Chiew-Siah Tei was born and raised in Tampin, a small town in southern Malaysia.

She has been widely published in Malaysian Chinese media since the 1980s. In the 1990s she wrote literary prose, as well as columns on social issues, film, arts and literature for a variety of publications including Sin Chew Jit Poh and Nanyang Siang Pao.

Her first collection of prose, It’s Snowing (Chinese) – an account of her observation as an outsider in Scotland – was published in 1998. This was followed by a collection of arts and film reviews in 2000, Secrets and Lies (Chinese). She has since the late 1990s won awards for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese Fiction Award and the National Prose Writing Competition. In 2002, Tei was nominated the Best Prose Writer of the year

Tei went to Scotland in 1994 to read for an M.Phil. in Media Culture, majoring in film studies, at Glasgow University. A chance participation in BBC’s Migration Screenwriting programme led to the writing of her screenplay, Night Swimmer. The completed film later won Best Short Film at France’s Vendome International Film Festival 2000.

Returning to Malaysia in 1998, Tei worked as a freelance translator and lecturer of media studies at a local college. In 2002, she left for Scotland again to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing and Film Studies at Glasgow University, where she began working on her first novel. In between studies and writing, she penned Three Thousand Troubled Threads, which was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005.

Her first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008), was long-listed for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 and short-listed for the 2008 Best Scottish Fiction Prize. In 2010, Tei was first awarded the inaugural Jessie Kesson Residency at the Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre, and later, the Hawthornden International Writers Fellowship.