Bi Feiyu is one of the most respected authors and screenwriters in China today. He was born in 1964 in Xinghua, in the province of Jiangsu, China. He is the recipient of several literary awards, including the Xu Lun Prize which he has won twice. He co-wrote the film Shanghai Triad, which was directed by internationally acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou and nominated for a Golden Globe. His novel The Moon Opera was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2008 and adapted into a popular TV series, and his novel Three Sisters won the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. Bi Feiyu studied Chinese literature at Yangzhou Normal University from 1983 to 1987 and, soon after graduation, moved to Nanjing where he worked as a teacher at Nanjing Normal College of Special Education for five years. In 1992 he became a journalist at The Nanjing Daily and worked there for six years. Now a renowned writer and a Vice President of the Writers' Association of Jiangsu Province, he is currently an editor for a literary magazine, Yu Hua (Rain Flower).
His writing career started in the 1980s and it was his poems which first got him noticed. Described in China as "the best male writer in depicting women's psychology", he is now the author of over 50 short stories, 10 medium-length novels and 4 full-length novels. An anthology (4 volumes) and a full collection (7 volumes) of his works were published in 2004 and 2008. His full-length novels include Shanghai Triad, The Summer and The Winter, The Plain, and Tui Na (Chinese Massage).