About The Author

A newspaper columnist and former teacher, John Bell Smithback has published more than fifty books defining English idioms and proverbs for an international audience, with his wife as illustrator and translator, as well as The Lonely Dark, a novel about America in the age of the atomic bomb, and Silent in the Dawn, a collection of poems. For more than thirty years, their educational column has appeared in a number of Asian newspapers, including Ming Pao in Hong Kong and the Star in Malaysia. John’s feature column WRITE ON appears in Ming Pao, his fiction in the European journal Spotlight and the Canadian literary magazine Brick. Describing themselves as “literary gypsies,” they have lived in various places including Hong Kong, Portugal, Singapore, and France, all the while producing their books and daily newspaper column. Until recently, they resided in England where they lived close to Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon.