Diane Wolff

DIANE WOLFF published "Tibet Unconquered: An Epic Struggle for Freedom" with Palgrave/​MacMillan in September of 2010. The volume appeared on the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese invasion.

Diane is pleased to announce that she has been nominated for a Women's Courage In Journalism Award for 2011.

The volume is an in-depth examination of the history of international relations between China and Tibet. The work begins with the conquest of China during the Mongol Empire, the basis of China's claim to Tibet.

She traces the history of Chinese state-building up to the fall of the dynastic system, the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the invasion of Tibet by the PRC in 1950. She also analyzes the ideological foundations of Chinese rule in Tibet.

The conclusion contains a new and original regional solution for the twenty-first century. The volume contains a foreword by Robert Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and founder of Tibet House.

"Tibet Unconquered" argues that the time is right for new thinking in China, adapting to the new situation in the South Asian region, where three nuclear powers and two hot wars, a rising heroin trade and the problem of extremism mean that China could take the lead in projecting smart power into the region.

Seen from Beijing, Tibet is a poor stepchild out on the multi-ethnic frontiers. Seen from the region, Lhasa is a traditional center, with the ability to influence economic development and much-needed trade relations in the Himalayan and South Asian region.

Diane's work of historical espionage, "Kashgar" will be the next work to be published, the first in a series about the agents of the Joint Terrorism Task force. When a major work of art is looted from a site in the Taklimakan Desert, the archaeologists realized they may be involved in a terror plot to destabilize American petroleum interests in China's Far West. For a sneak peek of the opening chapter, click on the novel's title.

The second piece in the series is "Orlando: A Thriller", an original take on a bioterror plot that is an operation of homegrown terror that takes place on American soil.

Diane's book on Chinese calligraphy "Chinese Writing: An Introduction" won an American Library Association Most Notable Book Award in the year of its publication. The volume contains photographs of masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy seen in close-up. C. C. Wang, the modern Chinese painting master, invited her to photograph his collection of Chinese calligraphy for the book. (Much of his Song and Yuan collection was sold to the Metropolitan Museum to be the basis of their Song and Yuan collection.)

Her two big biographical novels, "Khubilai Khan and Marco Polo" and "The Conqueror Genghis Khan" are based on the best research on both sides of the Atlantic in the post World War II world. They focus on the Mongol conquest of China, always the main object of Mongol arms.

Their historical accuracy is unique, the product of two decades of research following the trail blazed by her mentor, Professor Morris Rossabi, the noted biographer of Khubilai Khan. The works will contain an introduction by Rossabi.

Diane has a degree in East Asian Languages and Literature from Columbia University with a specialization in Chinese History. While at Columbia, she won a National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship (NDFL) for the study of Advanced Chinese.

She has done post-graduate work at Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley and was tutored in Japanese at the Stanford Inter-University Center in Tokyo. Diane lived in Tokyo for a year, traveled Japan extensively, taught English through the Stanford Center with private pupils and pursued independent study. She has traveled widely in East Asia.

In 1980, Diane was a member of then Mayor of San Francisco Dianne Feinstein's Cultural Delegation to the People's Republic of China and worked on arts exchange in Beijing and San Franciso’s sister city of Shanghai in music, painting and dance.

From 2002 to 2006, Wolff had a newspaper column that consisted of magazine-length pieces appearing on the front page of the Sunday opinion section of the Orlando Sentinel. The column was unique in that it focused on the historical backdrop to current events.

The idea was jointly developed by Diane and her editor, Peter Brown, currentloy a political columnist for the Wall Street Journal Online. Much of the work went out over the Knight-Ridder wire and appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Diane's work is widely published and has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, the Orlando Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury-News, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

In 1997, Diane wrote about China and the Internet in "china.com" as part of a cover series for "The National Interest," the magazine of the Nixon Center.

In covering a conference sponsored by the Baker Institute and the Asian Wall Street Journal, she was an early contributor to the online news service China News Digest.

She has reviewed groundbreaking Chinese and Japanese language-learning software for Multi-lingual: The Magazine for Language Technology.

She was a contributing editor of the New Asia Pacific Review where she reviewed books on Chinese history and Tibetan culture.

She wrote theater reviews for the Village Voice and was the editor of Preview, the magazine of the American Conservatory Theater of San Francisco in the 1980s.

In 2000-2001, Diane was the Associate Online Editor of the electronic edition of the five newspapers of the Suncoast Media Group (West Coast of Florida). At the Charlotte Sun-Herald, she was project editor of a serial novel.

Each chapter of the comic thriller "Gone With The Gator" appeared in the Sunday entertainment magazine section and in the online edition. Wolff managed sixteen writers over a period of five months from late 2000 to mid-2001.

In California, Diane produced television for KRON, San Francisco, an ABC affiliate, segments on the arts for its Sunday magazine show.

At the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, she studied Chinese painting and art history with James Cahill, Michael Sullivan, and Roger Keyes (Japanese prints). She took postgraduate seminars in Chinese painting at Mills College with William D. Y. Wu and travelled to China with him to study art.

A native Floridian, she swims, boats, sails and does yoga, and is an avid gardener and dedicated cook.

Author's representative:
Alex Hoyt
Alexander Hoyt Literary Agency
(212)663-7089