Nora Waln

Nora Waln (1895 – 27 September 1964) was a best-selling American writer and journalist in the 1930s–50s, writing books and articles on her time spent in Germany and China. She was among the first to report on the spread of Nazism from 1934 to 1938. She traveled widely in Europe and Asia, contributing articles to the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. She was one of the few correspondents who reported from Communist China and Mongolia, reporting for the Saturday Evening Post for three and a half years, including reporting from the Korean War (1947-1951). She regularly contributed to the Atlantic Monthly from 1925 to 1962.

She was the daughter of Thomas Lincoln and Lillian Quest Waln, from a Pennsylvanian Quaker family.

In 1918, she was Publicity Secretary of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (later the Near East Foundation) and contributed a foreword to the book Ravished Armenia.

From childhood, she was interested in Chinese culture after learning of a family trading-connection with the Lin family of Hopei Province from the early 19th-century.

Having made contact with the family, she left Swarthmore College before graduating, and in 1920, set out for China.

She ended up living for 12 years in the Lin household as a "daughter of affection" and developed this experience into her acclaimed memoir House of Exile, which was published in 1933. This gave readers an insiders look at Chinese culture and customs in a time of change following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. The family was considered "exiles" because a Lin had been ordered by thirteenth-century Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan to help work with the Grand Canal in Hopei, and had moved North from the family's Canton homestead.

House of Exile sold well in England and America, as did French and German translations.

While living in China, Waln met and married George Edward Osland-Hill, an English official in the Chinese Post Office, in 1922.

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