Ian Stewart–a foreign correspondent for thirty years and the author of eight fiction books and one non-fiction book–was born in Whangarei, New Zealand, on 21 September 1928. He attended Auckland Grammar School and gained a Diploma in Journalism at Auckland University.
He began his journalism career on the New Zealand Herald, where he worked from 1946 to 1951. In 1951, he went to Australia, where he joined the Sydney Morning Herald. He was subsequently employed by the Melbourne Herald, from where he was recruited by the Australian Associated Press and Reuters to report from Asia. He was a Reuter correspondent in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Djakarta. In 1960 he was hired by the New York Times and for the next 14 years reported on events in China and East Asia for that newspaper, with Hong Kong as his base. During that time he travelled to most countries in the region. In 1974, he was appointed as the New York Times’ Australian correspondent and transferred to Sydney. From 1976 he worked in public relations and as editor of a business publication, while writing several books.
In 1991, he returned to Asia as a free-lance correspondent, working out of Singapore first and then Kuala Lumpur. He wrote for the Australian, the Daily Telegraph (London), and the South China Morning Post. In 2001, he returned to Australia.
Ian Stewart began writing fiction when he was a young journalist in Australia and had two short stories published in The Bulletin in 1953.
His first success with a novel was The Peking Payoff, which was published in hard cover in 1975 by Macmillan Inc in New York and in paperback by Hamlyn. Hamlyn subsequently published The Seizing Of Singapore, Deadline In Jakarta, and An H-Bomb For Alice. In 1988, he published Reunion, a novel, under the imprint of Gordian.
In 2003, his non-fiction work, The Mahathir Legacy, was published by Allen & Unwin.
In 2012, he published his Asian saga Nanyang, a 700-page historical novel, the result of more than ten years' research and writing, as an Amazon eBook and paperback. It reflects his interest in the history of East Asia and the emigration of Chinese to South-East Asia (focusing mainly on Java), among them the ancestors of his wife. Nanyang covers a period of Asian history from the middle of the seventeenth century to the founding of Singapore and the death of Sir Stamford Raffles, and highlights European powers’ rivalry in the region. He republished Nanyang in 2014 with a 20-page comprehensive guide to the book’s fictional characters and historical figures.
He published two smaller fiction works, The Unintentional Jihadi in 2012 and The Lust of Comrade Lu in 2014, as Amazon eBooks.
Ian Stewart married Truus Tiang Nio The in 1957. She died in 1987. He has two sons, Ian Charles Stewart and Andrew Gordon Stewart.
Source: Biography supplied by author.
