Jamyang Norbu

Novelist, historian, playwright and polemecist, Jamyang Norbu is known as one of the leading exile Tibetan writers at work today, principally on account of his numerous essays on Tibetan politics, history and culture appearing regularly on his blog and other websites, and in such books as Illusion & Reality, Buying the Dragon’s Teeth, Shadow Tibet and Don’t Stop the Revolution.

Although he has been denounced by the People’s Daily (Beijing) as ‘…the radical Tibetan separatist’ and condemned by the exile Tibetan leadership for his critical writings on the Dalai Lama’s policies, Norbu is one of the few exile writers read inside Tibet and even in China, where translations of his essays have appeared on various websites. The Beijing based Tibetan poet and blogger, Tsering Woeser, has described him as the ‘Lu Xun of Tibet’.
His novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes won the Crossword Book Award (‘India’s Booker’) in 2000, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Norbu was a member of the Tibetan resistance force in Mustang, on the Nepal-Tibet frontier in the early 70s. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.