Awards | About

Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Leftover Woman, Searching for Sylvie Lee, Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. Her books have been chosen by Read with Jenna, CBS New York, Book of the Month, LibraryReads, Indie Next, Goodreads Choice Awards, Belletrist, Discover Great New Writers, and as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick. Most of her work is in development for film and television.

She has been chosen for numerous honors including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, an Orange New Writers title and the Sunday Times Short Story Award international shortlist. She was one of twelve contemporary authors asked by the Agatha Christie estate to write an original, authorized Miss Marple story for Marple: Twelve New Mysteries.

Jean immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood while living in an unheated, roach-infested apartment. In between her undergraduate degree at Harvard and MFA in fiction at Columbia, she worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer. Jean is trilingual, fluent in Dutch, Chinese and English, and studied Latin for seven years. 

She has appeared on The Today Show and Good Morning America, and spoken at many schools and venues including Harvard University, Columbia University, Talks at Google and the Tucson Festival of Books.  A television documentary was filmed about Jean and her work.

She reviews for the New York Times Book Review and has served as fiction judge for International Thriller Writers, Tucson Festival of Books, Ragdale, and San Miguel Writers Conference. Her work has been published in more than twenty countries and is taught in schools across the world. After living in the Netherlands for many years, she now lives in the New York area.

The youngest of seven children and a girl at that, I was a dreamy, impractical child who ran wild through the sunlit streets of Hong Kong.  No one was more astonished than my family when I turned out to be good at school. We moved to New York City when I was five and my only gift was taken from me since I did not understand a word of English. 

We lost all our money in the move to the United States.  My family started working in a sweatshop in Chinatown.  My father took me there every day after school and we all emerged many hours later, soaked in sweat and covered in fabric dust.  Our apartment swarmed with insects and rats.  In the winter, we kept the oven door open day and night because there was no other heat in the apartment. That was the inspiration behind my debut novel, Girl in Translation.

As I slowly learned English my talent for school re-emerged. When I was about to graduate from elementary school, I was tested by a number of exclusive private schools and won scholarships to all of them.  However, I'd also been accepted by Hunter College High School, a public high school for the intellectually gifted, and that was where I wanted to go. 

By then, my family had stopped working at the sweatshop and we'd moved to a run-down brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that had been divided into formerly rent-controlled apartments.  It was a vast improvement, but there was still no money to spare.  If I didn't get into a top school with a full financial aid package, I wouldn't be able to go to college.  Although I loved English, I didn't think it was a practical choice and devoted myself to science instead.  In my last year in high school, I worked in three laboratories.

I was accepted early to Harvard and I'd done enough college work to take Advanced Standing when I entered, thus skipping a year and starting as a sophomore in Physics.  It was in college that I realized that I could follow my true calling, writing, and switched into English and American Literature. I put myself through Harvard, working up to four jobs at a time to do so: washing dishes in the dining hall, cleaning rooms, reading to the blind, teaching English, and acting as the director of a summer program for Chinese immigrant children. Like many working-class people, I didn’t have the opportunity to take lessons for extracurricular activities as a child. It was in college that I also discovered I loved to dance.

I graduated with honors, then while looking for a day job, stumbled across a newspaper ad that read: “Wanted: Professional Ballroom Dancer, Will Train.” Terrified and unprepared, I went to the dance studio in an oversized red dress, black pumps I had covered with permanent marker to disguise their bald patches, and a long red scarf wrapped around my head like a turban. Somehow, despite all this, they invited me back for the audition, and then for the three-week training class. Ultimately, they hired me. I worked as a professional ballroom dancer for Fred Astaire in New York City for three years. I trained, did shows and competitions, and taught students how to waltz, swing, and mambo. For a young immigrant woman who had never fit in, who had never felt graceful, it was a great personal transformation. That was the basis for my second book, Mambo in Chinatown.

After winning Top Female Professional at Fred Astaire National Dance Championships, I left ballroom dance to pursue my true dream, writing. I went to Columbia to do my MFA in fiction.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with a Dutch man. I moved to the Netherlands and went through the process of adjusting to another culture and learning another language again. I taught English at Leiden University and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. I also worked as a Dutch-English translator until I finished Girl in Translation.  After it was accepted for publication, I quit to write full-time. 

After my decades-long marriage ended in divorce, I moved back to the New York area. I had always loved reading fantasy romance and I turned to romantasy novels for comfort, strength and hope. It finally occurred to me to write one myself. Dominion, the first book in The Silk and Iron Trilogy, was the result. This is the book that helped me heal and I hope it can bring readers that same sense of joy and renewal.