Education

He was educated at the boys school Chan Sui Ki (La Salle) College

Chan Sui Ki (La Salle) College

Chan Sui Ki College , is an Anglo-Chinese boys' secondary school in Homantin of Kowloon, Hong Kong, and was established by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic religious teaching order founded by St...

 and La Salle College

La Salle College

La Salle College is a boys' secondary school in Hong Kong. It was established by the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic religious teaching order founded by St...

, and graduated from the University of Hong Kong in 1984.

Songwriting career

He has been a cantopop

Cantopop

Cantopop is a colloquialism for "Cantonese popular music". It is sometimes referred to as HK-pop, short for "Hong Kong popular music". It is categorized as a subgenre of Chinese popular music within C-pop...

 lyricist since 1985, using the pen name Lin Xi. The Chinese characters for this name, 林夕, written vertically

Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts

Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space...

, look like the compound character (pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

: mèng), meaning "dream".

He has written over 2500 song lyrics. He is well-known for composing lyrics very quickly. On TVB's show Be My Guest, he admitted that his fastest record for writing the complete lyrics to a song is 45 minutes.

His most noted songwriting partnership is with composer Zhang Ya Dong for Faye Wong

Faye Wong

Faye Wong is a highly successful and influential Chinese singer-songwriter and actress who is usually referred to as a diva . Early in her career she briefly used the stage name Shirley Wong . Born in Beijing, she moved to Hong Kong in 1987 and rose to stardom in the early 1990s by singing...

, but he has also written with Andy Lau

Andy Lau

Andy Lau MH, JP is a Hong Kong Cantopop singer, actor, and film producer. Lau has been one of Hong Kong's most commercially successful film actors since the mid-1980s, performing in more than 160 films while maintaining a successful singing career at the same time...

, Miriam Yeung

Miriam Yeung

Miriam Yeung, RN, is a Hong Kong actress and Cantopop singer. Before entering the entertainment business, she was a registered nurse at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong. She studied at the Holy Family Canossian College Kowloon...

 and many others.

He composed the lyrics to the song "Beijing Welcomes You

Beijing Welcomes You

Beijing Welcomes You is a feature song for the 100-day countdown of the 2008 Summer Olympics held in Beijing, China. The song comprises one hundred famous artists and entertainers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea. Its music video includes a montage of scenes...

", a six-minute song which was performed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics by a panoply of popular Chinese singers, and which proved extremely popular with the Chinese public.

In May 2009 he published a book about his creative work in the previous decade, 曾经—林夕90前后 ('Once–Lin Xi's 1990s from beginning to end').