Ed Zhao

Ed was born in Beijing just as the economic reforms started, when red posters depicting muscular workers and wheatsheaf-holding peasants were being replaced by the equally red advertisements for Coca-Cola.

Ed the child enjoyed running in the tall grass at the Temple of Five Pagodas, and dreaded car journeys to the seaside in the summertime due to car sickness. Ed the teenager moved to Poland not long after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, witnessing a country in transition. He spent his formative years in the seemingly unchanging Cotswolds, followed by university in the West Country where he probably spent more time writing music and tales of fiction than Economics essays, but he graduated okay and ended up working in London...

... and that's where got married just before the deepest recession since the Great Depression. His first child was born not long before youngsters rioted in London. His second child was born and soon afterwards the UK held a referendum to leave the EU.

Ed now lives in Melbourne, Australia, with wife and two children. He is writing his second book, ever so slowly, something about the East and the West, the memories of Beijing and beyond, the stuff of romanticism and melancholy...