Born in Shanghai, Shen Danqi studied operations research and financial engineering at Princeton. After graduating, she spent several years performing macroeconomic policy analysis and formulation at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, before she returned to university to complete a master’s in international development at the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2010 she started to take a serious interest in longform non-fiction and shortform fiction, and in 2014 she published her first book, 《自由的老虎》 (Freedom of the Tiger), a collection of profiles and interviews with Princeton graduates. Shen Danqi’s fiction has been published in Chinese literary journals such as People’s Literature, Today, Shanghai Literature and NEWriting, and her short story anthology 《中国特色的译文读者》 (A Reader of Translations With Chinese Characteristics) was published in 2016. She currently lives in San Francisco.