Jung Chang was born in Yibin, 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 and, later, an assistant lecturer 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.

She is the author of the best-selling books Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China and Mao: The Unknown Story (co-written with Jon Halliday). Both books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and together sold some 15 million copies. Among the many awards she has won are the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book Of The Year UK (1993).