Denise Chong

The Honourable Denise Chong OC (born June 9, 1953) is a celebrated Canadian author, social historian, and former economist whose powerful non-fiction narratives have profoundly shaped the documentation of the Chinese-Canadian diaspora and global human rights. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, she earned a Master’s degree in public policy and economics from the University of Toronto before entering Canada's public service Canada.ca. She served as a senior economic advisor in the Prime Minister's Office under Pierre Trudeau throughout the early 1980s before transitioning full-time to literature. Chong vaulted into international literary prominence with her 1994 debut masterpiece, The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided, a deeply moving, decades-spanning family memoir about the raw realities of the early Chinese-Canadian immigrant experience that spent an astonishing 93 weeks on the national bestseller lists. She expanded her literary footprint with The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War, which was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award, and Egg on Mao: A Story of a Ordinary Man's Extraordinary Resistance, a gripping biography tracking a bus mechanic who defaced Mao Zedong’s portrait during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. In recognition of her monumental contributions to social history and civic dialogue, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013 and recently published her highly anticipated 2024 historical non-fiction work, Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of How Two Women Illegalized the Chinese Exclusion Act.