BIOGRAPHY

Boo Sujiwaro is a neurodivergent writer and illustrator born in Bangkok, boarding-schooled in Auckland, now residing in Norwich. They’ve been published and featured in Reflex Fiction, Kotoba Japan, NAWE Magazine. Boo was selected for the Lunar Codex project as one of the literary artists whose works will be archived on the moon in a time capsule via NASA Artemis partners in 2024.

They read for BAs in Fashion Design at the Accademia Italiana and in English with Creative Writing at Keele University where they graduated with first-class honours and two awards. Boo is studying for a certificate in Editing at the Graham School, University of Chicago and has recently completed an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia. Having grown tired of caucacity, they write to decentre the linguistic hegemony of the English language through stories that evoke nostalgia for the present.

They copyedit for a Japanese poetry organisation in Tokyo, localise translations for Korean webcomic publishers, and man the register of a Thai food stall in the Norwich Market some Saturdays. In order of fluency, Boo understands English, Thai, Korean, Japanese, Danish. They identify as 100% Thai, regardless of DNA test results.

CURRENT PROJECT(S)

I’M FINE: A product of a Japanese mother and a Danish father, Arne was born with a face that couldn’t be placed on a map. In the year that Japan’s youth suicide rate reaches a record high, Arne migrates from Denmark and begins his new life in a remote city in Shiga. He meets Naoki, a young hospital patient about to end his own life. On the waterlogged rooftop, amid frostbitten flowers, their fateful encounter thrusts Arne into a world where tragedy lurks around every corner. I’M FINE, or ONLY ON YOU TODAY TOO THE SUN SHINES, investigates the unspoken crevices of adolescence and the trauma you carry with you into adulthood—the novel, ultimately, asks: is loving someone enough to save them?

HANBIT: What do you do when the collision of real life and the internet makes it impossible to escape the seismic stardom of your abusers? Riya is Buddhist. Riya is Thai. Riya is English-educated. Riya is a critically acclaimed novelist elevated to social media prominence by K-pop fandom power. Riya is being haunted by the ghost of a Korean schoolgirl whose dream was to become a K-pop idol. Riya wants to be a respected literary figure, but her Korean ghost wants to sing under glittering stage lights in a miniskirt. HANBIT, or THINGS WE MISTAKE FOR LOVE, blends academic language with second-person voice to tell a satirical story about the exploitation of Thai bodies in the K-pop industry, Theravada Buddhism in late capitalism, and Asian people fighting on the internet.

RUMI RAN is an MG fantasy with crossover appeal. It sits with Gaiman and Riddell, reminiscent of Burton’s comedic darkness, and with a touch of early Hardinge.

ACADEMIC INTERESTS

Boo does research and speaks on Ethnic Representation in Contemporary Children’s Literature and Decolonisation Practices in Publishing. Their other academic interests include Netizenship and Asian Pop Cultures Studies, Korean Internet Novel Cultures and Literatures, Postcolonial Literatures and frameworks, and Fan Studies. They would like to do a PhD that looks at fan cultural productions and Asian digital narratives/literatures via a postcolonial lens, or a mixture of studies to that effect.

Boo is currently open to guest-lecture requests in ‘East Asian Narratives & the Art of Webnovels’ and ‘Netizenship: Anglophone Fandoms and Popular Fiction in East and Southeast Asia’.