James Sebastian was born in Kuala Lumpur and came to Singapore in 1949 at the age of fourteen. He was educated at St Joseph's Institution and had his tertiary education at the University of Malaya, then located in Singapore. He worked for three years as a shipping executive, and then after an eight-year stint in television, he launched out on a thirty-year career as an independent film producer. During this span he wrote a total of 130 film scripts, 57 of which he also directed and edited. During his 35 years in Singapore, James Sebastian was a prominent presence on the Singapore stage having played the lead in no fewer than 15 plays over a fourteen-year period. In 1984, James Sebastian settled in Australia. There, while continuing his film career, he wrote his first novel — The Phoenix Drowned. This effort won him the Literary Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The grant enabled him to rewrite The Phoneix Drowned as four separate novels, one of which is Man of the Rising Sun.
