Loung Ung is an author, lecturer, and activist who has dedicated the last 15 years of her life to promoting equality, human rights, and justice in her native land and worldwide. Her memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, (Harper Perennial) a national best-seller, details her survival of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. Some two million Cambodians — out of a population of just seven million — died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Of her family of nine, five survived.

Named one of the “100 Global Youth Leaders of Tomorrow” by The World Economic Forum, Ung has been the subject of an hour-long documentary for the German ARTE, Japanese NHK, and U.S. NECN.  She has also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the London Sunday Times and in Biography, and on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, Nightline, The Today Show, and other news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and C-SPAN.

Ung has shared her messages of civic service, banning landmines, activism, and leadership at numerous symposia in the U.S. and internationally, including: the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), The Million Dollar Round Table Plenary, Linkage Inc, Crowe Chizek and Company LLP, SONY, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, and many other organizations, schools, and corporate venues.

Born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh, Ung was only five years old when her family was forced out of the city in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Loung’s parents and two of her siblings. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont through sponsorship by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Holy Family Church parish in Burlington.

In 1995, Ung returned to Cambodia for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide. She was shocked and saddened to learn that 20 of her relatives had been killed, and thousands of the survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide were still being maimed, injured, and killed each year by an old threat: antipersonnel land-mines. She decided she needed to act. Ung became the National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World (the international version of the Campaign won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize) Ung has dedicated her life to promoting equality, human rights, and justice in her native land and worldwide.

First They Killed My Father has been published in 11 countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese.  Her second book, Lucky Child was published by HarperCollins in April 2005 to critical acclaim and is widely used in colleges and community reading programs.

When not working and traveling, Ung enjoys eating fried crickets, drinking margaritas, and riding around her neighborhood on her tandem bike with friends.

First They Killed My Father: An Eyewitness Account of the Cambodian Genocide

Lucky Child, or 13,000 Miles to a New Life: Six Lessons to Integrate Into Another Country and Culture and Still Be Your Authentic Self

Beyond Surviving to Thriving: Five Immigrant Lessons to Succeed in America

Turning Life into Books: An Exorcist of the Writing Kind

Writing to Change the World

Activists, Authors, Influential Women, Inspirational, Inspiring,