Far From the Rooftop of the World
Presented in partnership with the Center for East Asian Studies.
Journalist Amy Yee follows ordinary Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala, India and across the globe in the face of political, religious, and cultural persecution.
In 2008, the Chinese government cracked down on protests throughout Tibet, and journalist Amy Yee found herself covering a press conference with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, his exile home in India. She never imagined a personal encounter with the spiritual leader would spark a global, fourteen-year journey to spotlight the stories of Tibetans in exile.
As she documents how Tibetans live between worlds, Yee comes to know ordinary but
extraordinary people like Topden, a monk and unlikely veterinary assistant; Norbu, a chef and
political refugee; and Deckyi and Dhondup, a couple forced to leave their middle-class lives in Lhasa. Yee follows them to other parts of India and across oceans and four continents where they forge new lives while sustaining Tibetan identity and culture.
Amy Yee
Amy Yee is the author of the narrative nonfiction and book Far from the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents with a Foreword by the Dalai Lama. The book won the Chicago Writers Association’s 2024 award for traditional nonfiction and two Foreword Book of the Year awards in 2023.
She is an award-winning journalist, currently with the Chicago Sun-Times and previously with Bloomberg/CityLab and the Financial Times in India where she lived for seven years. She has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR and 30+ media outlets.
Amy has had four Notable Essays in the Best American Essays and was a MacDowell fellow. She has published poems in literary journals such as Salamander, Bayou, Memoir and many others.
In 2023, Amy won the Asian American Journalists Association’s award for reporting about protecting rights of immigrant voters, and a Society of Professional Journalists award for racial equity reporting. In 2025 she won the Chicago Headline Club's Lisagor award for Best Arts reporting about libraries unionizing. In 2023 she won Chicago Journalists Association's award for Best Business story.
She has also won three awards from the United Nations Correspondents Association; four from the South Asian Journalists Association; and the Association of Healthcare Journalists for analysis about reducing deaths of children in India and Bangladesh.
Amy is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School, Columbia Journalism School, Wellesley College and Hunter’s MFA program in Creative Writing.