The Monkey Chronicles

About the Author

Xi Xi (1937–2022), pseudonym of Cheung Yin, was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong with her family in 1950. In 1957, she graduated from Grantham College of Education and became a teacher at a government primary school.

She increasingly focused on her writing career, and her fiction and poetry earned her numerous literary awards, including the 1983 United Daily Award in Taiwan for her short story ‘A Girl Like Me’, the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature at the University of Oklahoma, and the Cikada Prize awarded by the Swedish Institute in the same year. She also received the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s 16th Life Achievement Award in 2022.

Xi Xi’s literary works spanned across novels, essays, modern poetry, and literary criticism. She published over 45 books, including My City, Not Written Words, The Teddy Bear Chronicles, Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems, and many more.

Jasmine Tong Man is now a visiting lecturer specialising in literary translation at various tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. She earned her PhD in Translation Studies in 2001. Her translation work includes Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (Book One) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry into Chinese. In collaboration with David Morgan, she has translated Leung Ping-kwan’s poems and short stories, as well as Wei Ya’s children’s poetry, into English. Recently, she has been crafting bilingual stories about life in Hong Kong, featuring her own watercolour illustrations.

David Morgan has collaborated with Jasmine Tong Man on various translations from Chinese to English for almost twenty years. He has also made a number of extended translations from Spanish to English and of short stories from French to English by the Palestinian novelist Mahmoud Shahin.

John Minford is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at The Australian National University.