Author and Journalist
Jonan Pilet spent his childhood abroad in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He studied writing at Houghton College, the University of Oxford, and received his Master of Fine Arts at Seattle Pacific University.
Pilet is a journalist currently residing in West Virginia. He has a passion for traveling and telling stories about people the world rarely sees.
NOMAD, NOMAD
In his debut short story collection, Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats, looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture.
Based on the author’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a vivid picture of Mongol landscapes, Western interactions, and the rise of cultural tensions. An orphaned Mongolian girl lives in the sewers of Ulaanbaatar. An American boy falls in love with a Mongolian girl who has committed patricide. A group of nomadic traders are stuck in a blizzard in the Mongolian steppe. In these eleven stories, Western misconceptions of Mongolia are dispelled as home is discovered to be a transcultural human need.
Praise for Nomad, Nomad
“Jonan Pilet’s stories are visceral, transporting, and tenderly human— with the lyricism of a poet, he brings his characters and landscapes so vividly to life. I would follow this writer anywhere.”
— Danya Kukafka, author of Girl in Snow
"In Nomad, Nomad, Jonan Pilet joins a distinguished roster of writers whose stories of foreign worlds transcend travel and enter the realm of imaginative quests, of lives and worlds hidden, discovered, and transformed. Pilet’s fiction is beautifully wrought and unsparing, tender, revelatory, and wise."
— Robert Clark, author of Love Among the Ruins
"Set in Mongolia where there is ‘more in the sky than in the earth,’ this collection of stories by Jonan Pilet depicts the raw ferocity of life as a missionary on the steppes. In this book, faith in God and human relationships are tested: plagues of locusts, frozen rivers to cross by horse, and the cold rhythm of long winters brightened by the comfort of a stove’s heat and mutton soup. Nomad, Nomad is a wonderful debut."
— Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Maze of Transparencies
"In prose that is both nimble and vivid, Pilet reveals the cold-lashed, wind-swept exterior landscapes of Mongolia as well as the aching interior landscapes of the rich varied characters traversing these stories. Whereas some writers write as spectators piling up observations, these stories have the feel of lived experience, of a writer writing from the inside out. Each story bristles with tension and astonishing detail. Each story is written with boundless compassion. In each story, Pilet takes our human urges, fears and longings and makes sheer music."
— Gina Ochsner, author of The Hidden Letters of Velta B.
