Justin Hill has been the winner of the Betty Trask, Geoffrey Faber and Somerset Maugham awards, and his books have been translated into fifteen languages. Wang Du Lu was born to a Manchurian family in Beijing in 1909. He worked as a school teacher, editor for a small newspaper and clerk for a merchant association. He suffered numerous tragedies during World War Two, the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, but found fame as the author of wuxia-romance novels, the best known of which, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee in 1999. He died in 1977.