A Perfect Crime

Born in 1976 in Ruichang, in the province of Jiangxi, A Yi worked as a policeman, sports journalist and editor before deciding to dedicate himself to writing at the age of thirty-two. After a brief period on the editorial board of Chinese literary magazine Chutzpah/Tian Nan, he began working in a publishing house. His first work, a collection of short stories, was released in 2008. In 2010 he published his second story collection, The Bird Saw Me, to popular and critical acclaim. In 2012, his novel A Perfect Crime was published in China (English edition Oneworld, 2015). A collection of his short stories, Two Lives, was published in English by Flame Tree Press in 2020. Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning was first published in China in 2017.

Anna Holmwood translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded one of the first British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship awards in 2010 and is currently working on a major series of Chinese martial arts novels by Jin Yong for MacLehose Press. In 2011 she co-founded the Emerging Translators' Network to support early career translators, and was elected to the UK Translators Association committee in 2012. She lives in China.