Liang Hong is a writer, essayist and professor at Renmin University of China. She is known for narrativising rural China, and is heralded by critics as a trailblazer, focusing on the lives of ordinary rural people and exploring something other than the metropolis. Her own rural upbringing and memories heavily inspire her works, for which she has won a number of literary prizes. Esther Tyldesley is a graduate of Robinson College, Cambridge who teaches Chinese language and translation at the University of Edinburgh. Her published translations include Xinran’s The Good Women of China, Sky Burial and China Witness, also by Xinran, Confucius from the Heart by Yu Dan and Little Aunt Crane by Yan Geling. In her spare time she reads far too many books and dreams of China.

“Speaks to universal challenges, problems facing not just Chinese villages but also alienated communities around the world." - Ian Johnson, New York Times“It is in these stories that the universality of people’s hopes, fears and frustrations really shines through.” - Jo Lateu, New Internationalist“Stunningly insightful… What makes Liang’s study so compelling is the way in which it offers a glimpse of a world in which personal problems … exist on the same level as broader social and political problems.” Mark Rappolt, ArtReview