It's a good question, and one I've often struggled to answer myself, for a variety of reasons. Simply put, WE Singh is the pen name of Warren Singh-Bartlett, a former journalist and non-fiction author, who is now an emerging Fantasy Sci-fi novelist.

As of May 2025, WE has one novel (the opening salvo in the Saga of the Seal Bearer) called A Djinnfernal Conspiracy, and a spin-off novella available only to subscribers to his mailing list called The Khartoum Caper.

WSB grew up all over Asia, including stints in Pakistan (where he was born) and Taiwan as a child, and then in India, Japan, Lebanon, Dubai and China as an adult. He also managed to fit in three years in Brazil in one of the world's most beautiful cities, Rio de Janeiro, as a teen, an experience that very nearly cost him his 'O' Levels and subsequent academic trajectory. For this, he blames the beaches of Leblon and Ipanema, both of which he was forced to pass in the school bus every morning. That he didn't spend more time bunking off school (or as they like to say in America 'playing hooky') is probably testament to never quite remembering to pack swimming trunks or a towel.

After four years at college in London (hello SOAS!) studying all things South Asian, including a one-year side course in a dead language last spoken in the 16th Century just to be able to read devotional love poetry dedicated to the Lord Krishna, written by an heretical sect that raised eyebrows (and eventually tempers) with its own devotion to dressing up and re-enacting the famous bouts of love-making between Krishna and his cowherdesses (the sect was all-male) as an an expression of their divine love, he landed a job in Japan, largely on the basis of having just watched Yasujiro Ozu's classic 1953 film  Tokyo Story a few days before his interview, and hence being able to pass himself off as actually knowing anything about that fascinating country, at all.

Tiring of 'teaching' he decided to move to China, setting off overland from London in late 1997. Thanks to what had been intended as a brief 3-day visit to Lebanon (on the basis that as he was then in Syria and was probably never going to be in that part of the world again, so it was probably worth nipping over the border for a quick shufti), he got sidetracked, fell into journalism, and ended up spending the next 20 years in one of the world's least probable, most misunderstood, and utterly magnificent cities, Beirut.

There, he wrote his first three non-fiction books, all about Beirut and Lebanon, and discovered that the kibbe and sfiha he had eaten in Rio as a teen were not, in fact, Brazilian dishes, but Lebanese. The love affair with the country that ensued was profound, passionate, and life-altering.

He reluctantly left Beirut in 2018, and after a brief but largely infelicitous stint in Spain - for reasons that shall forever remain unnamed - he finally made good on his old ambition to move to China. With impeccable timing, he arrived in Beijing in March 2020, the first day of mandatory hotel quarantines and just 6 days before China locked its doors for three years and went into isolation from the world.

Five years on, he's still in Beijing (but thankfully no longer locked-down), and is now contemplating another move in order give himself a chance to concentrate on writing more novels.