About

Elizabeth Wong (Liz) grew up in the quiet suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she was the only student in her state school to take SPM (GCSE-equivalent) exam paper in English Literature.

She graduated with a BSc in Yale University, with a double major in English and Geology. She wrote the very first draft of the novel that grew into We Could Not See The Stars as her final year project, as well as a thesis on sediment transport in the Alps.

Liz left the US to finish a MSc in Petroleum Geoscience at Imperial College London, UK, where she remains to this day (with a brief detour to Aberdeen), and acquired a husband and two kids along the way. She is also a geologist, working in the energy industry, with a stint in investment banking. She is currently focusing on her writing and on various geology projects.

Liz is interested in stories of Malaysia and also of this large world we live in—deserts, seas and rocks. The Earth that we know is a brief snapshot of the incredible stories in its life—and we are impoverished by knowing only our sliver of time. Geology is not just about rocks, but the stories they contain.

Her debut novel, “We Could Not See The Stars,” a literary speculative fiction, is published by John Murray Press in July 2021. An early draft was longlisted in Bath Novel Award and Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.

She has presented at the Geopoetry 2020 conference and has been published in Sinking City Lit Mag, and Wasafiri; see here for a list of her other work.