Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953. He is the author of Stick Out Your Tongue, which in 1987 led to the permanent banning of his books in China, Red Dust, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002, The Noodlemaker, and Beijing Coma which narrated the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and was hailed as ‘a landmark work of fiction’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘a huge achievement’ (The Times) and ‘monumental’ (Guardian).

While writing The Dark Road, Ma Jian travelled through the backwaters of central and southern China. Posing as an official reporter, he visited family planning offices and hospitals where forced abortions and sterilisations are carried out. He later adopted the guise of an itinerant worker and lived among fugitives of the One Child Policy who scrape a living on the Yangtze River and the vast waste sites of Guangdong Province.