Chief Publisher
Ying was parachuted into Beijing with US$2,000 in travellers’ cheques in the late 1980s and grew the Beijing office into a 30-person operation focusing mostly on magazine publishing. From 2007 onwards she, along with her editorial colleagues, founded ACA, funding operations by selling her house. These days she can be found talking to her publishing friends from 5:30am onwards, trying to find (in her words) “our Harry Potter”.
Chief Editor
David worked in financial marketing in the 1980s before switching to the world of journalism. He was Southeast Asia correspondent at South magazine before becoming editor of China Economic Review in 1992 and, later, China Business Handbook, where he worked closely with Ying in developing the international reputation of these titles. After more than a decade there, he went on to edit a number of different China-related books and teamed up once again with Ying in 2014 to become senior fiction editor at ACA Publishing. This is David’s dream job: playing a supporting role to the authors and translators in bringing some of the best in modern Chinese fiction to an English-speaking readership.
Senior Editor
Martin studied Chinese at Leeds University in the mid-1970s and went on to spend more than two decades in Hong Kong working in magazine publishing with Times Publishing Group and then Reed Elsevier, ultimately becoming their B2B Publishing Director. He first met Ying in Beijing in 1982 and their paths kept crossing thereafter, culminating in Martin joining ACA Publishing as Chief Editor in 2013 (having played a key role before then). These days, Martin likes nothing better than to wade through hundreds of pages of translated material and making the final editorial calls on the unique intricacies that pop up when trying to translate between such disparate cultures.
Marketing Director
Daniel has worked for Sinoist Books since the imprint’s inception, helping raise it to what it is today. He has won several publishing fellowships, and his work in the publishing industry was recognised at the 2026 London Book Fair, where he won the Trailblazer Award.
Will Forrester is a writer and editor. His work has appeared in the Guardian and Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has edited titles including All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation. Forrester is also Translation and International Manager at English PEN, a Director of Untold Narratives, and an independent expert for the EU’s Creative Europe programme.
Thomas Moran has a PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell University. Since 1994 he has been on the faculty of the Chinese Department at Middlebury College in Vermont, USA. He has edited or co-edited and contributed to three volumes on Chinese writers for the Dictionary of Literary Biography series and has published translations of Chinese short stories, plays, poems and essays. His next translation will be Ning Ken’s 2014 novel Three Trios.
Nicky Harman translates fiction, and occasionally non-fiction and poetry from Chinese. When not translating, she spends time promoting contemporary Chinese fiction to the English-language reader. She co-runs and is a trustee of the registered charity Paper-Republic.org; she writes blogs, gives talks at literary festivals and works with the Centre for New Chinese Writing at Leeds University, UK. She won the 2020 China Special Book Award, and the 2013 China International Translation Contest.
Frances Weightman is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Leeds, UK, as well as the Founding Director of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. Her current research focuses on contemporary Chinese literature and authors. Frances has published widely on Chinese fiction of all periods and she is also Editor of the Open-Access research journal, Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature.
Jane works at Inpress Books, an Art Council England supported trade sales and marketing agency for independent publishers. Jane has previously worked at Canongate Books, Simon & Schuster and Hodder & Stoughton, working across UK and international sales, having started her publishing life in the production department of The British Museum Press.