Jonathan Tel won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015. He has won various other awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, and the Sunday Times EFG Story Prize. All of these were for stories set in China, which in revised form are now chapters in the highly praised novel about financial goings-on in contemporary China, Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao (Turtle Point Press, New York, 2020). He has recently been based in Berlin, researching and teaching about refugees there, and writing a book of fiction about Syrians in Germany.