Subscribe or Log In to Anytime
Access audio & film from your favourite writers and thinkers
Give the gift of Anytime
Treat someone to a Hay Festival Anytime subscription
Please subscribe to Hay Festival Anytime for access to this content (more details)
Subscribe for £20.00 or log in if you already have a subscription
 

Jung Chang talks to Georgina Godwin

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China

Hay Festival 2026, 

A rare chance to hear from the author whose generation-defining book offered readers an essential understanding of China’s recent history, and whose follow-up promises to do the same again.

Jung Chang’s epic personal history Wild Swans was a publishing sensation. The story of herself, her mother and her grandmother spanned the final days of the rule of China’s last emperor. It took us through the Cultural Revolution and into the late 1970s, as Jung herself emigrated to Britain as one of the first Chinese people to leave Communist China for the West.

Hear Chang discuss her follow-up, Fly, Wild Swans – almost 35 years in the making – with broadcaster Georgina Godwin. Bringing in the story of the past few decades of her life, from her arrival in the UK to study, through her academic and publishing successes, it’s an engrossing history that once again changes how we think about China.