Weina Dai Randel is the award-winning author of four novels, Night Angels, The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Moon in the Palace and The Empress of Bright Moon, a historical duology about Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor. Weina is the winner of the RWA RITA® Award, a National Jewish Book Awards finalist, and a two-time Goodreads Choice Awards Best Historical Fiction nominee. Her novels have received starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Shelf Awareness and rave reviews from other publications such as Historical Novel Review, RT Book Reviews, and Book Reporter. Weina is also the recipient of the Mass Cultural Council’s art grant in 2023.
Her novels have been translated into thirteen languages, including Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.
The first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII, Weina has been frequently invited to speak at universities, libraries, conferences, book festivals, orthodox and reformed synagogues, and other organizations in the US.
Born in China, Weina came to the United States at twenty-four, when she switched to English and began to speak, write and dream in her second language. She holds an MA in English from Texas Woman’s University in Texas. She has worked as the subject-matter expert for Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA program and as an adjunct professor. Interviews with Weina have appeared on WFAA’s Good Morning Texas and in such publications as World Literature Today, Texas Jewish Post, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Los Angeles Review of Books. After living in Texas for years, Weina now resides in Boston with her loving husband, two children, and a family of chipmunks in the backyard.
