Lee Murray author, editor
Lee's list of must-read Asian horror writers to discover
Below, you'll find an alphabetical list of fabulous Asian and Asian diaspora writers of horror, dark fiction, and the supernatural to discover, including their websites, newsletter links, and, on occasion, free stories for you to sample. Please note, the focus here is writers of horror and speculative works, so some stories might be upsetting to some readers. Look for these writers on awards lists and festival programming. Please scroll down! Your new favourite writer might just be at the bottom of this list... Also includes some recommended anthologies.
I'll try to keep these entries as up-to-date as possible. Please drop me a line if something needs updating.
NADIA Bulkin
Nadia Bulkin is the author of the short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017). She has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award five times. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She has two political science degrees and lives in Washington, D.C.
Website: https://nadiabulkin.com/
Read Nadia short story "Intetropical Convergence Zone" here: https://nadiabulkin.com/fiction/intertropical-convergence-zone/
Grace CHAN
Grace Chan is an Aurealis and Norma K Hemming Award-shortlisted speculative fiction writer. She can’t seem to stop scribbling about brains, minds, technology, alien worlds, relationships, power, identity, and hidden parts of the self. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Going Down Swinging, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, and many other places. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, is about staying in love after mind-uploading into virtual reality (Affirm Press, 2022). Grace was born in Malaysia and lives in Melbourne, Australia. In her other life, she works as a psychiatrist. She is represented by Jacinta Di Mase Management.
“Set in a shocking and inevitable near future, Chan’s debut novel is a cultural epiphany: a desperate end-of-the world search for connections that will transcend generations, imperfections—even death. Exquisitely written and startlingly real, Every Version of You establishes Chan as speculative fiction’s newest virtuoso.”—Lee Murray, USA Today Bestselling author, and four-time Bram Stoker Award® winner.
Website: https://gracechanwrites.com/
Newsletter: https://gracechanwrites.substack.com/
Read Grace's free story, "To the Dark Side of the Moon" in Hexagon 2022 (page 10): https://hexagonmagazine.ca/issue-9-summer-2022/
Tania Chen
Tania Chen is a Chinese-Mexican queer writer. Their work was selected for the Brave New Weird anthology by Tenebrous Press, and has also appeared in Unfettered Hexes by Neon Hemlock, Apparition Lit, Strange Horizons, Pleiades Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Longleaf Review, and The Dread Machine, among others. They are a graduate of the Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop of 2021 and a recipient of the HWA's Dark Poetry Scholarship. Currently, they are assistant editor at Uncanny Magazine.
Twitter @archistratego
Mastodon @archistratego@wandering.shop
Read Tania's free poem free story, Half Quarter Life Crisis on Strange Horizons: http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/half-quarter-life-crisis/
Rin Chupeco
Rin Chupeco is a nonbinary Chinese Filipino writer born and raised in the Philippines. They are the author of several speculative young adult series, including The Bone Witch, The Girl from the Well, The Never-Tilting World, and Wicked as You Wish. Formerly a graphic designer and technical writer, they now write fiction full-time and live with their partner and two children in Manila. They can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @RinChupeco.
Website: https://www.rinchupeco.com/
Read and early version of Rin's short story "Kapre: A Love Story" which appears in Black Cranes, here: http://philippinegenrestories.com/2011/05/kapre-a-love-story/#more-37
Elaine Cuyegkeng
Elaine Cuyegkeng is a Chinese-Filipino writer. She grew up in Manila, where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. She writes about eldritch creatures, monsters with human faces. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner, their tiny faerie daughter and their cat familiars.
Elaine has been published in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, Rocket Kapre. You can find her on @layangabi on Twitter.
Website: https://benebellwen.com/
Read or listen to Elaine's Eugie Foster Award-winning story "The Genetic Alchemist's Daughter", which first appeared in Black Cranes, on Pseudopod #731:
https://pseudopod.org/2020/11/13/pseudopod-731-the-genetic-alchemists-daughter/
ELIZA CHAN
Eliza Chan is a second-generation British Chinese author. She writes about East Asian mythology, British folklore and madwomen in the attic, but preferably all three at once. Her work has been published in The Dark, Podcastle and Fantasy Magazine. Eliza's debut novel, Fathomfolk is avaialble from Orbit / Hachette. You can find her on twitter @elizawchan
Website: https://www.elizachan.co.uk/
Listen to Eliza's short story "Kikinasai" (in Thirty Years of Rain, 2016) on Pseudopod: https://talestoterrify.com/episodes/tales-to-terrify-333-eliza-chan/
Ashley Deng
Ashley Deng is a Canadian born Chinese Jamaican writer with a love of fantasy and all things Gothic. She studied biochemistry with a particular interest in making accessible the often-cryptic world of science and medicine. When not writing, she spends her spare time overthinking society & culture, and genre fiction.
Website: https://ashedeng.ca/
You can read Ashley's story "Degustation" over at Nightmare Magazine: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/degustation/
Maria Dong
Maria Dong is the author of Liar, Dreamer, Thief. Her short fiction, articles, and poetry have been published in dozens of magazines, like the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Augur, Nightmare, Khoreo, Fantasy, Apex, and Apparition Literary Magazine.
Website: https://www.mariadong.com/
You can read Maria's free short story, "The Cabbit" in Nightmare Magazine: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-cabbit/
Tori Eldridge
Tori Eldridge is the IndieBound national bestselling author of the Lily Wong mystery thriller series—The Ninja Daughter, The Ninja’s Blade, The Ninja Betrayed—and the Brazilian horror, Dance Among the Flames. Her shorter works appear in the inaugural reboot of Weird Tales Magazine and numerous anthologies, including “Missing on Kaua‘i” in Crime Hits Home. She was awarded the 2021 Crimson Scribe Award for Best Book of the Year and nominated for the 2019 Anthony, Lefty and Macavity Awards for Best First Novel. Her screenplay The Gift was a semi-finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. Tori was born and raised in Honolulu—of Hawaiian, Chinese, Norwegian descent—and currently resides in Los Angeles, where she earned a fifth-degree black belt in To-Shin Do ninja martial arts.
Website: https://torieldridge.com
Read Tori's story "Call Me Dumping" in Suspense Magazine (p. 4) 2014: https://www.suspensemagazine.com/files/Suspense_Magazine_December_2014.pdf
Geneve Flynn
Geneve Flynn is Chinese, born in Malaysia, but she now calls Australia home. She is a two-time Bram Stoker Award®- and Shirley Jackson Award-winning fiction editor, author, and poet. Her works have been nominated and shortlisted for the British Fantasy, Ditmar, Aurealis, Australian Shadows, Elgin, and Rhysling Awards, and the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of the 2022 Queensland Writers Fellowship. Co-editor (with Lee Murray) of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women and poetry contributor to Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken.
Website: www.geneveflynn.com.au
Read or listen to Geneve's short story "Little Worm" (from Black Cranes) for free on Pseudopod #758:
Vanessa Fogg
Vanessa Fogg is an American writer of Thai and Chinese descent, born and raised in the American Midwest. She received a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences and a minor in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She received her doctorate in Molecular Cell Biology from Washington University in St. Louis. After years at the laboratory bench, she now works as a freelance technical medical/scientific writer and editor. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Lightspeed, Podcastle, GigaNotoSaurus, The Future Fire, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4. Her fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn, is available in print and ebook from Annorlunda Books. Her debut collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists and Other Stories, is forth coming from Interstellar Flight Press.
Website: www.vanessafogg.com
Read or listen to Vanessa's short fiction, 'The Bones Beneath" on Podcastle:
https://podcastle.org/2022/06/07/podcastle-738-the-bones-beneath/
Kiyomi Appleton Gaines
Kiyomi Appleton Gaines is a writer of fairy tales and other fantastical things. She was a 2018 Contributing Editor at Enchanted Conversation, and contributor to Mad Scientist Journal 2019 Spring Quarterly. Her work has also appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, and The Grimm Reaper. Find more of her writing at a work of heart and follow her on Twitter @ThatKiyomi. Kiyomi is a third-generation Asian-American of Japanese descent. She lives in Bend with her husband and two marmalade cats.
Website: https://workofheartkag.wordpress.com/
Read Kiyomi's free short story "The Wolf Between the Worlds" (among others) on her website: https://workofheartkag.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/the-wolf-beneath-the-world/
doungjai Gam
doungjai gam is a Thai-Lao-Eastern European who ended up planting roots in New England. she is the author of glass slipper dreams, shattered and watch the whole goddamned thing burn. her short fiction and poetry have appeared in LampLight, Wicked Haunted, Nox Pareidolia, and The Cape Cod Poetry Review, among other places. born in Thailand, she currently resides in southern Connecticut with author Ed Kurtz
Website: www.vanessafogg.com
Read or listen to Vanessa's short fiction, 'The Bones Beneath" on Podcastle:
https://podcastle.org/2022/06/07/podcastle-738-the-bones-beneath/
Thomas ha
Thomas Ha is a former attorney turned stay-at-home father who enjoys writing speculative fiction during the rare moments when all of his kids are napping at the same time. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles.
Website: thomashawrites.com
Read Thomas's short story, "Balloon Season", for free at Fusion Fragment, Issue #3, Nov 2020: https://www.fusionfragment.com/issue-3/
Image for Thomas's short story "To be a Happy Man", forthcoming from Lightspeed Magazine. Art by Carrion House.
Cassandra Khaw
Malaysian-born Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, and former scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Khaw's work can be found in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Khaw's first original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a British Fantasy award and Locus award finalist, and their novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, is published by Nightfire.
Various chapters of Cassandra's horror novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, can be read for free on Tor's website: https://www.tor.com/2021/10/04/excerpts-cassandra-khaw-nothing-but-blackened-teeth-chapter-one/
Ryder Kinlay
Ryder Kinlay smashed onto the scene showing the world they breed them tough in Australia's Outback.
Kinlay's best selling selling debut REHAB is a gritty and graphic tale of life in an Australian drug and alcohol rehab facility. It’s a mixed bag in genre with elements of extreme and paranormal horror. She is also the creator of David Longbottom’s MISadventures, a satirical splatterpunk series.
Rosalie M. Lin
Rosalie (who has also published under the name Jessica) is a twenty-something fiction writer and essayist who has published in both English and Chinese. Her writing for The New York Times Chinese Website won a SOPA Award for Editorial Excellence in 2017, and her short story “Red Mask” (Shimmer 2016) was honorably mentioned in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Best Horror of the Year.
Website: https://rosaliemlin.com/
Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito
Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito is a Chinese American writer based in Portland, Oregon. When she’s not spending time with her family outdoors, she’s crafting short stories in horror, sci-fi, fantasy, or whatever genre-bending she can get away with. Her work can be found in Nailed Magazine, Red Penguin’s Collections, Buckman Journal’s Issue 006, Flame Tree Press’s Asian Ghost Short Stories, Strangehouse’s Chromophobia, and Moms Who Write’s Order of Us.
Website: www.francesippolito.com
Read Frances's story "An American Dream" for free in Nailed here: https://www.nailedmagazine.com/features/an-american-dream-by-frances-ippolito
Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer and an immigrant from Fujian. She is a member of HWA, SFWA, and Codex. She is an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Humber School for Writers, and the University of Edinburgh. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, Uncanny, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop's 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun (2023), Smol Tales from between Worlds (2023) and I am AI (2023). Her short story "Give me English" was shortlisted for a Nebula Award. Find her on Twitter (@AiJiang_) and online (http://aijiang.ca).
“Eerie and palpable with unrequited longing, Linghun is a quiet tour de force, a diasporic ghost story of half-life, family, and deferred dreams. Ai Jiang’s writing is fiercely evocative and resounds with meaning and clarity. Linghun is tale that lingers.” —Lee Murray, four-time Bram Stoker Awards®-winner and author of Tortured Willows
Website: https://aijiang.ca/
AlMA Katsu
Japanese-American Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of six novels, most recently Red Widow, The Deep, and The Hunger. She is a graduate of the master's writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University. Prior to the publication of her first novel, Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies. She lives in West Virginia with her husband.
Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores a supernatural threat beyond what anyone saw coming; the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it’s too late.
Website: https://almakatsubooks.com/
KP Kulski
K.P. Kulski was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Korean mother and American-military father. A wanderer by design and later by habit, she’s lived in many places within the United States as well as Japan. A former history professor, her fiction is often inspired by history; most evident in her gothic horror novel, Fairest Flesh, from Strangehouse Books and novella, House of Pungsu, from Bizarro Pulp Press. She now resides in Northeast Ohio with her husband and children in a house in the woods. Find her on Twitter @garnetonwinter.
“As sharp as broken porcelain and delicate as a peony’s petals, House of Pungsu is the story my spirit hungered for. K.P. Kulski shifts rice paper doors to reveal the darkest truth.”—Lee Murray, USA Today Bestselling author, Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award® winner.
Website & newsletter: https://www.garnetonwinter.com/
Listen to K.P. Kulski read an excerpt from her story "What The Sea Gives" which appears in Don't Break the Oath: Women of Horror Anthology Volume Four: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUh_m-t841k
Gabriela Lee
Gabriela Lee teaches creative writing and children's literature at the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. Her fiction has been published in the Philippines and abroad, most recently in the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (Omnium Gatherum, 2020). She received the 2019 PBBY-Salanga Grand Prize, which was published as the picture book Cely’s Crocodile: The Story and Art of Araceli Limcaco-Dans (Tahanan Books, 2020). She recently contributed the chapter “Digital Liminality and Identities in Philippine Young Adult Speculative Fiction” to Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories, edited by Sharmani Gabriel and Bernard Wilson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Website: www.sundialgirl.com
Angela Liu
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer based in NYC and Tokyo. She researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan and currently splits her time between taming a feral toddler and navigating the demonic world of IT consulting. Her work is published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Fusion Fragment, among others.
Find her on Twitter: @liu_angela
Read Angela's story, "Ppaka" for free over on The Dark magazine: https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/ppaka/
USman Malik
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani-American writer and doctor whose fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award, the Crawford Award, and the British Fantasy Award. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Million Writers Award, and twice the Nebula. His stories have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and venues such as Tor. com, The Apex Book of World SF, the US in Flux (Center for Science & Imagination at Arizona State University), and WIRED Magazine among others. Website: https://www.usmanmalik.org/product/midnight-doorways-fables-from-pakistan/
Aoko Matsuda
Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Yukio Mishima Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. Her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married was published by Strangers Press in the UK in 2016. In 2019, her short story “The Woman Dies” was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray, and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese. Where the Wild Ladies Are was translated into English by Polly Barton.
RENA MASON
Rena Mason was born in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. She is a first-generation American horror fiction author of Thai-Chinese descent and a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. Her literary debut, The Evolutionist, won the Bram Stoker Award® for Best First Novel in 2013, while her novella East End Girls was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction. She is co-editor, with Vince Liguno, of the HWA's ground-breaking anthology Other Terrors. Her co-written screenplay RIPPERS was a 2014 Stage 32 /The Blood List Presents®: The Search for New Blood Screenwriting Contest Quarter-Finalist. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, The International Screenwriters' Association, and the Public Safety Writers Association.
“Rena Mason is a cultural visionary, and arguably horror’s best kept secret. Take The Evolutionist, where she transcends genre with mind-bending psychological twists, lush writing, weird-science plotting, and razor-sharp commentary on the isolation and otherness of modern suburbia. Nightmarish yet surprisingly compelling, Mason’s debut novel is a must-read, and it’s just the beginning...” —Lee Murray, four-time Bram Stoker Awards®-winner and author of Grotesque: Monster Stories
Website: https://www.renamason.ink/
J.A.W. McCarthy
Bram Stoker Award-nominee J.A.W. McCarthy is the author of Sometimes We’re Cruel and Other Stories (Cemetery Gates Media, 2021) and Sleep Alone (Off Limits Press, 2023). Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Vastarien, LampLight, Apparition Lit, Tales to Terrify, and The Best Horror of thehttps://pseudopod.org/2022/11/18/pseudopod-839-the-only-thing-different-will-be-the-body/ Year Vol 13 (ed. Ellen Datlow). She is Thai-American and lives with her husband and assistant cats in the Pacific Northwest. You can call her Jen on Twitter @JAWMcCarthy.
Website: www.jawmccarthy.com
Read or listen to Jen's Bram Stoker Award-nominated short story, "The Only Thing Different Will be the Body" on Pseudopod 839: https://pseudopod.org/2022/11/18/pseudopod-839-the-only-thing-different-will-be-the-body/
ANNIE MCCANN
Annie McCann is an Indonesian-Australian Muslim, born and raised in the western suburbs of Sydney, NSW. An avid reader, book blogger and emerging writer, she created a network of readers called Read3r’z Re-Vu in 2009, co-founded a network of Muslim writers called The Right Pen Collective in 2019 and is one of the Australia Reads Ambassadors endorsing reading for all ages. You will also find Annie emceeing celebrity and literary panels every year at conventions such as Supanova, Comic Con, Book Fair Australia and many more.
Annie's short story, "Twisted Elegance of the Deep Green Sea", appears in Clan Destine Press's This Fresh Hell. In this story, Indah has misgivings when her brother travels to the West Javanese tourist destination Pelabuhan Ratu, where the body of an Australian diplomat has washed up on shore... Look for Annie's upcoming middle grade novel and also a graphic novel, also exploring West Javanese myth and folklore.
Celine Murray
Celine Murray is a queer, disabled, New Zealander with a multi-faceted cultural background, including Chinese, Māori, and Scottish ancestry. A short fiction writer from a young age, she published her first collection, Seven to Seventeen, at 17 years old. She is the winner of a Sir Julius Vogel Award for science fiction and fantasy for her novella, Peach and Araxi. At university, Celine pursued her interests in linguistics and communication and now holds a Masters of Speech and Language Pathology. Though just beginning to dip her toes into the world of horror, Celine has a longstanding enthusiasm for death, with work experience in the death industry. She also enjoys embroidery, drinking tea, and playing board games with her partner.
A editor, copy-editor, manuscript assessor, and sensitivity reader, Celine can be contacted via Lee's website.
Listen to Celine read an excerpt from her essay "Fox Daughter" from Unquiet Spirits in the clip above.
ASA Nonami
A prolific writer of her own brand of sometimes gothic suspense, Asa Nonami is known for her strong women characters in a mystery genre frequently predominated by men. Nonami was born in 1960 in Tokyo and attended Waseda University to study sociology before dropping out and getting a job at an advertising agency. In 1988 she made her fiction debut with Happy Breakfast and won the Japan Mystery Suspense Award. Her other awards include the 115th Naoki Prize for The Hunter, which was adapted into a film, and the Chuokoron Prize for Literature in 2012. Her other works include The June 19th Bride, Paradise Thirty, Dramatic Children, Murderer of the Blooming Season, and Body. (Biography sourced from Words Without Borders)
Priya Sharma
Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Tor.com. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Priya is a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award winner, and Locus Award finalist, for “All the Fabulous Beasts”, a collection of her some of her work, available from Undertow Publications. “Ormeshadow”, her first novella (available from Tor), won a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award. It was a 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire finalist. Her stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Czech, and Polish. Her novella Pomegranates, PS Publishing (Dec 2022), appears on the Locus Recommended Reading List 2022.
Website: https://priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com/
Read Priya's short story "The Crow Palace" on The Dark 2018:
MM Shill
M. M. Schill currently resides in North Florida. She’s a writer, award-winning baker, graphic designer, and illustrator. When she’s not creating, she studies and teaches martial arts. Outside of those pursuits, she’s an outspoken advocate for abuse survivors. She maintains close ties to local survivor volunteer groups and help-centers. She often writes on the topic when she isn’t crafting in her speculative fiction worlds.
Read or listen to Mm Shill's short story "Oni in the Box" on Pseudopod:
https://pseudopod.org/2023/02/19/pseudopod-853-oni-in-the-box/
Christina Sng
Christina Sng is the three-time Bram Stoker Award winning author of A Collection of Dreamscapes (2020) and A Collection of Nightmares (2017), and Tortured Willows (2021). She is Elgin Award runner-up for Astropoetry (2017) Tortured Willows (2022), and a Bram Stoker Award finalist for poetry collection A Gravity of Existence (2022) and essay “Final Girl: A Life in Horror” (2020). Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art have appeared in numerous venues worldwide, including Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Interstellar Flight Magazine, Penumbric, Southwest Review, and The Washington Post. Christina is a fourth-generation Singaporean whose grandmothers were Teochew and Cantonese. Connect @christinasng.
Website: https://christinasng.com/
Yvette tan
Yvette Tan is one of the Philippines’ most celebrated horror writers. Aside from short fiction collections in English and Tagalog, she’s written a feature film that received nationwide release and co-written a libretto for a ballet that was performed by Ballet Philippines on the main stage of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. She was the official scribe of the Manila Biennale in 2018 and her story was the companion piece to the artwork that adorned the Philippine pavilion in the 2021 Frankfurt Book Fair. She co-hosted “Trese After Dark,” the behind-the-scenes companion to the Netflix hit anime “Trese.” She is a creative consultant to a Filipino game inspired by the country’s mythical creatures. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Czech, and Hungarian. Yvette's titles include the much acclaimed Waking the Dead & Other Stories, and Seek Yee Whore (2022) and Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @yvette_tan and on Facebook at @yvettetanauthor.
Trang Thanh Tran
Trang Thanh Tran writes speculative stories with big emotions about food, belonging and the Vietnamese diaspora. They grew up in a big family in Philadelphia, then abandoned degrees in sociology and public health to tell stories in Georgia. When not writing, they can be found over-caffeinating on iced coffee and watching zombie movies. She Is a Haunting is their debut novel.
Website: www.trangthanhtran.com
Twitter: @nvtran
Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese-American writer from Austin and author of Four Treasures of the Sky (Flatiron Books). Her work has appeared in Apogee, CALYX, Ninth Letter, Passages North, wildness, and The Rumpus, with essays in HuffPost, Bustle, The Cut, and HelloGiggles, among others. She is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the VONA/Voices and Tin House workshops, and holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming.
Alyssa wong
Alyssa Wong writes award-winning fiction, comics, and games. Their stories have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. Alyssa was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and their fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Alyssa’s comics credits include Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, Marvel (Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, Alligator Loki, Extreme Carnage), DC (Batwoman, Wonder Woman), and Adventure Time. Alyssa has also written for Overwatch and Blizzard Entertainment’s Story and Franchise Development. Alyssa lives in California and can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.
Website: https://www.crashwong.net
Read Alyssa's short story, Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers in Issue37 of Queers Destroy Horror! 2015:
https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/hungry-daughters-of-starving-mothers/
Bryan Thao Worra
Bryan Thao Worra is a Lao American writer with over 20 awards for his writing and community leadership including an NEA Fellowship in Literature and was a Cultural Olympian representing Laos during the 2012 London Summer Games. In 2009 he received an Asian Pacific American Leadership Award from the governor’s Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans. He also holds a 2011 Youth Media Innovation Award from the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center and won the 2014 Elgin Award for Book of the Year from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. He has presented at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Loft Literary Center, Intermedia Arts, Kearny Street Workshop, the Institute for Contemporary Art, among many others, and recently as a Visiting Artist with University of Merced Center for the Humanities. He is the first Lao writer to be professional member of the Horror Writers Association and trained several years with Asian Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy on social justice during their National Gender Equity Campaign. One of the co-founders of the National Lao American Writers Summit, he is the author of 6 books, with work appearing internationally in Australia, Canada, Scotland, Germany, France, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan. Read more at https://thaoworra.wordpress.com/
Benebell Wen
Benebell Wen is a Taiwanese American, specifically,she's Hakka on her father’s side from western Taiwan, and Hokkien (Minnan) on her mother’s side, from the deep south and what’s often referred to as the heartland of Taoist mysticism. She is the author of The Tao of Craft: Fu Talismans and Casting Sigils in the Eastern Esoteric Tradition (North Atlantic Books, 2016). An occultist, she is currently at work on an annotated English translation of the I Ching Book of Changes.
Website: https://benebellwen.com/
You can read an illustrated excerpt from Benebell's work I Ching Book of Changes here:
https://benebellwen.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/chapter-2-myths-legends-and-cultural-heroes-1.pdf
Hannah Yang
Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer from Seattle. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and other places. She writes stories that use magic and monsters to explore what it means to be human.
Website: https://hannahyang.com/
You can read Hannah's story "A Girl of Nails and Teeth", over on Nightmare Magazine: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/a-girl-of-nails-and-teeth/
And a must-read, this gorgeous story, "Eating Bitterness", in The Dark magazine: https://www.thedarkmagazine.com/eating-bitterness/
Wen Wen Yang
Wen Wen Yang writes speculative fiction. She is a first-generation Chinese American from the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University with a degree in English and creative writing.
Her fiction can be found in many places, including Fantasy Magazine and forthcoming in the Fit for the Gods anthology.
Website: https://wenwenwrites.wordpress.com/
You can read her flash fiction story "Skin Anomalies" at If There's Anyone Left, Vol 3, April 2022: https://www.iftheresanyoneleft.com/stories/wenwenyang
Isabel Yap
Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has lived in the US since 2010. She holds a BS in Marketing from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Her debut story collection, Never Have I Ever, was published in 2021 by Small Beer Press and won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Her work has been a finalist for the Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and World Fantasy Awards, and has appeared in venues including Lithub and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter.
Website: https://isabelyap.com
Newsletter: https://isabelyap.com/newsletter
Catherine Yu
Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York. She is a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop. Direwood is her debut novel from Page Street Publishing. Helga, a YA Frankenstein reimagining, is coming out in 2024.
Website: catherineyuwrites.com
Kelsea Yu
Kelsea Yu is a Taiwanese Chinese American writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. Whether through a speculative or real-world lens, her writing explores diaspora identity, twists on folklore, complicated interpersonal relationships, and characters who make unconventional choices. Kelsea’s debut novella, Bound Feet, is published through Cemetery Gates Media, and her sophomore novella, The Bones Beneath Paris, is forthcoming from Dark Matter Ink in February 2024. Her debut novel, It’s Only a Game, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Children’s in 2024. Kelsea has stories published or forthcoming in magazines such as PseudoPod, Fantasy, and Reckoning, and in various anthologies.
Website: https://www.kelseayu.com/
Yi Izzy Yu
Yi Izzy Yu left Northern China for the US in 2011. Since then, she has taught Chinese and English in high schools and colleges, given birth to the now eight-year-old visual artist Frankie Lu Branscum, and published work in magazines ranging from New England Review to Samovar and in the collections of translated Chinese weird fiction: The Shadow Book of Ji Yun and Zhiguai. Currently, she lives outside of Pittsburgh, where she teaches and translates Chinese and investigates shadows.
some recommended Anthologies
Asian Monsters (edited by Margret Helgadorttir)
Asian Monsters is the third in a coffee table book series from Fox Spirit Books with dark fiction and art about monsters from around the world. 'Another marvellous manticore of monsters: aswang, vetalas, bloodwomen, lelepah, hulijing, robot ghosts and the already-dead. And the scariest thing of all? The normalcy through which they shuffle and swoop: our monstrous world of patriarchy and privilege, of disenchantment, drone warfare and terror.' Mark Bould, 2016 Pilgrim Award winning author, critic and editor of Studies in Global Science Fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television Journal, Africa SF, and SF Now.
Where the stars Rise (edited by Lucas K. Law & Derwin Mak)
In this multi-award-winning book, follow twenty-three science fiction and fantasy authors on their journeys through Asia and beyond. Stories that explore magic and science. Stories about love, revenge, and choices. Stories that challenge ideas about race, belonging, and politics. Stories about where we come from and where we are going. Each wrestling between ghostly pasts and uncertain future. Each trying to find a voice in history.
AUTHORS: Anne Carly Abad, Deepak Bharathan, Joyce Chng, Miki Dare, S.B. Divya, Pamela Q. Fernandes, Calvin D. Jim, Minsoo Kang, Fonda Lee, Gabriela Lee, Karin Lowachee, Rati Mehrotra, E.C. Myers, Tony Pi, Angela Yuriko Smith, Priya Sridhar, Amanda Sun, Naru Dames Sundar, Jeremy Szal, Regina Kanyu Wang (translated by Shaoyan Hu), Diana Xin, Melissa Yuan-Innes, Ruhan Zhao, and Elsie Chapman (Introduction)
