Monkey King

Wu Cheng’en (Author) Very little is known about Wu Cheng'en (c. 1505-80), although he is believed to have held the post of District Magistrate for a time. He had a reputation as a good poet, but only a few rather commonplace verses of his survive in an anthology of Ming poetry and in a local gazetteer.Julia Lovell (Translator) Julia Lovell is the translator of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, and is the author of Maoism, for which she won the 2019 Cundhill History Prize, and The Opium War, for which she won the Jan Michalski Prize. She is Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes about China for The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Cambridge.

Julia Lovell's new translation of Monkey King: Journey to the West is the best English edition of the classic Chinese fantasy novel I have ever read. If you wish to understand why Monkey King has been a fixture in Chinese popular culture for no fewer than five centuries, then look no further