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It’s fair to say Mian Mian, Hitomi Kanehara and Zita Law aren’t household names in Singapore. These best-selling authors are shaking up the literary establishments in China, Japan and Hong Kong respectively, and some of their works are not even available in English. Find out more about the women who will be gracing our shores for ‘Asia on the Edge’.

Mian Mian’s first novel, Candy, confirmed her reputation as the bad girl of Chinese popular fiction. This high-school dropout dabbled in nude modelling and deejaying before publishing a story about the druggy, lawless underbelly of a soulless industrial city. Banned by the Chinese authorities in the late ’90s, the book also went on to become an underground bestseller, helping to enshrine Mian’s reputation as China’s wild child. Her first visit to Singapore for this event, Mian today is a single mother and nightlife promoter in Shanghai, with more recent novels such as Panda Sex displaying a newfound maturity.


Hitomi Kanehara’s ethereal beauty belies a steely, unflinching bent for deeply psychotic characters and shockingly violent situations, leading her to win Japan’s top literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, at the age of 21 amid a blaze of publicity. Another high-school dropout and the daughter of a literary professor father, Hitomi went on to pen four more novels, including Autofiction, currently available in English. At 25, she is the youngest writer at the festival.



Also known as Shen Xue, Zita Law is the most mainstream author of the trio (she also made it through high school and even holds a law degree), yet she writes about ghouls and souls in an unorthodox series of romance novels. After publishing more than 60 books in traditional Chinese, Law’s impeccable tales of love still come with a twist, with such titles as Dead of Love, Pawnshop No. 8 and My Soul Burns Wild – just think of her as the mistress of the supernatural fantasy-romance genre in Asia. JL