Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor", a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She came to England in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics from York University in 1982. She lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday.

Jon Halliday is a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, University of London. He has written or edited eight previous books.

Seth Faison spent 12 years living in and writing about China, including five as Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Faison earned a reputation in Asia as a writer with a knack for capturing the moods and flavors of China. Originally from Brooklyn, he first went to China as a 25-year-old looking for an adventure. He spent two years studying Chinese and then got his first job as a reporter in Hong Kong. He moved to Beijing a year before the student movement in Tiananmen Square of 1989, which he covered for a Hong Kong newspaper. Once he joined The New York Times, he covered New York City and specialized in Asian Organized Crime and people smuggling. He went to Shanghai to open a news bureau in 1995, writing principally about the dramatic social and economic change underway there. He is the author of South of the Clouds : Exploring the Hidden Realms of China. "(Faison's)...book captures in extraordinary detail the cultural heritage and values of the Chinese people." (Booklist)