Linda Jaivin

Linda Jaivin is the author of the international bestselling novel Eat Me – a kind of Sex and the Sydney before there was Sex and the City – as well as six other works of fiction, many of which have been published internationally, and four critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, including the China memoir Monkey and the Dragon, the Quarterly Essay Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World and Beijing, part of Reaktion Press’s Cityscopes series and a love letter to the city to which she first travelled in 1980. 

Her 2009 novel A Most Immoral Woman was based on the true story of the affair between the great Australian China correspondent George E Morrison and an American nymphomaniac heiress in China and Japan in 1904. Her latest novel, The Empress Lover, is another kind of love letter to Beijing mixed up with a mystery, a fantasy and a tragedy. The Infernal Optimist, a black comedy set in an immigration detention centre, was shortlisted for the 2007 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.