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Steph Cha

Korean American novelist

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Steph Cha (born 1986) is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song: Follow Her Home (2013), Beware Beware (2014), and Dead Soon Enough (2015). Her most recent book, stand-alone crime fiction novel Your House Will Pay (2019), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery. She also co-created and co-wrote the Amazon Prime Video series Butterfly.

01Background

Cha was born in Van Nuys, California in 1986. She subsequently grew up in Encino, California with her mother, father and two younger brothers. She attended Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City. Cha graduated from Stanford University, where she studied English and East Asian Studies, and also completed a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School.

02Work

Novels

In 2013, Cha published her first Juniper Song mystery, Follow Her Home (2013) with Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Publishers. The book has received positive reviews from the Los Angeles Times, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Hyphen, KoreAm Journal, and other publications. The sequel Beware Beware (2014) was published the following year in 2014, also by Minotaur Books. The third novel in the series, Dead Soon Enough was published by Minotaur Books in 2015.

Other Writing

Cha also has published freelance book reviews and food writing for the Los Angeles Times (serving as a restaurant scout and a protégé of sorts for LA Times' Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold), humor pieces for Trop Magazine and a short story entitled "Treasures in Heaven" in the Winter 2013 Fiction Issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Cha has also written more than 2,400 reviews on Yelp, according to a Los Angeles Times interview, and has held the "Elite" reviewer title for more than six years in a row, according to an interview with The Rumpus.

03Awards

Year Title Award Category Result Ref
2019 Your House Will Pay Anthony Awards Anthony-Novel Nominated
Aspen Words Literary Prize , Longlist
Barry Award Barry-Novel Nominated
Dagger Award New Blood Dagger Award Nominated
Lefty Award Lefty-Novel Nominated
Los Angeles Times Book Prize LAT, Mystery/Thriller Won
Macavity Award Macavity-Novel Nominated
Young Lions Fiction Award , Nominated
Watch videos about Steph ChaExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Steph Cha, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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