5x15 Special: Jung Chang on Fly, Wild Swans

We’re excited to relaunch 5x15 Specials: solo evenings with remarkable voices who change how we understand the world.

More than 30 years have passed since Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was banned in China and embraced across the world. With over 13 million copies sold in 37 languages, its searing account of three generations of women revealed the political and social cost of the Cultural Revolution and transformed the way millions of people saw China. But its candour made it difficult for Jung to return home.

Her subsequent book, a critical biography of Mao Zedong, further hardened the Chinese authorities against her, making it impossible for her to return to see her ailing mother. Across all her writing Jung has charted the lives of Chinese women in the 20th century, showing how they resisted, endured and sometimes colluded with the forces that shaped their country. Her long-awaited new book Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China continues that story, with a sweeping and deeply intimate follow-up that brings her family’s history, and that of modern China, into the present day.

On April 20th, Chang returns to the 5x15 stage where, in conversation with journalist Rosie Boycott, she will recount her family’s extraordinary story and how the fate of one family became the story of a nation.

5x15. Where great stories are told live.

A Best Book of the Year in The Times; Daily Telegraph; Financial Times and Waterstones

'Beautiful and moving’ – Elif Shafak, The Observer

‘Few can match Chang’s ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped western understanding of China as broadly’ – The Guardian

‘Packed with poignant snapshots of family history and juicy episodes of literary life under state scrutiny … the follow-up to her 1991 bestseller is both a tribute to her uncrushable mother and a powerful portrait of censorship and shifting attitudes in Xi’s China’ – The Financial Times