James Jennings

James Jennings has devoted his life to languages, in particular French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic and Khmer, and worked in interpreting, translating and drafting in international organisations across the world. From 2011 to 2014, he was the senior interpreter at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia, an experience that is powerfully evident in No Sell Dead. In 2015 Jennings moved from Cambodia to Myanmar, a time when the country was opening to the world under Daw Suu Kyi. As an accomplished landscape and riverscape painter, he staged his first solo exhibition in Yangon (Rangoon) in 2017. His oils draw their inspiration from the great Asian rivers: the Mekong, the Irrawaddi, the Yangon River. He has written articles in Asian Reviews on subjects ranging from Vietnamese lacquer painting to the early poetry of Pablo Neruda (written in Burma). He left Myanmar at the time of the military clampdown and settled in the Alentejo region of Portugal. His second novel, The House of Lusitania, a love story set in the dying days of Portugal’s African empire and the 1974 Revolution, appeared in 2021.

Books