Jamie Dibs is author of thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy books.
He has built an award-winning career under a different name as a finance and technology journalist, editor, and media founder. Work and the global travel opportunities it brought have provided background music to his fiction. He was born in the United States (go Phillies!) in 1970, the Year of the Dog. He went to university to study international relations in Washington, D.C., and got his first reporting gig in New York. He’s also been fortunate to study in Bologna, Italy, and Brussels.
In 1997, he moved to Hong Kong to cover Asia’s financial markets, and he’s lived there since, with a stint in Paris and regular visits to Lisbon. Living in a multicultural, Asian-based city introduced Jamie to Thai kickboxing (he survived), yoga, and some kick-ass food. More importantly, he’s gained exposure to different values and ways of thinking. His wife Mabel is a Hong Kong-born Chinese with her own pursuits, including a passion for cooking (Jamie opens the wine and washes the dishes).
Jamie’s inspiration as a writer
Writing fiction had been a weekend activity. Jamie enjoyed some wins, with small presses publishing his early thrillers, and his journalism alter ego also published books on Asian history along with business books. But thrillers and sci-fi? That was a hobby, especially after those indie presses went out of business.
Sometime in the late 2010s – before Covid, anyway – he returned to his childhood home (a leafy Pennsylvania suburb north of Philly) to help his parents downsize houses. They had kept a lot of his childhood stuff, boxed up in the basement or the attic, and his job was to sort out what he’d keep and what he’d throw away. He was amazed by the amount of objects his parents had kept, most of which he had forgotten ever existed.
He found the earliest stories he had written. He’d forgotten these too, but holding these was like getting slapped, particularly objects from fifth or sixth grade, 10 or 11 years old.
Everyone in class had written or drawn a mini-book, 16 pages of folded paper bound in a stiff cover. Jamie was amused to remember these protean stories, but what really struck him, cross-legged on the upstairs floor, was the back cover of one of these slim things. “Other books from best-selling author Jamie Dibs”, he had declared in big yellow letters, listing the titles of the other school projects he’d written.
He’d spent his adult life in journalism, forgetting about this dream. As a child and then a teenager, he’d devoured fiction: James Bond adventures, Steven King spine-tinglers, fantasy from Tolkien to more contemporary stuff like Stephen R. Donaldson, sci-fi: Dune, “Star Wars” books, but also more political works that we’d call literary, like 1984 and the novella Flowers for Algernon, which made him cry.
These books were more than entertainment. They were a guide to how to live, how to be a person, how to think about the world. Even the pulpy ones. Sometimes especially those: 007 sure had a suave sophistication that teenage Jamie could barely imagine. Later in life he deep-dived into jaundiced British spy tales, American hardboiled crime fiction, and gonzo Japanese novels. These strands were also influences on Jamie’s first thrillers.
The shock of recovering that childhood school project, with its declaration of bestseller status, has led Jamie to focus more on developing as a professional author. It is also drawing him back to the impulses that drove his early experiments in writing, especially fantasy and sci-fi. In high school, Jamie was a big Dungeons & Dragons player (yeah, nerd, but see also muay thai, above), and in those adventures is a wellspring of ideas, ones that feel baked in.
Today Jamie’s work recreates those childhood passions as a foundation layer – no, the crypt – with the cathedral walls supported by the flying buttresses of a worldly, international career. He wants to recreate that sense of wonder and adventure for grownups, to use story to help readers think about our world in new ways, to explore who we are – and have fun along the way.