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Kirstin Chen

Biography

Kirstin Chen

Kirstin Chen is the award-winning, bestselling author of three novels. Her latest, COUNTERFEIT, has been recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, Haper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Parade and more. Television rights have been optioned by Sony Pictures. Her previous two novels are BURY WHAT WE CANNOT TAKE and SOY SAUCE FOR BEGINNERS.

She has received fellowships and awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Real Simple, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Zyzzyva and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Stanford University.

Born and raised in Singapore, she lives in San Francisco. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

Kirstin Chen

Books by Kirstin Chen

Counterfeit
by Kirstin Chen - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ava Wong is a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son and a beautiful home. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling. Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, 20 years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. She has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.

Soy Sauce for Beginners
by Kirstin Chen - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Gretchen Lin, adrift at the age of thirty, leaves her floundering marriage in San Francisco to move back to her childhood home in Singapore and immediately finds herself face-to-face with the twin headaches she’s avoided her entire adult life: her mother’s drinking problem and the machinations of her father’s artisanal soy sauce business.