A Yi (real name Ai Guozhu) is a Chinese author born in 1976 in Ruichang in Jiangxi province. After spending five years as a police officer, he quit to become the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly literary magazine Chutzpah, and later became an editor of the “Iron Gourd” literary-fiction imprint. He has written two collections of short stories, Grey Stories and The Bird Saw Me, and he was nominated for the People’s Literature Short Stories prestigious award for Top Twenty Literary Giants of the Future in 2010. A Perfect Crime was published in China in 2011, and in English translation in 2015. It is described as “a thrilling and stylish novel about a motiveless murder that echoes Kafka’s absurdism, Camus’ nihilism and Dostoyevsky’s depravity.”