
Weina Dai Randel is an award-winning, internationally bestselling author of six historical novels, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Last Rose of Shanghai, which was also optioned for film; Night Angels, which was long listed for the Massachusetts Book Awards; The Master Jeweler; and the Empress of Bright Moon duology. She is a winner of the RWA RITA Award, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards, and a two-time Goodreads Choice Awards Best Historical Fiction nominee. Her novels have been translated into seventeen languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.
The first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII, Weina was frequently invited to speak at universities, libraries, conferences, book festivals, orthodox and reformed synagogues, and other organizations in the US.
Born in China, Weina came to the United States at twenty-four, when she switched to English and began to speak, write and dream in her second language. She holds an MA in English from Texas Woman’s University in Texas. She has worked as an adjunct professor and also as the subject-matter expert for Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program, where she designed the curriculum for the romance genre. Interviews with Weina have appeared on WFAA’s Good Morning Texas and in such publications as World Literature Today, Texas Jewish Post, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
After living in Texas for years, Weina now resides in Boston with her family.