Ian Stewart

I was a foreign correspondent in Asia for 30 years, which included fifteen years reporting for The New York Times with Hong Kong as my base.

I had earlier been a Reuter correspondent, working for the agency in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I began writing fiction when I was a young journalist in Australia and had two short stories published in a leading magazine.

My first success with a novel was The Peking Payoff, which was published in hard cover in 1975 by Macmillan Inc in New York and in paperback by Hamlyn. Hamlyn subsequently published The Seizing Of Singapore, Deadline In Jakarta and An H-Bomb For Alice.

In 1988, I self-published Reunion, also a novel.

Following my ten years as a freelance correspondent, from 1991 to 2001, based first in Singapore and then Malaysia, I wrote The Mahathir Legacy, a non-fiction work, which was published in Australia in 2003 by Allen & Unwin. It is available as both an Amazon eBook and paperback.

My major work, the historical fiction saga Nanyang, published as an eBook and paperback, reflects my interest in the history of East Asia, where I have spent so much of my adult life, and, in particular, the emigration of Chinese to South-East Asia, among them the ancestors of my wife Truus The Tiang Nio.

I have recently published The Unintentional Jihadi, a thriller in a light-hearted vein, which had its gestation in the final years of my time as an Asian correspondent, and The Lust of Comrade Lu, which is very relevant to the fraught relations between Hong Kong and China.

My latest work, The Cut-Throat Razor Murders, is the first book I have set in New Zealand, the land of my birth.

I am publishing some of my older works as Kindle editions. I began with Reunion and followed it with The Peking Payoff.

Reunion centers on the threat of war between Indonesia and Australia, which the main protagonist hopes to avert by revealing a secret from his Indonesian past.

In the Peking Payoff, a Hong Kong taipan seeks to secure the British Colony's future at a meeting with China's premier unaware of plans to kill the Chinese leader and implicate the magnate with the coerced help of his drug-addicted wife

For further information about me, see my blog: http://iangstewart.typepad.com/my_weblog/