About Michelle Wan
Michelle Wan was born in 1942
in Kunming, China, in the middle of an air raid (the attending physician
took cover while she made her way into the world). She spent her early years in India, moving with her family between Calcutta and Delhi in the cool season and the hill stations of Kashmir in the hot. When Michelle was
five, the family moved to the US, where she grew up.
She studied anthropology at Stanford University and continued there for graduate studies in
cinematography, a course she aborted for lack of “nose oil” (what film makers
of the day lubricated their cameras with).
Her nose was too small.
Life subsequently took
Michelle to live in France, England and Brazil before depositing her in Canada, where she has remained. Prior to adopting writing as a full time metier, Michelle completed an M.A. in Geography at
the University of Guelph
and worked in a variety of areas including international development;
international higher education; program evaluation and most recently
addictions.
Wild orchids rank high among
Michelle’s many enthusiasms, but she also loves dogs, hiking, most things
French, people of all sorts, and any kind of good food, not necessarily in that
order. The only things she doesn’t much care for are boiled chicken’s feet and
eggs from hell (those sulfurous smelling 1000 year-old eggs that her
grandmother, a tiny Chinese woman with bound feet, used to urge on her when she
was a child).
Michelle currently lives in Guelph,
Ontario with her husband, Tim Johnson, a tropical horticulturist, and their two dogs, Downtown Max and Quel Jazz.
She and Tim go yearly to the Dordogne to photograph and chart wild orchids. The Death in the Dordogne series of mystery novels draws its inspiration from that part of the
world. Her first hand knowledge of that
region and these shyly beautiful flowers is clearly felt in her three novels, Deadly Slipper, The
Orchid Shroud, and her latest, A
Twist of Orchids (Doubleday Canada, April 26, 2008). She is
currently working on a fourth.
Most recently Michelle trekked
through the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China, and thinks she may be one
of the only Canadians to ever see rare Chinese orchid, Cypripedium farreri, in the wild.
For more information about A TWIST OF ORCHIDS or to
schedule an interview with
Michelle Wan, please contact:
Bob Coltri,
519-471-0224, rcoltri@execulink.com
R. J. COLTRI & Assoc., Publicity & Marketing, London.
