John Givens studied art in Kyoto for four years and worked in Tokyo for eight years as a writer and editor. He received an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow. Givens has been writing fiction about seventeenth-century Japan and has just published The Plum Rains, a collection of short stories set in that period. Givens has also published three novels in the United States: Sons of the Pioneers, A Friend in the Police, and Living Alone, as well as non-fiction books, short stories and essays in a variety of literary journals in the U.S., Japan and Europe. He currently lives in Howth.