Elsie Sze

Ever since her high school days in her native Hong Kong, Elsie Sze had wanted to become an author. Sze left Hong Kong at 22, to pursue graduate studies at the University of Toronto, and, later, the University of Chicago. After two consecutive careers as teacher and librarian, she knew it was time to follow her passion for fiction writing, if she was to realize her life's dream. She gave up her job as librarian in 2001, to devote time to her first novel. The result was Hui Gui: a Chinese story, published in 2005, a family saga set against China and Hong Kong in the 60 years leading to the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Sze is an avid world traveler, often to exotic places, which form the subjects for her stories. Her second novel, The Heart of the Buddha, published in 2009, is set in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. It was a finalist in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award, 2009, in the Multicultural Fiction category. In 2013, Sze won the inaugural Saphira Prize, a literary prize offered by Women in Publishing Society, Hong Kong, for unpublished writing, for her manuscript "Ghost Cave". Her book Ghost Cave: a novel of Sarawak was published in March, 2014. Of her prize-winning novel, Sze says, "Ghost Cave talks of ghosts, yet it's not a ghost story; rather it's a story of love transcending time and space, of bonding and reconciliation as the basis of the human condition." "Ghost Cave" has been translated into French for distribution.

Sze's latest new novel "Sea Fever" was published on September 20, 2022. Set in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, now an independent republic, the novel is a mystery-thriller about the evils resulting from one of the worst human-orchestrated environmental disasters of all time, the killing of a once vibrant, life-sustaining, and fourth largest inland sea in the world, the Aral Sea in Central Asia.

"Sea Fever" is now an Amazon Bestseller.

Elsie Sze's website: www.elsiesze.com.