Oh My Goddess!, or Ah! My Goddess! in some releases, is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kōsuke Fujishima. It was serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon from September 1988 to April 2014, with its chapters collected in 48 tankōbon volumes. The series follows college sophomore Keiichi Morisato and the goddess Belldandy who moves in with him in a Buddhist temple; after Belldandy's sisters Urd and Skuld move in with them, they encounter gods, demons and other supernatural entities as Keiichi develops his relationship with Belldandy. The manga series has been licensed for English-language release by Dark Horse Comics.
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Bai Sheng is a fictional character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature. Nicknamed "Daylight Rat", he ranks 106th among the 108 Stars of Destiny and 70th among the 72 Earthly Fiends.
Alison Watt OBE FRSE RSA is a British painter who first came to national attention while still at college when she won the 1987 Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Rory MacLean FRSL is a British-Canadian historian and travel writer who lives and works in Berlin and the United Kingdom. His best known works are Stalin’s Nose, a travelogue through eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Magic Bus, a history of the Asia Overland hippie trail; and Berlin: Imagine a City, a portrait of that city over 500 years. In 2019 John le Carré wrote that MacLean "must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time."
Guess was a Taiwanese television variety show, hosted by Jacky Wu and other hosts, that began on 4 July 1996 and ended its run on 18 August 2012. It was broadcast in Taiwan, weekly on Saturdays from 22:00 to 00:00 on free-to-air China Television (CTV) (中視) and syndicated to be broadcast in Singapore weekly on Saturdays 23:30 on free-to-air MediaCorp Channel U and Malaysia's 8TV weekly on Sundays 17:00 to 18:30.
Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer, primarily of fantasy books, for which she has won many awards.
Aya Goda is Japanese writer, and an artist. She has lived in Japan since 1998. Aya's first book Tao: On the Road and on the Run in Outlaw China was awarded the Noma Prize for Non-Fiction from Kodansha in 1995. The English version of the novel was selected as one of the 50 books touted as the "most worth talking about" World Book Day 2009.
Cao Yong was a Chinese artist whose work depicts Tibet. He spent a year alone in the mountains of Tibet and the paintings he produced were exhibited in Beijing in early 1989. He was subsequently arrested by the Chinese Authorities, with the Beijing Police burning seven of the paintings. He escaped with his fiancée Aya Goda to Japan.
Burma Chronicles is a 2007 Canadian graphic novel written and illustrated by Guy Delisle. Burma Chronicles is a travelogue about Delisle's time spent in Burma with his young son, Louis, and his wife, Nadège, an administrator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Originally written in French, the book was translated into English by Helge Dascher and published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2008.
Like a Butterfly is a Japanese slice of life romance shōjo manga series written and illustrated by suu Morishita and published by Shueisha in Margaret magazine. Volume 1 was released on July 25, 2012 and a total of 12 volumes have been published. At New York Comic Con 2022, Viz Media announced that they licensed the series for English publication. The series is published in French by Panini, which released the first volume on February 4, 2015. It was adapted into a drama CD.
ShaoLan Hsueh is a London-based Taiwanese author, designer, venture capitalist, tech entrepreneur, podcast host, speaker, and the creator of Chinese language learning system Chineasy. As a college undergraduate in Taiwan, she wrote several bestselling software books that were widely distributed by Microsoft, and co-founded Internet company pAsia. In 2005, while studying for a master's degree at Cambridge, she founded Caravel Capital. Hsueh introduced Chineasy during a 2013 TED Talk, and subsequently authored several books and other learning tools to distribute the method.
Kodansha Ltd. is a Japanese privately held publishing company headquartered in Bunkyō, Tokyo. Kodansha publishes the manga magazines Nakayoshi, Afternoon, Evening, Weekly Shōnen Magazine, and Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine, as well as the more literary magazines Gunzō, Shūkan Gendai, and the Japanese dictionary Nihongo Daijiten. Kodansha was founded by Seiji Noma in 1910, and members of his family continue as its owners either directly or through the Noma Cultural Foundation.
The Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustrations was organised by Asia/Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU) supported by the Noma International Book Development Fund from 1978 to 2008. It was an annual competition, ending in 2008.
Helen Kay Wang is an English sinologist and translator. She works as curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum in London. She has also published a number of literary translations from Chinese, including an award-winning translation of a Chinese children's book.
Kikuko Tsumura is a Japanese writer from Osaka. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Dazai Osamu Prize, the Kawabata Yasunari Prize, and the Oda Sakunosuke Prize.
Yukiko Motoya is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress. She has won numerous Japanese literary and dramatic awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, and the Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award. Her work has been adapted multiple times for film.
Wave, Listen to Me! is a Japanese manga series by Hiroaki Samura. It has been serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon since July 2014, with its chapters collected in ten tankōbon volumes as of April 2023. The manga is published in North America by Kodansha Comics. An anime television series adaptation produced by Sunrise aired from April to June 2020 on MBS's Animeism block. A television drama adaptation aired on TV Asahi from April to June 2023.
Kim Sa-ryang was a Korean writer. He wrote in a variety of genres including novels, plays, reports, and reviews, in two languages, Korean and Japanese. His career as a writer first began in Japan after publishing a short story written in Japanese, and his Korean-written works were later published in Korea. For his short story "Bit soge ," written in Japanese, he became the first Korean to be nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. He went to China in 1945 to join the army fighting for Korea's liberation. After the country's independence, he mostly lived and wrote in North Korea and died in 1950 during the Korean War.
