Monique Roffey

Is Roffey a TCK or an immigrant, and does it matter?  She was born in Trinidad (father British, mother Mediterranean), went to England for school and stayed.  I would err on the side of immigrant.

Does it matter?  The novel tells a story likely to appeal immensely to anyone.  A middle-aged man escapes his terrible job and recent family trauma to take his young daughter sailing around the Caribbean for months.  Anyone can empathise with, and desire, this kind of escapism.  The sailing and the travel experiences are likely to appeal to anyone who has travelled and anyone who wishes they could travel, perhaps right now.

In in terms of literary tropes and TCL tropes, Archipelago is rife with loss (an infant drowns in a flood, and later a much-loved dog falls overboard and drowns too), and also dislocation (Gavin and his daughter are out-of-place and adrift on the wide ocean).  In these respects, it is like third culture literature.

In other respects, however, it clearly is not.

There no secrecy, guilt, disenfranchisement, sexual dysfunction, abandonment of children or even malaria (each of which is a prominent trope depending on whether the TCA you are reading was an affluent business person's child, dipkid, a brat, or an MK).

Picking up on this week's writing about point of view: here it resides solely with Gavin, and though he reflects more than once on the circumstances of his son's death, it is not at all like the TCAs below who focus almost exaggeratedly on the issue of multiple perspectives.

Also, my sawhorse Time.  If a distinctive feature of TCL is that narrative is organised according to place, not time then Archipelago  doesn't fit.  On line three we are told it is 7pm, and though there are flashbacks, the novel's plot unfolds pretty systematically from that moment.  Throughout, Roffey steers her reader using the clock more than the globe "They set sail for Curacao at dawn.  It is mid-December 2010" (141).  (Contrast this with another ship-board novel, Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, which is TCL.  In this novel place always trumps time as a way of orienting the reader: "And now I was going to England" (114), "She went inland and south" (179), "We slipped into England in the dark" (263)).

Does it matter?  No, not if you are simply looking for an appealing and well-written piece of travel fiction.  Yes, if you are thinking that maybe TCKs who grow up to become authors (TCAs) share literary tropes and styles because of a culture they also share.

Tom Stoppard isn't who I thought he was. (A preliminary theory turns out to be, at least in part, correct)

Yesterday I wrote about TCL and Point of View.  To sum up, it seems that TCL often includes multiple perspectives on the same event, in the form of different characters seeing their own version of the same event, or of a single character trying to see all possible interpretations of a specific event.

(A note to my friend S---: I think I answered a question about perspective and Point of View when you asked one about empathy.  Those are different things, aren't they?)

Yesterday evening, long after my blog post, I was having a shower and was struck (often it is in the shower that I am struck) with this question: What about Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ? This 1967 play is a prominent feature of the British literary canon.  I studied the play as an undergraduate, in a course about British postmodern literature.  It seems impossible to get more British than a canonical author like Stoppard.

The play lifts a one-liner about two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead") and builds a play around who these characters were, and how it was they wound up dead.  Stoppard's play assumes we know Shakespeare's, and parts of the play we know as Hamlet get repeated in it, as we see the same events, but from Rosencrantz and Guildentsern's perspectives.  In other words, the play does exactly what I contend TCL does: it presents multiple perspectives on a single event.

How happy am I then, to discover this morning that Stoppard, though lauded (Knighted!) for his work as a British author, is clearly also a CCK and a TCK (and an exile/ immigrant too).  To quote Lary Opitz, "Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlìn, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on July 3, 1937. When he was two years old, his family fled from the Nazis to Singapore where his father, a company physician, was killed at the start of World War II. Stoppard and his mother lived in India for the duration of the war and then moved to England in 1946. There she wed Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. Tom assumed his stepfather's surname."

Here's an example of how one might use observation of literary tropes and devices (in this case a use of multiple Point of View in a way that seems to be specific to TCL) to fingerprint  a work (in this case, seeing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead might not actually be as British in its tropes as I had previously assumed).

Stoppard: I happily fingerprint him as a Third Culture Author.  Whoopee!

(Promotional image from The New American Shakespeare Tavern's 2012-2103 season)

TCL and POV

After sushi with author-friend S---

Third Culture Literature and Point of View

What, my friend S--- asked, about empathy in third culture literature?  Is it distinctive?

It must be, surely, for Third Culture Kids benefit from knowing about cultural difference early in their lives. They know that what is frowned upon in one place may be encouraged in another (for instance the issue of asking a friend or distant relative for money: very uncomfortable for an American, normal and acceptable for a Ghanaian). TCKs are especially adroit at seeing all points of view.  Does their fiction writing reflect this?

1) Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Catton: TCK via Canada/ NZ). (I am on page 382 of 832: I am an expert.  ha).  There are 12 men in a room at the start of the novel and it seems we may get some portion of the same complex and interlocking story about one night (14 January, 1866) from each of them.   It seems that Anna Wetherell's perspective might provide the synthesis.  Definitely many different voices get to speak here (there is much dialogue),  narration changes hands from character to character and the novel seems to have an omniscient narrator who refers to him/herself with a royal "we" : "rather than transcribe this sentimental exchange, we choose to talk above it, and instead describe in better detail . . ." (295).   One of the men (Moody) says this most TCK thing: "I contend there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths--and pertinence, you must agree, is a matter of perspective" (282).

(In Catton's other novel , The Rehearsal, the conceit of acting is explored--more on the TCK chameleon in another post--but here too we see different perspectives on the same thing.  A girl has a relationship with her teacher.   We see one set of high-school-aged students confess their opinions to their saxophone teacher, but we also see students of the nearby drama college interpret the story for stage).

2) At the other extreme, Ian McEwan's Saturday (McEwan: British Military Brat via Libya and Singapore).  All of this happens from the perspective of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, and the whole novel focuses on a single day.  Like The Luminaries, the component parts of a single day's drama are taken apart, assessed, discussed and thought through.  Thus though we are in Perowne's perspective the whole time, he is exploring as many different points of view about his day and its events as he can.  He spends a lot of time looking in mirrors too, I think (I need to go back and look for page numbers), and looking out of windows: these provide perspectives on himself and different vantage points on the world around him.

3)  What's better for splitting a single point of view than mental illness?  Consider John Wray's Lowboy.  (Wray: TCK and Cross Culture Kid or CCK, via Austria and the USA).  Lowboy/William is schizophrenic, so is his mother Violet/Yda and the policeman searching for William struggles with the fact that his father renamed him Ali when his birth name was Rufus.  Each of the main characters expresses at least two perspectives.

4)  A nice segue from Lowboy is DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English (bio in preceding post).  Here we have Siamese twins (two consciousnesses presenting contradictory accounts of events), separated as adults.  We follow their alarming, yet successful, quest to buy a wife from a small, war-torn, Republic (formerly part of the USSR).

But, is this multiplicity of View Point typical to ALL contemporary literature?  Not quite.  Perhaps everyone is interested in Point of View, but I see other writers handling it quite differently.  (How valid is my random sampling, you ask?  Hmn.  Yes.  That is a good question.  Nonetheless, here are my thoughts.)

1)  Dan Rhodes' (Britain) Marry Me is a compilation of very (very) short stories, all about relationships (primarily heterosexual).  Many perspectives.  Unlike Catton, or McEwan these perspectives reflect on a thematically similar scenario but not exactly the same event.

2) Like McEwan, Wilma Stockenstrom's (South Africa.  Trans J. M. Coetzee)  Expedition to the Baobab Tree inhabits one perspective.   However, this one individual thinks widely, beautifully, dreamily about a broad range of historical event and personal experience.  A swath of time, all from one view.

3) In That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott (Australian, CCK white and aboriginal) occupies an amorphous universal perspective and creates a dreamtime or creation myth which includes the arrival of white settlers.  In some senses, this is completely opposite to what happens in the TCL works I list above: here all perspectives are shown to be one.  Ultimately there is only one perspective.

4) And what about mental illness?  In I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon we have another mentally ill protagonist, and she (like Wray's Lowboy) has a mentally ill mother.  Her identity is markedly unstable (she has many different names over the course of the novel), but she presents a single point of view at each juncture, not several perspectives on the same moment.  She says "All these years and we never arsts, where we come from or who we is" (287). That line alone makes Kay's protagonist different from the TCL ones who seem to be examining and re-examining everything from as many perspectives as possible with the hope of answering exactly those questions.

Does TCL have a distinctive "fingerprint"?

In my book, The Writer and the Overseas Childhood, I argue that there are prevelant themes in third culture literature:

dislocation
loss
disenfranchisement

and, depending on the kind of third culture literature:

secrecy and guilt (often in the literature of diplomatic kids, or others raised with significant material privilege) or

precocious underage sex (often in military brat writing, perhaps an expression of the need to make intense connections quickly, before being posted to a new location or an expression of the need to challenge the rigidity of military hierarchy) or

abandonment (often in the writings of missionary kids, perhaps expressing the difficulty of being raised as subordinate to one's parents' mission).

But, going on from what's in my book, is there a third culture fingerprint of some kind, a stylistic marker, a shared rhetorical device?

I thought, and I still think, that the way time unfolds in third culture literature is distinctive.  If the stereotypical first line in fiction is "it was a dark and stormy night" then time (when was it?) generally drives literary narrative.  In Michael Ondaatje's work (poetry and novels) place comes before time (where was it?).  I have gone in to a big pile of TCL reading to see if my theory holds up with other authors.

Here's the big pile:

You'll notice some things about the pile right away:

I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon and DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English are set out in front.  DBC Pierre is a TCK.  His real name is Peter Finlay.  He was born in Australia, spent early years in the US, the South Pacific and Great Britain and then the rest of his childhood in Mexico  (someday I really want to compare him to that other strangely Irish-US-Mexican figure, comedian Louis CK, but that's for another day).  I.J. Kay is ostensibly uncomplicatedly British, though she now lives in the Gambia. There is a dearth of information about her, and the name is clearly a penname.  A subsidiary question I had when I began this big pile o' reading was are IJKay and DBC the same person??  I don't think they are, actually (DBC never uses semi-colons, IJKay uses them almost every sentence), but it was a fun place to start.

Starting with those two led me to refine my experiment: in order to tell if third culture literature is distinctive, I have to contrast it with literature that is contemporary but not third culture.  Hence two piles. 

On the left, literature by writers who are not TCKs : I J Kay, Dan Rhodes, Susan Minot, Evie Wyld, Chimamandah Ngozi Adiche, Russell Hoban, Wilma Stockenstrom (Trans J.M. Coetzee), and Kim Scott. 

On the right, third culture literature by: DBC Pierre, Brittani Sonnenberg, Ian McEwan, John Wray, Susi Wyss, Gerald Durrell, Francesca Marciano, Penelope Lively and John Lanchester.  Also in this pile, though perhaps not TCK (more investigation required): Monique Roffey.
And of course Eleanor Catton, both The Rehearsal (already read) and The Luminaries which is so long I feel like time has stood still and I will be reading it forever . . .

Here're some questions to end on:
Is Eleanor Catton (Canada/ NZ) a TCK in the same way as someone like McEwan (Britain, Libya, Singapore)?  How many places do you have to have lived in to be really TCK?  Why are all the folks in my pile white?  Are you "more" TCK if you've got a first world passport but moved repeatedly through the third world? 
How does the literature, the fiction, answer these kinds of questions?
 
 

Joseph O'Neill, TCK, Nominated for Man Booker Prize

Joseph O'Neill's "The Dog" has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize.  It will not be available in the US until September.

O'Neill is identified as "Irish," but his story is rather more complicated.

He was born in Ireland, of mixed Irish and Turkish ancestry.  He went to preschool in Turkey, then lived in Iran, Mozambique and Holland.  He went to college in England, and now lives in New York (The Writer and The Overseas Childhood 32).

O'Neill won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award for Netherland.

As far as I can tell (having not seen it, never mind read it), "The Dog" involves expats from New York and elsewhere living in Dubai (a quintessentially bizarre expatriate hub).

Third Culture Kids Who Write: A Growing List of Third Culture Authors

Updated June 2017

What you will find here is Third Culture Authors's Names in six sections:

1) New stuff that I am adding this round (also integrated into sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 as appropriate)

2) TCAs whose work reflects their identity.

3) TCAs whose work doesn't necessarily reflect their identity

4) TCA memoirs

5) Colonial-Era TCAs

6) Misc. of related interest.


How do I choose authors for this list?

I go by David Pollock's definition of third culture kid: "[A] person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background."

I recognize that definitions are infinitely adaptable and that Pollock's can be broadened to include CCKs (Cross-Cultural Kids) and other interesting, valuable experiences.  For the sake of establishing that TCAs are vast in number, and perhaps proving as much to any doubters, I keep to Pollock's definition fairly rigidly.

Note that most of these authors have published more than one work.  The list below represents thousands of published works by TCAs.  Enjoy!


1) New Stuff that I am adding this time round

(With thanks to Jessica Sanfillipo Schulz, Nina Sichel of Writing Out of Limbo, and Displaced Nation for their numerous tips and leads.)


Baranay, Inez. (Novels, Essays)
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Ghosh, Amitav. (Novels, some set in India, Ecocrit)
Gregson, Julia. (Military Brat, with substantial and diverse adult travel too, reflected in huge range of contexts in her novels)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Handal, Nathalie. (Poems, Plays, Travel narratives)
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
L'Esperance, Mari.  (Poetry!)
Mawer, Simon.  (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
Sharif, Somaz.  Iranian-American, but perhaps because of frequent dislocations in the US before age 11, a TCK. (Poems)
Yanagihara, Hanya.  Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).

Memoir:
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Gardiner, Marilyn.  Essays (Between Worlds) and Memoir (Passages Through Pakistan).
Hervey, Emily.  Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Rice, Elizabeth.  Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Young, Melody.  Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.


Interesting academic connections:


Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.


Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica.  "Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists."  Transnational Literature Volume 9, Issue 1, November 2016

By Me, Rauwerda, Antje. “Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.

 and

 “Katniss, Military Bratness: Military Culture in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy.”  Children’s Literature 44 (2016): 172-191.

Trivia: Joe Strummer was a diplobrat!  And Jim Morrison was a military brat.

Contemporary Third Culture Fiction

(* denotes a text I’ve written about in The Writer and The Overseas Childhood)

2) By TCKs who write about TCK experience to some degree

Aitken, Neil.  Poetry.
*Alison, Jane.  (Novels)

Alameddine, Rabih (Novels)

Allende, Isabel. (Spanish language, but very available in translation)

Anam, Tahmina. A Golden Age.

Banerji, Sara. (Novels)
Baranay, Inez (Novels, Essays)

Bedford, Sybille.  (Novels and memoir)

Bell-Villada, Gene H.. (Academic Writing, but also TCK fiction and a memoir)
Berg, Elizabeth.  Durable Goods (but many other novels, some not about military brat/ TCK experience at all).

*Bird, Sarah. The Yokota Officer’s Club (other novels not explicitly TCK)

Blaise, Clark.  (Novels, Short stories)

Boyd, William. (Novels)

Boyers, Peg. (Poetry Honey With Tobacco is very TCK, Hard Bread less explicitly so)

Bromell, Henry.  (Novels, short stories, screenplays for Homeland and others)

Buck, Leila.  (Plays)

*Buck, Pearl S.. The Good Earth.
Burns, Helen.  (Military Brat) A Lovely Light.

Castro, Brian.  Birds of Passage and other novels (multiracial as well as TCK)

Chun, Trudy.  The Buddhapest (adolescent literature)

*Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini
Cowhig, Frances Ya-Chu.  Plays.

Desai, Kiran. (Novels, eg The Inheritance of Loss.  Anita Desai’s daughter)

Drew, Eileen. The Ivory Crocodile and Blue Taxi.

Duncan, Brian.  The Settler.

Durrell, Gerald (novels for adults and adolescents, in addition to a wealth of memoir)

Durrell, Lawrence.  (Novels)

Durrow, Heidi. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Evans, Maya.  Poetry.

Forna, Aminatta.  Three novels and a memoir

Girardi, Robert.  (Novels and stories, some more internationalized than others)
Glover, Merryn. A House Called Askival.

Gregson, Julia. (Military Brat, with substantial and diverse adult travel too, reflected in huge range of contexts in her novels)
*Greenway, Alice. White Ghost Girls. And The Bird Skinner

Handal, Nathalie. (Poems, Plays, Travel narratives)
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Hazzard, Shirley.  The Great Fire.

Iyer, Pico. (Novels, memoirs, essays)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
Johnson, Denis. (The Laughing Monsters and others)

Khan, Uzma Aslam.  The Geometry of God.
Kuegler, Sabine.  ( "German." Novels, some of which deal with growing up in Papua etc.)  
Kurtz, Jane.  Children's lit explicitly about TCK and transition issues.

L'Esperance, Mari.  (Poetry!)
Lee, Don.  (Though he is a TCK, his novels focus on Asian-American identity)

Lessing, Doris. (Many novels)
Lewis, Susan Kiernan. (MB upbringing; murder mysetries in international settings)

*Lewis, Richard. The Flame Tree (and other novels)
Lokko, Lesley Naa Norle.  (CCK issues, Scots-Ghanaian)

Manyika, Sarah Ladipo.  In Dependence (Novel), Short stories, Academic writing.

Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men
Markowits, Benjamin.  Novels

*Martel, Yann.  The Life of Pi (other novels less internationalized)

*Moser, Gene.  Skinny Dipping and Other Stories.
Moyer, Kermit.  Short Stories, MB focus

Meyers, Margaret.  Swimming in the Congo (MK)

*Nangle, Paula.  The Leper Compound. (Linked Short Stories)

Nothomb, Amelie. (French language, but fairly available in translation)

Obreht, Tea. The Tiger’s Wife.

Omotoso, Yewande.  Novels.

*O’Neill, Joseph.  Netherland.

Ondaatje, Michael. (Many novels, and many collections of poetry—most, but not all, international in scope)

Orr, Elaine Neil. A Different Sun.
Parfitt, Jo.  Sunshine Soup.

Parssinen, Keija.  The Ruins of Us.

*Palmer, Catherine. The Happy Room (and many romance novels not as internationalized)

Phoenix, Michele.  Novels and blog.  Active MK.
Porte, Joyce Baker. Stormbird of the Serengeti.
Rashkovich, Zvezdana. (Novels)

Revoyr, Nina. The Age of Dreaming.

Riley, Lucinda.  The Orchid House and lots of others.
Rinsai, Rosetti.  (Novels, various places) 
De Rosnay, Tatiana.  (Novels, 12 in French, 3 in English)

Rispin, Karen. African settings for romance novels.
Scott, Jack. Turkey Street (and others)
Scudamore, James. Heliopolis.
Scholes, Katherine.  The Rain Queen (and other novels).

Shafak, Elif. (Novels)

Shakespeare, Nicholas.  (Novels)

Slaughter, Carolyn.  (Novels and memoir)

Snell, Ron.  Rani Adventures Trilogy (for children)
Sonnenberg, Brittani.  Home Leave.

Tan, Hwee Hwee. Foreign Bodies.

Tearne, Roma.  Mosquito.
Tuck, Lily.  (Novels)
Windle, Jeanette. (Missionary Colombia reflected in works)

White, Robb.  Novels (missionary Phillipines)
Woodman, Betsy. Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes.
Wyld, Evie.  All the Birds, Singing.

Wyss, Susi.  (Stories, Novels)

3) By TCKs who don’t write about TCK experience explicitly

Aridjis, Chloe. The Book of Clouds (and others)

Baldwin, Shauna Singh. (Novels).
Ballard, J. G.. (Sci fi)

Barker, Nicola (Several Novels/ collections of short stories)
Black, Tony. ("tartan noir" crime, according to wikipedia)

Carle, Eric.  Iconic children's books for very young readers.
Carroll, James. (Plays, Novels, Spy novels, Theological novels)

Catton, Eleanor The Luminaries and The Rehearsal

Clare, Cassandra.  (Several Fantasy Novels)

Collins, Suzanne (Several adolescent novels incl. The Hunger Games trilogy) 
Cortazar, Julio (Prominent Spanish language novels, all available in translation)

*Dekker, Ted.  (Many thrillers)

DeWitt, Helen. (Many novels—The Last Samurai is TCK in content)
Espey, John.  Novels.
Foreman, Amanda.  Many novels. 
Fox, Kate. Watching the English (non-fiction, social anthropology)
French, Tana. (Crime)

Girardi, Robert.  (Crime)
Graham, Frederick Cork. (Thrillers)

Ghosh, Amitav. (Novels, some set in India, Ecocrit)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Hamid, Moshin.  (Novels set in Pakistan—some international/global themes but not explicitly about dislocation?)
Hawkins, Paula.  The Girl on the Train (Thriller)
Hooman, Majid. (Non fiction works about Iran--diplomatic parents. Grandson of Ay. Khomeini)
Houellebecq, Michel.  Submission (and other novels)
Horrocks, Heather (Romantic Comedies and Mysteries)
Hosseini, Khaled. (Afghani novels eg The Kite Runner, childhood years in France)

Hyland. M.J. (Three novels: How the Light Gets In may be the most TCK in themes . . . though I suspect all three have TCK themes throughout--as do all the others in this section!)
Jaquiery, Anna.  Crime fiction.

*Kingsolver, Barbara. (The Poisonwood Bible is very TCK, other works less explicitly so)

Khoo, Rachel.  Cookbooks and Cooking TV.
Lanchester, John. (Novels)
L'Engle, Madeleine.  Fiction for children, primarily.

Lively, Penelope (So many novels!  Also children’s lit)
Lowry, Lois.  (Children's chapter books)

*MacDonald, Ann-Marie. (The Way the Crow Flies is very TCK, other novels and plays less explicitly so).
Maugham, Somerset W.. LOTS of expat novels, but his background is European TCK.
Mattich, Alen.  Zagreb Cowboy.

Markowits, Benjamin.  Novels.
Mawer, Simon.  (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
McCallin, Luke.  Crime (Eastern Europe)

*McEwan, Ian. (Novels, typically not explicitly TCK)

McIntosh, Fiona.  (Fantasy novels)

McKinley, Robin (Adolescent Fantasy)

Messud, Claire.  Several novels (some evoke TCK and especially CCK--Algerian/French--themes)
Mina, Denise. Crime!

Peake, Meryn Laurence (Gormenghast novels—fantasy)

Pierre, DBC (Several Novels)
Poe, Edgar Allen. (English and Scottish boarding schools--who knew?)  

Powers, Richard. (Several Novels)

Pullman, Philip. (Many fantasy novels)
Purves, Libby. (Novels-- I want to read How Not to Be a Perfect Mother ;-) )

Rubinstein, Gillian (aka Lian Hearn.  Engl/ Nigeria.  Kids lit and recent adult fiction set in feudal Japan)
Rasheed, Leila. Kids lit (TCK and CCK--not sure how much of that comes up in her work) 
Say, Alan.  Some novels with TCK/ CCK themes, others more Japanese in focus.

Schaeffer, Frank. (Portofino is very TCK, but there are a wealth of other works on theology, Christanity, Evangelism and politics)

Sharif, Somaz.  Iranian-American, but perhaps because of frequent dislocations in the US before age 11, a TCK. (Poems)
Smith, Cordwainer.  (Penname for  Paul Linebarger. SciFi novels, and other genres under other pen names)

Stoppard, Tom (plays)
Taylor, Laini.  Lots of novels (some YA) 
Treloar, Lucy. Salt Creek (and others) 
Tolkein, J.R.R. (Many fantasy novels)

Ubukata, Tow.  (Fantasy, Manga)

Vandermeer, Jeff. (Sci fi/ Fantasy)

Weldon, Fay.  Novels.

Whedon, Joss (Buffy—JW did his last two years of highschool in England)

Wray, John. (Novels.  Wray is a Penname.  As John Henderson he writes for the New York Times Magazine)
Yanagihara, Hanya.  Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).
Yapa, Sunil (An adult traveller . . . and CCK, but  perhaps not TCK)

*Young, Wm Paul. The Shack.

4) Memoirs

Addleton, Jonathan. Some Far and Distant Place.
Alter, Stephen. All the Way to Heaven.
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Barcoft, Jane.  Pink Sand Poems (poetry)
Belcher, Wendy Laura.  (memoir and academic work on Ethiopia)

Burklin, Linda.  This Rich and Wondrous Earth.

Coleman,  Dan.  The Scent of Eucalyptus
Dalton Bradford, Melissa. Global Mom.
Dartnell, Ashley.  Farangi Girl: Growing up in Iran: A Daughter's Story.
Duncombe, Kristin Louise.  Trailing: A Memoir.
 Durrell, Gerald, Lawrence and Margaret.
Fuller, Alexandra.  Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and others (TCK by virtue of England and Rhodesia/ Zim transitions???)
Gamble, Kathleen. Expat Alien.

Gardiner, Marilyn.  Essays (Between Worlds) and Memoir (Passages Through Pakistan).
Gardner, Rita M.. The Coconut Latitudes
Godwin, Peter (two memoirs in English)  
Graham, Frederick Cork. 
Hartley, Aidan.  The Zanzibar Chest.

Harvey, Vivian Palmer.  The Missionary Myth  
Hervey, Emily.  Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Hawkins, Paula.  The Journey to the Girl on The Train  
Henderson James, Nancy.  At Home Abroad.
Hudson, W.H. Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina.

Jentzsch, Michael Blutsbrueder (translation from German)
Kaplan, Alice.  French Lessons.

Kastner, Christin Kriha.  Soldiering On: Finding My Homes.
Lawlor, Mary.  Fighter Pilot's Daughter.
McKay, Lisa.  Love at the Speed of Email.
Murray, Taylor.  Hidden in My Heart: A TCKs Journey Through Cultural Transition.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Neudorf, Bob .  Journeying Mercies: Tuesday Was Gone. 
O'Shaughnessy, Chris.  Arrivals, Departures and the Adventures Inbetween.
Obama, Barack. Dreams of my Father

Oglesby, Sam. Wordswarm (edited collection of short memoirs by TCKs) and Encounters and others 
Osborne, Marilyn Stewart .  Child of the Outback and Footprints
Penhaligon, James.  Speak Swahili, Dammit.  
Phillips, Hudson. The Oyster Stuffed Locker (poems)
Rice, Elizabeth.  Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Ritter, Michael ed.  The Brat Chronicles.
Samuelsson, Marcus.  Yes Chef (memoir) and cookbooks. 
Seaman, Paul Asbury.  Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home.  
Sichel, Nina.  Essays and Stories.
Shigo,  Cynthia Cunningham (memoir and novel) 
Taber, Sarah.  Born Under An Assumed Name and other travel narratives 
Tait, Derek.  Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans: A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya.
Young, Melody.  Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.
Zweig, Stephanie.  Nowhere in Africa.

5) The Colonials (Many of these names also cross over into the Memoir section)

Blixen, Karen. Out of Africa
Cloete, Stuart.
Godden, Rumer. (and sister Jon)
Gordon, Katherine. The Emerald Peacock.
Greene, A.H.M. Kirk.
Huxley, Elspeth.
Kaye, M.M.. 
Keating, Barbara and Stephanie. (Lots of co-written novels)
Kendall, Felicity. White Cargo.
Kipling, Rudyard. 
Markham, Beryl.
Master, John.
McCall Smith, Alexander.
Pearce, Michael.
Orwell, George.
Smith, Wilbur.
Thesiger, Wilfred.


6) Misc but noteworthy:

Meneses, Lilliana "Homesick for Abroad: A Phenomenological Study of  Third Culture Identity, Language and Memory." (PhD thesis for GWU, 2006)

Canadian Artist and Military Brat Leslie Reid http://www.lesliereid.ca/paintings.html (interesting that her website's bio doesn't say anything about her childhood)

Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.

Migration, Diversity, and Education: Beyond Third Culture Kids. Editors: Dervin, Fred, Benjamin, Saija (Eds.) (I can't wait to read this one! Work in here by Bell- Villada, Tanu and others)

Trivia: Joe Strummer was a diplobrat!  And Jim Morrison was a military brat. 

Rauwerda, Antje M. "Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.

and  “Katniss, Military Bratness: Military Culture in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy.”  Children’s Literature 44 (2016): 172-191.

Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica.  "Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists."  Transnational Literature Volume 9, Issue 1, November 2016