The Next Alexander McCall Smith?

The latest subject of January Magazine’s Author Snapshot interview series is Diane Wei Liang, author of The Eye of Jade, a novel about a female detective in Beijing who’s endeavoring to find an ancient jade that was lost during the Cultural Revolution. Liang’s most interesting response is to the question, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?”

I had wanted to be a writer when I was about 14 or 15. However my mother, who was a professor of Chinese literature, discouraged me because, at that time, writing was a dangerous profession in China. Writers had been among the first to be purged in the political movements of Mao. So I put the idea to the back of mind and went on to study psychology and then business in the United States. I only went back to visit that idea again when my second child was born six years ago.

The full interview can be found here.