Chiew-Siah Tei was born and raised in Tampin, a small town in southern Malaysia. A bilingual writer, she has won a series of awards for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese Fiction Award. She wrote the script for Night Swimmer, which won Best Short Film at the Vendome International Film Festival, and her play, Three Thousand Troubled Threads, was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival. She came to the UK to study in the 1990s, and now lives in Glasgow. Her first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2007.