Tao Wong is a Malaysian-born Canadian author of LitRPG and progression fantasy, based in Toronto, and one of the most productive self-publishers working in those genres.
Trained in business, accounting and marketing, he first ran Starlit Citadel, a Canadian retailer of board games, comics and books, before publishing his debut in 2017 with no prior writing experience. When his book sales overtook the shop, he turned to writing full time, and now routes his prolific output - some two thousand words a day across a backlist of more than forty titles - through his own imprint, Starlit Publishing.
His breakthrough was A Thousand Li, a cultivation saga in the Chinese xianxia and wuxia tradition, which he frames as a love letter to the old martial-arts classics; it opens with The First Step and is being reissued in hardcover by Ace. Alongside it he writes the System Apocalypse, a sprawling LitRPG set in a 'System'-governed universe, and Adventures on Brad, whose first book A Healer's Gift follows Daniel, gifted by the gods with healing, as he sets out to become an adventurer in a world of dungeons and levels. A gentler streak shows in The Nameless Restaurant, a cosy cooking fantasy.
A martial-arts practitioner and self-described anime nerd, he was shortlisted for the UK Kindle Storyteller Award in 2021, and his work has been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, among others.
