Wild Swans is a tragic tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of bravery and survival.
Jung Chang is the author of the bestselling books Wild Swans: Three
Daughters of China (1991), which the Asian Wall Street Journal
called the most read book about China; Mao: The Unknown Story
(2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time magazine as
'an atom bomb of a book' and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine
Who Launched Modern China (2013), a New York Times 'notable book'.
Her latest book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women
at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China (2019), is regarded as
'another triumph' (Evening Standard London).
Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold
more than 15 million copies worldwide. She has won many awards,
including The NCR Book Award (UK, 1992, the forerunner of the
Samuel Johnson Prize), UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992),
Fawcett Society Book Award (UK, 1992) and Book of the Year (UK,
1993).
She has received a number of honorary doctorates from universities
in the UK and USA (Buckingham, York, Warwick, Dundee, the Open
University and Bowdoin College, USA). She is an Honorary Fellow of
SOAS University of London.
Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the
Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a
'barefoot' doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before
becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She
left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in
1982 at the University of York – the first person from Communist
China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Originally
a third generation Malaysian born and brought up in Penang, Pik-Sen
has lived in the UK for nearly five decades and is a familiar face
on British television. An experienced narrator, some of her titles
include Watching The Tree To Catch A Hare by Adeline Yen Mah, The
Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan and Empress Orchid by Anchee Min.
Pik-Sen regularly appears on BBC Radio dramas and programs such as
Book of the Week.
'Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the
brain-death of a nation.'
*The Sunday Times*
'Wild Swans made me feel like a five-year-old. This is a family
memoir that has the breadth of the most enduring social
history.'
*The Independent on Sunday*
'There has never been a book like this.'
*Los Angeles Times*
'Everything about Wild Swans is extraordinary. It arouses all the
emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed
to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair and
delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of
darkness.'
*The Sunday Telegraph*
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