Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Cantonese father and an English mother. He was educated in Hong Kong and England. After graduating from St John's College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo emerged in the 1980s as one of the most important novelists writing about bi-cultural diversity, reflecting both his Anglo-Chinese background and his concerns for the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in South-East Asia.