AUSTIN COATES

Austin Coates(1922–97), a former senior British civil servant in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Sarawak, left government service at age forty to pursue a professional writing career. Widely regarded as the most distinguished English-language author in Hong Kong, Coates remained a long-time Hong Kong resident, later dividing his time between Hong Kong and Portugal, where he died. Macao and the British is a companion to his other two books on Macao, A Macao Narrative and the historical novel City of Broken Promises. Both these books and his other novel, The Road, are also available in the Echoes series from Hong Kong University Press.