Esther Tyldesley is a translator and a teacher of translation and Chinese. She graduated from Robinson College, Cambridge with a degree in Chinese, after which she spent four years teaching English to trainee teachers in rural Guizhou Province. During those four years, the things she had learned about China at university started to make more and more sense, and when she got back to the UK she was able to translate her first book: Xinran’s The Good Women of China, released in 2001. She gained a Master’s degree in Applied Translation Studies at the University of Leeds in 2002.

Esther now works teaching Chinese Language and Translation at the University of Edinburgh. In her spare time, she reads far too many books and dreams of China. Her published translations include Sky Burial and China Witness, also by Xinran, Confucius from the Heart by Yu Dan and Little Aunt Crane by Yan Geling.