Joy Zhang

I have been a free-lance writer since the age of 16. By the age of 18, I was already able to make a decent living on my journalism work. My biographical novel, A 12-Year-Old’s Studying Experience in the US (12岁我到美国读中学), was published by China’s Children and Juvenile Publishing House (中国少年儿童出版社) in June 1999, and has since been reprinted three times.

In April 2011, while I was working at the LSE, I was invited by the Chinese newspaper, People’s Daily (Overseas Edition) (人民日报海外版), to start a weekly column on a British/European perspective on higher education. I was intrigued by this rare opportunity and, for a number of reasons, I originally thought this must be a short-lived column. As it turns out, the column, Small World (一桌一椅一世界), has been very well received among overseas Chinese audience. My editors have been most supportive. I have been told that it is the longest running column in the People’s Daily’s history. I eventually ended this column in August 2017 when I felt the pressure to censor my own writing. But this column led to my 2017 non-fiction 小世界：在欧洲做学术的注脚（Small World: Footnotes to Academic Observations) published by the prestigious 三联书店 (SDX Joint Publishing Company). It was listed by the China Publishing and Media Journal as one of the 20 Impactful Books (non-fiction/popular science category) of 2017.

To date, I have been interviewed by more than 30 media outlets, including the Science, Nature, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, the British Medical Journal, the Associated Press, Statnews, NPR, National Geographic, Undark Magazine, BBC, ABC (Australia), Courier della Sera, de Volkskrant, El Pais (Spain), Weekendavisen, VoA, ARD German Radio, Radio24 (Italy), Swiss radio, South China Morning Post, Xinhua News Press and China Central Television, as well as the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan and Madame Figaro magazines. I’ve also written for the Hastings Bioethics Forum, openDemocracy, Somatosphere, the Conversation and CNN Global Public Square blog.