Jonathan Mirsky was born in New York in 1932 and educated at Columbia University, Cambridge University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught Chinese and Vietnamese history, Comparative Literature, and Chinese at Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth College.
In 1974, Mirsky moved to England. From 1993 to 1998 he was based in Hong Kong as the East Asia editor of The Times (London). Previously he wrote for The Observer, The Economist, and The Independent. He is a regular writer for The New York Review of Books, Literary Review, and The Spectator, as well as a contributor to a range of other journals.
Mirsky broadcasts frequently on radio and TV and was part of the BBC team in China during the Queen of England's visit in 1986. He has accompanied Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries to Beijing, has interviewed the Dalai Lama, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Lee Teng-hui, and has visited Tibet six times throughout the course of his long residence and travel in Asia.
Mirsky has lectured to the Royal National Defense College, the Institute for International Affairs, and at many universities. In 1989, he was named British newspapers' International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen uprising. In 1999, Dr. Mirsky was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard and in 2002 he was the I.F. Stone Fellow in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.