Jocelyne Allen

Prior to leaving Canada for a decade-long exile in Sweden and Japan, Jocelyne Allen's published writing was largely confined to two critically acclaimed fanzines. Great Day For Up obsessed over Dr. Seuss and smoking, while The Official Publication of the Independent Republic of Josi devoted its pages to the trials and tribulations of lording over a small, fictitious dictatorship.

But Allen's first paid work was as a columnist for a Japanese magazine. Her "Oh, Japanese" column focused on her perceptions of Japan as a foreign resident. She had been writing the column for over a year when she finally went looking for a copy. After asking a blushing bookstore clerk in carefully rehearsed Japanese, she was led to the adult section of the shop, where she discovered that the Selected Stories monthly which had been faithfully publishing her column was a softcore porn magazine.

After subsequent stints in a touring Japanese taiko drumming ensemble and as a teacher at a high school for delinquent Japanese girls, Allen found herself living in Tokyo, working full-time as an editor and translator at a downtown agency. It was on her daily three-hour commute on overcrowded rush hour trains that she began what would become her first published novel, You and the Pirates, in an attempt to ignore the men in white gloves cramming her into the trains so the doors would close.

When she noticed her Japanese skills outpacing her English ability, Allen decided it was time to return to her homeland and moved to Toronto in the summer of 2007. Presently working as a freelance Japanese translator, she no longer has to force her way through the rush-hour crowds and she is much happier for it. She spends her days translating a wide variety of pieces from Japanese into English and is currently working on a collection of manga.

Although Japanese and English are her two strongest languages, Allen also speaks Swedish and French and is menulingual in German. She has a degree in Mathematics and spends much of her free time trying to convince people that math is fun.