Chen Xiwo teaches comparative literature at Fuzhou Normal University and has published seven major novels. Due to his refusal to compromise about the style or content of his writing, it was nearly twenty years before his books could be published in China. In 2010, Asia Sentinel described Chen Xiwo as "one of China’s most outspoken voices on freedom of expression for writers" and published his speech given at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong on September 27, 2010. One recurring theme in Chen’s fiction is the relationship between sexual and social corruption. Perhaps his most famous work, the novella I Love My Mum (遮蔽) explores incest and S&M as metaphors for a dysfunctional society. His works have been nominated for several prizes, and in 2001 he won the Chinese Literature Media Prize for Dissipation (我们的苟且). Today Chen Xiwo is one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed authors. In 2010, an English translation of I Love My Mum was released by Make-Do Publishing. His novel Irritation (抓痒) was published in a French translation by Editions Reflets de Chine (2009).
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Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She has worked as a literary translator for a dozen years and, until the spring of 2011, also lectured at Imperial College London. Now, in addition to translating, she organizes translation-focused events and mentors new translators from Chinese. She led the Chinese–English workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School from 2009 to 2011 and in 2011 was Translator–in–Residence at the London Free Word Centre. Authors she has translated include Zhang Ling (Gold Mountain Blues); Yan Geling (Flowers of War), Han Dong (A Phone Call from Dalian: Collected Poems, and Banished!), Hong Ying (K–The Art of Love), and Xinran.
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