Adventures Browsing the Library - How to Find Your Next Book Project with Paul French

Since first becoming a user of the HKU Library twenty-five years ago, Paul French has mined its resources for material that has subsequently formed the backbone of his work. The source for many biographies, histories, novels, podcasts, and magazine articles have often come from HKUL collections. From discovering what exactly a Fox Spirit is and why you should worry if you meet one to finding lost lives in forgotten old memoirs, HKUL has proved to be a treasure trove. Such a hoard of great books in fact that the library doesn’t always realise everything it has – the old, and long thought lost, Foochow Club Library lies scattered throughout the stacks of HKUL just awaiting reassembly. A talk on how to constructively meander through miles of shelves while profitably procrastinating among the stacks with the New York Times bestselling author and HKUL aficionado.

About the speaker
Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award winner for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. His most recent book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir has received much praise with The Economist writing, ‘…in Mr French the city has its champion storyteller.’ Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils are currently being developed as movies. He is currently working on a biography of the inspirational year (1924/1925) Wallis Warfield Spencer, later the Duchess of Windsor, spent in China for publication in 2024.