 books of literary fiction, she won the UK’s Willesden Herald Short Story Prize and was nominated for France’s Prix Hemingway and the UK’s Bridport Prize for Poetry. She was also a two-time nominee for Ireland’s Frank O’Connor Award and the Singapore Literature Prize. She was awarded writing fellowships in France, Scotland, and Hong Kong. Wena is known for her work on diaspora culture, transnational identity, and gender roles. Since 2002, her cosmopolitan stories have been widely anthologized and translated in French, Italian, and Chinese. From 2011 through 2017, her short stories are studied by thousands of high school students in Singapore sitting for the Cambridge O Level Exams in English Literature. They have also been studied by British, American, Hong Kong and Singapore academics as examples of transnational literature. Wena has been the subject of feature interviews in numerous international publications, most notably The Japan Times, South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Marie Claire, Huffington Post and Vice. Born and raised in Singapore, Wena graduated magna cum laude in English Literature from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is a lawyer by profession. www.wenapoon.com