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Born in 1976, A Yi (real name Ai Guozhu) worked as a police officer, secretary and editor before settling down at the age of 32 to the fiction he always knew he would write. After a brief stint on the editorial board of Chutzpah, a now-defunct but once highly-influential literary magazine featuring work by younger and edgier writers (like A Yi himself), he moved to the Xiron publishing company, where he is an editor of the the "Iron Gourd" literary-fiction imprint. Though highly esteemed by a select group of readers and writers (Li Jingze, former head editor of People's Literature Magazine regularly praises him publicly), A Yi's reputation has been slower to spread to a wider reading public (and, given the darkness of his subject matter, it might not).

A Yi has produced many collections of short stories as well as longer work. Two full-length novels have appeared in English:

Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning (Oneworld, 2022, translated by Nicky Harman), of which New Internationalist said, 'It’s tempting to view the book as A Yi’s unflinching take on a moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary China, but he is also lowering his bucket into a much deeper well of delicious literary misanthropy.'

and

A Perfect Crime, Oneworld, 2015, translated by Anna Holmwood. The Wall Street Journal said, ‘Tightly crafted…less a traditional catch-him-if-you-can crime caper and more a psychological probe into a pathological mind.’

An English translation of his story "The Curse" can be read here.

A Yi is represented by Peony Literary Agency.

See Asymptote's Sinophone "20 Under 40"

Photo by Matthew Niederhauser.

A Yi is the featured author in READ PAPER REPUBLIC, week 1, 18 June 2015.

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