Mellissa Fung

Mellissa Fung is a Canadian journalist, author and filmmaker who grew up in Vancouver after her family emigrated from Hong Kong when she was four, and holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She joined CBC Television in 2000 and built a long career as a national correspondent covering both Canadian and world affairs, including the Beijing Olympics and the war in Afghanistan. While reporting from Afghanistan in 2008 she was abducted and held hostage for 28 days by a criminal gang -- an ordeal that became the subject of her number-one bestselling memoir Under an Afghan Sky. Beyond her CBC reporting, she has produced documentaries for outlets including Al Jazeera International and TVOntario, often focused on subjects like post-traumatic stress among returning soldiers. In this catalogue she appears as Louise Penny's co-author on The Last Mandarin (2026), a political thriller following a Chinese dissident and her estranged daughter as they race from Washington to Hong Kong amid a crisis traced back to Beijing. The novel draws on Fung's own foreign-affairs reporting and firsthand knowledge of the region, pairing her journalistic expertise with Penny's storytelling in the same way Penny's earlier standalone, State of Terror, drew on Hillary Rodham Clinton's diplomatic background.