Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong is a Chinese American crime novelist, poet, translator, critic and academic, born in Shanghai. He first came to the United States in 1988 to write a book about T. S. Eliot and stayed in the country after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He is known for a series of Shanghai-set detective novels and has also published poetry and translations from the Chinese. He has published fourteen crime and mystery novels in the Inspector Chen Cao series, including Death of a Red Heroine, which won the Anthony Award for best first novel in 2001, and A Loyal Character Dancer. The books follow Shanghai Chief Inspector Chen Cao, a poetry-quoting policeman who writes poems himself.