Francie Lin

Francie Lin is a Taiwanese-American novelist, whose debut novel The Foreigner won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.

Background Lin was born to a Taiwanese American immigrant family, and was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah.

After high school, Lin graduated from Harvard University. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan for the years of 2001–2002, where she gathered material for her first novel, The Foreigner. She currently lives with her husband, historian and writer Stephen Platt, and family in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The novel also received strong reviews from the Los Angeles Times ("Genre-wise, The Foreigner is best described as a thriller, rife with murders, drugs, secrets and betrayals. But you won't find any of the cardboard characters, clunky writing, or clichéd conventions that too often mar suspense fiction. Lin is equally attentive to description and plot...Lovely, detailed writing makes you care about what happens to these characters...A sequel would prove most welcome"), the San Francisco Chronicle ("Lin demonstrates admirable range and skill in The Foreigner. She's capable of writing both marvelous humor and scenes of utter darkness in her tale of a naive man at a complete loss for dealing with the world."), the Baltimore Sun ("Lin has much to say about the clast of East and West and the sometimes shaky bonds of family, wrapping her sly observations in an entertaining coating of ever-propulsive narrative that turns Emerson from a rich boy into a warier, sleeker, wiser man.") and Kirkus Reviews (which called it " darkly funny debut").

The book was also a June 2008 BookSense pick, and also received positive reviews from the Boston Globe, Colin Harrison, Vroman's Bookstore and Breaking the Fourth Wall.