About the Author

Ian Rowen is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Geography and Urban Planning at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, and was a Fulbright Fellow and postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica. His work on Taiwan's culture and politics has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, International Journal of Transitional Justice, The New York Times, the BBC Chinese and elsewhere. His translation credits include Tibetan Environmentalists in China: The King of Dzi by Liu Jianqiang (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and several international award-winning Taiwanese films such as Splendid Float and Spider Lilies, directed by Zero Chou.

Reviews

"Transitions in Taiwan is a literary exploration of the forty violent years during which the Taiwan people were ruled by an authoritarian power. The seven carefully selected and beautifully translated stories in this volume, in addition to presenting to the English readership some of the country's best literary talent, offer an invaluable glimpse into a difficult part of Taiwan's history, while reflecting on the possibilities for its imaginative reconfigurations by means of fiction." -Asian Review of Books"[The stories express that] in an era where legal and extrajudicial state expropriation underpins social transitions, anything is fair game [... and that] elsewhere the violence is mental. Four of the six tales involve imprisonment or persecution, and here the transitions extend beyond social change to pose existential questions... A thought-provoking addition to the expanding canon of White Terror-era literature in translation." -Taipei Times