Ilsa Sharp is a British-born freelance writer and specialist in SE Asian affairs, with a Chinese Studies honours degree from Leeds University. She has built up a strong track record for current affairs and economics/business reporting, writing and editing, as well as environment/nature/wildlife/popular science over her long career as a journalist and author, based in Singapore/Hong Kong/Australia and including extensive travel throughout the Asia-Pacific region, since 1968. She was a Hong Kong-based ‘China-watcher’ for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1970s, and among the first foreign journalists to travel in and report from China towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1971. Ms Sharp also has a parallel track record of public relations copy-writing and consultancy, both for business corporations and for government. She has specialised in commissioned institutional, corporate and government history books.