Wena Poon is a prisoner of destiny - although perhaps not quite the destiny she would like to imagine. The Singapore-born American author is a lawyer by trade. That she also writes fiction, some of it concerning lawyers, will inevitably invite comparisons ... with John Grisham.
Poon, however, envisages a slightly different career path and more rarefied comparisons. Of her stories, set in such divergent locations as Hong Kong and Cambridge, New York and Hanoi, she says: 'They capture a particular group of people - young, transnational, urban professionals like bankers, lawyers, architects, journalists, engineers, business executives - who constantly have to travel for work.'
Her recently released collection, The Proper Care of Foxes, is, she says, 'really a reflection of the lives of people who read and live The Financial Times. The job of a writer is to capture reality and there are pockets of lyricism in the lives of this travelling class, and there is poetry in the world of work.
'J.G. Ballard said in Miracles of Life that he was drawn to science fiction because none of Virginia Woolf's characters ever put petrol in a car,' she says. 'I am quite determined to be the modern Virginia Woolf, whose characters not only have to refill gas tanks, but lead wondrously gorgeous, romantic existences while worrying about mobile-phone roaming charges. I write about people who fall in love on Facebook, whose lives are changed by a single e-mail. This is reality.'
Poon could be one of her characters. Almost perpetually travelling, sometimes landing at home bases in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, she is participating in the International Writers' Workshop hosted by Baptist University, Kowloon Tong - a sort of homecoming, given that she lived here from 2000 to 2002. Nine writers from around the planet are in residence for up to a month, during which they will undertake cultural exchange trips to Zhuhai and Shandong. Poon was invited on the strength of her nomination last year for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, for her collection Lions in Winter. The nine authors deliver public lectures and recitals and sit on university panels discussing aspects of literature; not all of them, however, have day jobs.
At the recent Singapore Writers' Festival, Poon, jauntily complying with a fatiguing schedule of endless panel discussions, interviews and solo presentations, was described as 'unstoppable' by one observer. But in that she has little choice.