Nicole Mones (born 1952) is an American novelist and food writer.
As of March 2014 she has published four novels, including Lost in Translation , which appeared in 1998, A Cup of Light (2002), and The Last Chinese Chef , (2007), and in March 2014, "Night in Shanghai. Lost in Translation won the 2000 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize [1] awarded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester for best work of fiction by an American woman, and also the Pacific Northwest Annual Book Award, [2] a five-state prize. "The Last Chinese Chef" was the only American finalist for the international Kiriyama Prize [3] and also a World Gourmand Award winner in the Chinese cookbook category, although it is a novel with no recipes. Mones' novels have been translated into at least 17 languages. She also contributes articles about Chinese cuisine to Gourmet magazine, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, [4] The Washington Post, [5] and The Los Angeles Times. [6]
Mones did business in China for 18 years from 1977, running a textile concern, and all four of her published novels are set mainly in China. In all of them, a love story is entwined around a detailed and accurate description of a facet of Chinese culture: in Lost in Translation, the heroine becomes involved in an archaeological expedition to find the remains of Peking Man; the action of A Cup of Light turns around a rare collection of Chinese porcelain; The Last Chinese Chef, as its name suggests, features Chinese cuisine; and Night in Shanghai is the story of African-American musicians in Shanghai during the jazz age and what happened when World War II exploded around them.
Mones currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize.
Lost in Translation is a novel written by Nicole Mones, published by Bantam Dell in 1999. It is the story of an American woman trying to lose her past by living as a translator in China. Emotionally charged and erotic, this widely translated bestseller has been universally praised for its authoritative portrayal of a China rarely captured in contemporary fiction. The novel's accolades include the Kafka Prize for the year's best work of fiction by any American woman, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association Book Award for the year's best novel from the five northwestern states, and the New York Times Book Review's Notable Book and Editor’s Choice.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), and The Dutch House (2019). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ruth Reichl, is an American chef, food writer and editor. In addition to two decades as a food critic, mainly spent at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and a novel, and been co-producer of PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, culinary editor for the Modern Library, host of PBS's Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. She has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.
The Kiriyama Prize was an international literary award awarded to books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Its goal was to encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the region. Established in 1996, the prize was last awarded in 2008.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi is a Malaysian writer living in London.
Alan Wong is a chef and restaurateur known as one of 12 co-founders of Hawaii Regional Cuisine. They came together to form an organization to create a new American regional cuisine, highlighting Hawaii's locally grown ingredients and diverse ethnic styles. In 1994 they all came together and compiled a cookbook, The New Cuisine of Hawaii, to be sold for charity. Wong and Choy are alumni of the Kapiolani Community College Culinary Arts program. Wong had several restaurants in Hawaii, as well as one in Japan.
Aimee Phan is a Vietnamese-American author. She was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first novel, We Should Never Meet, was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian among other publications. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She worked as an assistant professor in English at Washington State University from fall 2005 to summer 2007, and now teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California and resides in Berkeley, California with her husband and two kids.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Marianne Wiggins is an American author. According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, Wiggins writes with "a bold intelligence and an ear for hidden comedy." She has won a Whiting Award, an National Endowment for the Arts award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2004 for her novel Evidence of Things Unseen.
Nadeem Aslam FRSL is a British Pakistani novelist. His debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds, won the Betty Trask and the Author's Club First Novel Award. His critically acclaimed second novel Maps for Lost Lovers won Encore Award and Kiriyama Prize; it was shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Award, among others. Colm Tóibín described him as "one of the most exciting and serious British novelists writing now".
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is a Chinese American writer. She previously taught writing and literature in the Graduate MFA Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design until 2015. Bynum is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Her brother is musician Taylor Ho Bynum.
Nell Freudenberger is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.
Anne Mendelson is an American food journalist and culinary historian. She lives in Hudson County, New Jersey, with her cat, and believes that the medley of ethnic cooking in her neighborhood, combined with memories from her childhood in rural Pennsylvania, provided inspiration for her writing.
Julia Lovell is a British scholar and prize-winning author and translator focusing on China.
Carrie Brown is an American novelist. She is the author of seven novels and a collection of short stories. Her most recent novel, The Stargazer's Sister, was published by Pantheon Books in January 2016.
Canlis is a fine dining restaurant serving New American and Pacific Northwest cuisine in Seattle, Washington. Situated in the Queen Anne neighborhood, the restaurant has views of Gas Works Park and the Cascade Mountains. It was built by Peter Canlis in 1950, and remains family-owned. The restaurant currently employs 94 people.
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman is an American author of literary fiction, poetry, true crime, memoir, and nonfiction. Her poetry and first three books were originally published under the pseudonym Sherri Szeman.
Linda LeGarde Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. An enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune.