After graduating with a degree in anthropology from National Taiwan University, novelist, screenwriter, and literary critic Chu Ja-Han went on to pursue a PhD in sociology from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in France. Greatly influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, and Salman Rushdie, Chu Ja-Han excels at fictionalizing the hidden lives of ordinary people caught up in the vast currents of history.