Samuel Hawley

Samuel Hawley was born and grew up in South Korea, the son of missionary parents. After earning BA and MA degrees in history from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he returned to East Asia for two decades to teach, first in Japan and then Korea, retiring in 2007 as an associate professor of English at Yonsei University in Seoul.It was in Japan that Hawley started writing for magazines and newspapers on topics ranging from travel and Japanese fashion to sumo wrestling and fishing at downtown tsuribori. By the late 1990s he had turned his attention to books, notably The Imjin War, the most comprehensive account in English of Japan’s sixteenth-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China. His other Asia-themed books are America’s Man in Korea and Inside the Hermit Kingdom, concerning George C. Foulk, America’s diplomatic representative in Seoul at the time of Korea’s opening to the West. Hawley switched his focus to popular nonfiction after returning to Canada in 2007. His first work in this new vein was Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties, which received starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. He followed this with I Just Ran: Percy Williams, World’s Fastest Human, named one of the five “Best Sports Books of 2011” by the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). He has most recently turned his hand to writing historical fiction with his first novel, Bad Elephant Far Stream.