Nicole Mones (born 1952) is an American novelist and food writer.
Lost in Translation won the 2000 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize[1] awarded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester for best work of fiction by an American woman, and also the Pacific Northwest Annual Book Award,[2] a five-state prize.
"The Last Chinese Chef" was the only American finalist for the international Kiriyama Prize[3] and also a World Gourmand Award winner in the Chinese cookbook category, although it is a novel with no recipes.
She also contributes articles about Chinese cuisine to Gourmet magazine, and has written for The New York Times Magazine,[4] The Washington Post,[5] and The Los Angeles Times.
In all of them, a love story is entwined around a detailed and accurate description of a facet of Chinese culture: in Lost in Translation, the heroine becomes involved in an archaeological expedition to find the remains of Peking Man; the action of A Cup of Light turns around a rare collection of Chinese porcelain; The Last Chinese Chef, as its name suggests, features Chinese cuisine; and Night in Shanghai is the story of African-American musicians in Shanghai during the jazz age and what happened when World War II exploded around them.