SAMUEL HAWLEY

www.samuelhawley.com

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Samuel Hawley is a writer. His books are highly eclectic. He has written about 16th-century East Asian history, 19th-century Korean-American relations, Olympic sprinting and land speed racing and a circus elephant named Topsy who was electrocuted in 1903. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

BIOGRAPHY

Samuel Hawley was born and grew up in South Korea, the son of missionary parents. After earning BA and MA degrees in history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he returned to East Asia with his wife to work as a teacher for nearly two decades, first in Japan and then Korea, ending in 2007 as an associate professor of English at Yonsei University in Seoul. He additionally served for three years as head of Yonsei’s 3,000-student Communicative English Department, and as publications chairman and editor for the Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch. He continues to serve as editor of the Society’s annual journal Transactions, the oldest Korean studies journal in the world, published since 1900.

It was in Japan in the early 1990s that Samuel started writing for magazines and newspapers on topics ranging from Japanese fashion and international travel to the world of sumo wrestling, daimyo clocks and fishing at urban tsuribori. By the late ‘90s he had turned his attention to books. His most notable work from this period is The Imjin War, a 700-page narrative account of Japan’s sixteenth-century invasion of Korea and attempted conquest of China, an event of seismic importance in the history of East Asia. It took him more than four years to research and write. He next tackled US Navy ensign and American diplomat George C. Foulk, Washington’s representative in Seoul at the time of Korea’s opening to the West. Foulk, one of the first Westerners to learn to speak Korean and to travel extensively in the country, was perhaps the foremost Western expert at the time on the “Hermit Kingdom.”

After returning to Canada in 2007, Samuel began writing popular nonfiction full-time. His first work in this new vein was I Just Ran: Percy Williams, World’s Fastest Human (Ronsdale Press) about one of Canada’s greatest Olympic athletes. He followed this with Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties (Firefly Books), which received starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.