Simon Elegant

Simon Elegant is China bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Taiwan. Previously, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Asia including Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Elegant was the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, which won the 2019 readers’ choice award from TripAdvisor as the world’s best restaurant.

He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), about China’s greatest poet, Li Bai, a novel that succeeded “in summoning up the man and his age in ways that are both deliciously foreign and all too familiar,” according to the New York Times.