48 American novelists of Asian descent

Aliette de Bodard is a French-American speculative fiction writer. She is of French/Vietnamese descent, born in the US, and grew up in Paris. French is her mother-tongue, but she writes in English. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer specialising in image processing and is a member of the Written in Blood writers group.

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is an author and editor of 20 books. She co-founded PAWWA or Philippine American Women Writers and Artists; and also founded Philippine American Literary House. Brainard's works include the World War II novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, The Newspaper Widow, Magdalena, and Woman With Horns and Other Stories. She edited several anthologies including Fiction by Filipinos in America, Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, and two volumes of Growing Up Filipino I and II, books used by educators.

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan was an English-language Filipino novelist and poet who immigrated to America on July 1, 1930. He never returned to the Philippines and he spent most of his life in the United States. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want.

Elaine Castillo is an American writer. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, Castillo moved to London and later received a MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. She was a three-time recipient of the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize for prose while at UC Berkeley, and she has also been nominated for the Pat Kavanagh Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Gatewood Prize.

Steph Cha is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song, Follow Her Home (2013), Beware Beware (2014) and Dead Soon Enough (2015). Her most recent book is the stand-alone crime fiction novel, Your House Will Pay (2019), which won the LA Times Book Award.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictee. Cha was considered to be an avant-garde artist. Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. In her works, such as Dictee, Cha took language apart and experimented with it in her writing. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictee, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictee is taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.

Diana Chang was a Chinese American novelist and poet. She is best known for her novel The Frontiers of Love, one of the earliest novels by an Asian American woman. She is considered to be the first American-born Chinese to publish a novel in the United States.

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.

Frank Chin is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.

Sook Nyul Choi is a Korean American children's storybook author.

Susan Choi is an American novelist.

Margaret Dilloway is a Japanese American author best known for her novels How To Be An American Housewife and The Care And Handling Of Roses With Thorns.

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist, physician, activist, humanitarian and UNHCR goodwill ambassador. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California, a predicament that he likened to "an arranged marriage." He has published three novels, most notably his 2003 debut The Kite Runner, all of which are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan as the protagonist. Following the success of The Kite Runner he retired from medicine to write full-time.

Yang Huang is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Living Treasures, was a finalist for the 2008 Bellwether Prize and the 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards. Her short story collection, My Old Faithful, won 2017 Juniper Prize for Fiction.

Gish Jen is a contemporary American writer and speaker.

Xuefei Jin is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.

Cynthia Kadohata is a Japanese American children's writer best known for her young adult novel Kira-Kira which won the Newbery Medal in 2005. She won the National Book Award in Young People's Literature in 2013 for The Thing About Luck.

Julie Kagawa is an American author, best known for publishing and writing The Iron Fey Series consisting of 15 books including: The Iron King, The Iron Daughter, The Iron Queen, and The Iron Knight.

Alma Katsu is an American writer of adult fiction. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and has been published in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and Italy.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.

Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling Chinese American author of the novels Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee, which was chosen as The Today Show Book Club Pick. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards.

Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.

Don Lee is a Korean-American novelist, fiction writer, literary journal editor, and creative writing professor.

Tosca Lee is a bestselling American author known for her historical novels and thrillers.

Marjorie M. Liu is an American New York Times best-selling author and comic book writer. She is acclaimed for her horror fantasy comic Monstress, and her paranormal romance and urban fantasy novels including The Hunter Kiss and Tiger Eye series. Her work for Marvel Comics include NYX, X-23, Dark Wolverine, and Astonishing X-Men. In 2015 Image Comics debuted her creator-owned series Monstress, for which she was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best New Series. In 2017 she won a Hugo Award for the first Monstress trade paperback collection. In July 2018 she became the first woman in the 30-year history of the Eisner Awards to win the Eisner Award for Best Writer for her work on Monstress, though she shared the award with writer Tom King, who won for his work on other books.

Malinda Lo is an American writer of young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, Adaptation, Inheritance, and A Line in the Dark. She also does research on diversity in young adult literature and publishing.

Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth.

Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, which won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013, and What Lies Between Us (2016), which won the Sri Lankan National Book Award for best English novel and the Godage Award.

Milton Atsushi Murayama was an American novelist and playwright. A Nisei, he wrote the 1975 novel All I Asking for Is My Body, which is considered a classic novel of the experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawaii before and during World War II.

Celeste Ng is an American writer and novelist. She has released many short stories that have been published in a variety of literary journals. Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, released on June 26, 2014, won the Amazon Book of the Year award, as well as praise from critics. Ng's short story Girls at Play won a Pushcart Prize in 2012, and was a 2015 recipient of the Alex Awards. Her most recent novel is Little Fires Everywhere. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Fae Myenne Ng is an American novelist, and short story writer.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other accolades, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from an American Author from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nguyen is also a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture and South East Asia.

Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. She is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

Ruth Ozeki is an American-Canadian author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. Her books and films, including the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), seek to integrate personal narrative and social issues, and deal with themes relating to science, technology, environmental politics, race, religion, war and global popular culture. Her novels have been translated into over thirty languages. She teaches creative writing at Smith College where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Ed Park is an American journalist and novelist. He was the executive editor of Penguin Press.

Linda Sue Park is a Korean-American author who published her first novel, Seesaw Girl, in 1999. She has written six children's novels and five picture books. Park's work achieved prominence when she received the prestigious 2002 Newbery Medal for her novel A Single Shard. She has written the ninth book in The 39 Clues, Storm Warning, published on May 25, 2010.

Nina Revoyr is an American novelist and children's advocate, best known for her award-winning 2003 novel Southland. She is also executive vice president and chief operating officer of Children's Institute, Inc., which provides clinical, youth development, family support and early childhood services to children and families affected by trauma, violence and poverty in Central and South Los Angeles.

Bienvenido N. Santos was a Filipino-American fiction, poetry and nonfiction writer. He was born and raised in Tondo, Manila. His family roots are originally from Lubao, Pampanga, Philippines. He lived in the United States for many years where he is widely credited as a pioneering Asian-American writer.

Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995), a detailed account of See's family history, and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007) and Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan received honorable mentions from the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.

Amy Ruth Tan is an American author known for the novel The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted into the film The Joy Luck Club in 1993 by director Wayne Wang.

Adrian Tomine is an American contemporary cartoonist. He is best known for his ongoing comic book series Optic Nerve and his illustrations in The New Yorker.

Vu Hoang Tran is a Vietnamese American writer. His debut novel, Dragonfish, was released in 2015.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a Taiwanese-American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.

Wang Ping is a Chinese-American professor, poet, writer, photographer, performance and multimedia artist. Her publications have been translated into multiple languages and include poetry, short stories, novels, cultural studies, and children's stories. Her multimedia exhibitions address global themes of industrialization, the environment, interdependency, and the people.

Maureen Crane Wartski was a naturalized American author She wrote many novels for children and young adults. Wartski's Eurasian heritage and her deep connection to the natural world inspired many of her novels which address such issues as racism, identity and bullying.

Raymond Kin Wong is an American actor and writer. He is the author of the award-winning novel, The Pacific Between. He was also named as one of Pittsburgh Magazine's 25 Most Beautiful People in 2007.

Shawn Hsu Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He has served as the Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program (2003–06), Chair of the Department of English (1997–2002), and Director of the Creative Writing Program (1995–97) at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1984 and teaches courses covering critical theory, Asian American studies, which he is considered a pioneer in, and fiction writing. Wong received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California Berkeley (1971) and a master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University (1974).

Hanya K Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii.