“Globalization and its Discontents: Stories from the Factory Floors of Egypt and China”

Leslie T. Chang has written about women in the developing world for two decades. Her book Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation (Random House, 2024) follows the lives of three women who work in Egypt’s garment industry. The book also relates Chang’s own experiences living in Egypt for five years and the history of the country’s textile industry, its changing interpretations of Islam, and how factors from dramatic swings in economic policy to conservative marriage expectations and a failing education system all shape the country and the choices available to women.

Her previous book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) explored China’s mass migration through the lives of young women from the countryside who work in a factory city in South China. Factory Girls was named a New York Times Notable Book and has been translated into ten languages. Chang is a recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Visions Award, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship.

Prior to these experiences, Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in American History and Literature, Chang has also worked as a journalist in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. 

She and her husband, writer Peter Hessler, live in southwestern Colorado with their twin daughters.