Professor John MINFORD

Professor John Minford is a world-renowned sinologist and literary translator. He was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1968 with a First Class Honours degree in Chinese Studies. Over the subsequent 15 years he worked closely with David Hawkes on the Penguin Classics version of the 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone 紅樓夢, translating the last forty chapters. He went to Canberra in 1977 and studied for his PhD under the late Liu Ts’unyan 柳存仁. He went on to translate for Penguin a selection from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales 聊齋志異 and Sunzi’s The Art of War 孫子兵法. His most recent work, a translation of the famous Chinese divination text, the I Ching 易經, was published in October 2014 by Penguin Books.