Writer, Journalist & Editor in Berlin/Kuala Lumpur






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Emily Ding is a freelance writer, journalist, and editor based in Berlin and Kuala Lumpur.

Drawn by a vivid sense of place, her stories range across themes—humans vs. nature; travel, migration & culture; memory politics & the legacies of conflict—and are published in both literary and news media.

As a former columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, she contributed a series of narrative nonfiction as braided Instagram stories. She has also written personal and critical essays for the Mekong Review.

As a journalist, she published news features in Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, Public Radio International, Vice Asia, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, Slate, Roads & Kingdoms, Wired UK, New Naratif, Esquire Singapore and Malaysia, Malaysiakini. Some of this work was supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Fuller Project, and the National Geographic Society/Out of Eden Walk.

She has also acted as a mentor to other journalists for the Solutions Journalism Network in the U.S. and Macaranga, an environmental-reporting outfit in Malaysia.

Writing, reporting, and photography aside: She has researched and factchecked for TV documentaries, which were broadcast on National Geographic, History, and Netflix. She also edited news and feature stories for small Southeast Asian publications and wrote travel and commercial copy.

She is a former Associate Editor of Esquire Malaysia and a former Web Editor of Litro Magazine in London.

Currently, she is working on a couple of personal projects, including fiction.

She is also taking freelance and project-based commissions and particularly interested in collaborating with nonprofits working on migration, animal welfare, or environmental issues.

Please get in touch.