Wang Anyi grew up in Shanghai and began her career as a writer in 1978 after being sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Her books in English include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Columbia, 2008), a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. She is a professor of Chinese literature at Fudan University.
Howard Goldblatt, a Guggenheim Fellow, is an internationally renowned translator of Chinese fiction, including the novels of Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.