Wena Poon (方慧娜, born 1974) is a lawyer and novelist based in the United States. She writes English-language fiction. Her work has been seen by academics in the UK, US and Singapore as representative of the transnationalism of her generation. Biography Poon began writing novels and plays in her early teens. She obtained her degrees in English literature and law from Harvard University. She is a corporate finance lawyer by profession. Born and raised in Singapore, she has lived in Hong Kong, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Austin. Her family is of Chinese Teochew descent and has lived in Singapore for five generations. According to Poon her grandmother and the story of her family as well as her home country during WWII served as a major inspiration to her as a writer. She speaks English, French, Mandarin, Teochew, Cantonese and Hokkien and reads Japanese script. These languages are sometimes used in her English-language fiction. She claimed that she had grown up with multilingual radio broadcasts and television series including M*A*S*H. Poon herself described her childhood as "audio-visual". She is a photography enthusiast and has incorporated some of her photographs as illustration to her novella "Kami and Kaze". Poon is also a fan of anime, manga as well as the works of the film director and actor Takeshi Kitano. Literary prizes Since her first book was released in 2008, Poon has won the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (UK), and has been nominated for the Frank O'Connor Award (Ireland), Le Prix Hemingway (France), the Bridport Prize in Poetry (UK), the Singapore Literature Prize, and the Popular Readers Award (Malaysia). Short fiction collections Lions in Winter (2007) portrays the Singapore Chinese diaspora in America, Canada, Australia and England. It was published in the US and Europe by Salt Publishing London and in Asia by MPH Group Publishing. It was a Straits Times best-seller in Singapore, was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted for the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize. In 2009, Poon released The Proper Care of Foxes. Using Voltaire's "Il fault cultiver notre jardin" as a theme, the stories take place in Singapore, Hanoi, Hong Kong, London, New York, and Palo Alto. The title story is about a high-flying young London banker who was laid off during the recession and his chance encounter with an old classmate from Malaysia. Published by Ethos Books, it earned