The Pillowbook of Doctor Jazz is autobiographical fiction in the tradition of Jack Kerouac: on the road in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Recalling the Japanese Pillowbook of Sei Shonogan, Dr. Jazz records the sights and sounds of his journeys, in the ironic voice of a traveller at end of day.

Trevor Carolan was born in Yorkshire. His family emigrated in l957 and he grew up in New Westminster, British Columbia. He has travelled extensively and lived in California, Alberta, and Britain. He began writing professionally at 17, filing dispatches from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury music scene. Widely published as journalist, literary critic, anthologist, poet, and translator specializing in East-West arts and letters, his work has appeared in five languages.

Dr. Carolan has worked as media advocate on behalf of international human rights, North Korean famine relief, Bosnian refugees, Canadian Aboriginal land claims, and Pacific Coast watershed issues. He served as literary coordinator for the XV Olympic Winter Games in Calgary; and has been Coordinator of writing programs at the Banff Arts Centre. He holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Bond University, Queensland. For more than 20 years he has lived in North Vancouver where he served for three years as an elected municipal councillor and later wrote as political columnist for the North Shore News. He now teaches English at University of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver.

His current works are Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific (Cheng & Tsui), and Against the Shore: The Best of Pacific Rim Review of Books, which he co-edited with Richard Olafson. The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz, an autobiographical novel, and Celtic Highway, a collection of poetry, are published by Ekstasis Editions. Giving up Poetry, a memoir of his acquaintance with the late poet Allen Ginsberg is published by Banff Centre Press. In 2003 he received a Spirituality & Health Best Books of the Year citation for his Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe), an account of his lengthy studies with Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

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