Robert Blair Osborn

Robert Blair Osborn is a native of Seattle and grew up in Palo Alto and Berkeley. He studied intensive Mandarin at Beijing University in the late 1980s and worked in Japan for 7 years. He lives in Sacramento.

His first novel, "Lovers & Comrades," is set in China during the Second World War and in the US during the McCarthy Era. It explores the psychological fallout on an American foreign service officer who returns to the States during the 1950s and is blacklisted from the State Department.

His poetry collection, "Makeshift Escape Hatches: Poems and Polaroids," contains stories of lust, sex, heartbreaks, and hangovers.

His favorite authors include Kazuo Ishiguro, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sasha Hemon, Maggie O'Farrell, Yukio Mishima, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov.