Jung Chang, Chinese-British writer best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, delivered the University's 2012 Baggs Memorial Lecture on Tuesday 13 March.
Watch the 2012 Happiness Lecture again
Transcript available on request - please email internalcomms@contacts.bham.ac.uk
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 and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982 - the first person from Communist China to recieve a doctorate from a British university.
Jung Chang is the author of the best-selling books Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China, and Mao: The Unknown Story. Both books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and together sold some 15 million copies. Among the many awards she won are the UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book Of The Year UK (1993).