Kevin Kwan Books in Order

If you want the full Crazy Rich saga: Crazy Rich Asians → China Rich Girlfriend → Rich People Problems.
If you like sharp standalone rom-coms: Sex and Vanity.
If you’re curious about his newest social satire: Lies and Weddings.
If you prefer to test the waters: Crazy Rich Asians.

Kevin Kwan was born in Singapore in the mid-1970s and grew up as the youngest of three boys in a Chinese Singaporean family with deep roots in the city. His relatives included bankers, doctors, church leaders, and society figures, so he saw old-school privilege up close from an early age.

His great‑grandfather helped found one of Singapore’s first major banks, and his paternal grandfather was a Western‑trained eye surgeon who was knighted for his medical work and philanthropy. Stories about that world — the parties, the expectations, the unspoken rules — would linger in the background of his imagination for years.

When he was about eleven, Kwan’s parents left Singapore and resettled the family in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake, Texas. The move came with a jolt of culture shock: suburban streets instead of tropical humidity, American high school instead of his boys’ school in Singapore, and a new accent to learn if he wanted to blend in.

In Texas he finished high school early, then studied at San Jacinto College and the University of Houston–Clear Lake, where he earned a degree in media studies. Art, photography, and storytelling all pulled at him, and after graduation he headed to New York to attend Parsons School of Design and focus on photography.

New York turned into a long apprenticeship in visual culture. Kwan worked at Interview magazine, spent time at Martha Stewart Living, and joined the design firm M&Co. In 2000 he launched his own creative studio, taking on projects for museums, publishers, and cultural institutions while quietly building a life in the city he had dreamed about as a teenager in Texas.

His shift into fiction began in a much more personal way. In the late 2000s, while caring for his father during a serious illness, Kwan found himself driving to medical appointments and talking about their old life in Singapore. To capture those memories, he started writing short sketches about the families, apartments, and elaborate gatherings he remembered.

Those sketches eventually grew into Crazy Rich Asians, the 2013 novel that introduced readers to New York professor Rachel Chu, her boyfriend Nick Young, and the fiercely private, wildly wealthy world of their families in Singapore. The book’s mix of gossip, food, fashion, and family tension struck a chord, and Kwan followed it with China Rich Girlfriend in 2015 and Rich People Problems in 2017, completing the Crazy Rich trilogy and seeing the first book adapted into a hit film.

After the trilogy, he widened his canvas. Sex and Vanity (2020) reimagines a classic Edwardian romance against a backdrop of Capri villas and Manhattan penthouses, while Lies and Weddings (2024) follows a cash‑strapped aristocratic family through a volcanic Hawaiian wedding and a tangle of love, debt, and duty. Along the way he has picked up high‑profile recognition and invitations from festivals and cultural organizations in both Asia and the United States.

Across all of these books, Kwan keeps circling the same questions: how money shapes families, what it costs to defy expectation, and what it means to move between cultures without fully belonging to any single one. His stories are packed with private jets, couture gowns, and jaw‑dropping real estate, but the engine is always human — mothers and sons, cousins and exes, people trying to work out who they are when everyone is watching. He now splits his time between writing and screen projects, drawing on years in Singapore, Houston, New York, and Los Angeles to fuel new versions of the “crazy rich” worlds he first glimpsed as a child.