Bound: An Expatriates Journey to China and Beyond
04 October 2014, 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Venue: Rouge, Jalan Bisma, Ubud
Cost: Free

A Literary memoir explaining why expatriates choose to live and work in very different cultures to their own. Combining personal experience with interviews carried out in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Bound:An Expatriates Journey to China and Beyond was long-listed for the Proverse International Prize and for the 2014 Australian Book Review Calibre Prize. To be launched by Ian Burnet

Christine Lavender

Christine Lavender’s first doctorate was in education, and her second in creative writing. During her University teaching career she authored and edited two academic books and published articles in international refereed journals. She contributed to an anthology of creative writing, Relay in 2011. She was Academic Director of a design and business college in Shanghai, China and had an association with the city between 2002 and 2012. Her memoir Bound:An Expatriates Journey to China and Beyond emerged from these experiences. It breaks new ground in its focus on expatriates who by taking risks and, “turning to the foreign” attract both challenges and new opportunities.

Ian Burnet

Ian Burnet has spent 30 years living, working and travelling in Indonesia. Fascinated by the diverse cultures and history of the archipelago, he believed the story of the tiny islands of Ternate and Tidore and their effect on world history needed to be told. His book Spice Islands (2011) tells the history, romance and adventure of the spice trade over 2000 years. It has received critical acclaim and has been described as “a wonderful book – a triumph of passion and scholarship”.
His next work, East Indies (2013), tells the story of the 200 year struggle between the Portuguese Crown, the Dutch East Indies Company and the English East India Company for trade supremacy in the Eastern Seas. The story begins in Malacca, one of the world’s biggest trading ports in the 16th century, documents the founding of Batavia (Jakarta) one of the world’s biggest trading ports in the 17th century and concludes with the founding of Singapore and Hong Kong, some of the world’s biggest trading ports today.