Shortlisted for the prestigious U.S. National Book Award 2010.
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2010.
Evan Davis, chair of the judges and presenter of Radio 4 Today, announced the winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction at the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA), London. He comments: “It is the personal detail in Nothing to Envy that makes it both gripping and moving. Nowhere will you find a better account of real life in North Korea, a society that is all too easily comically typecast by massive parades of co-ordinated flag-wavers. I think we knew this book had something when we found ourselves reading it out loud to spouses and partners. And it is a real testament to Demick’s writing, that a book on such a grim topic can be so hard to put down.”
Nothing to Envy Real Lives in North Korea Synopsis
Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third largest city. Two lovers, who dated secretly for a decade, feared to criticise the regime to each other. A loyal factory worker watched her husband and son die of starvation before escaping the country. In telling the stories of Chongin's residents. she has recreated the lifestyles of North Korean citizens from their interests and concerns to their culture.
Barbara Demick has been interviewing North Koreans about their lives since 2001, when she moved to Seoul for the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club award for human rights reporting, the Asia Society’s Osborne Eliott award and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Award.
Before joining the Los Angeles Times, she was with the Philadelphia Inquirer as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She lived in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia and wrote a book about daily life, Logavina Street: Life and Death in Sarajevo Neighborhood. Her Sarajevo reporting won the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Demick grew up in Ridgewood, N.J. She is currently the Los Angeles Times’ bureau chief in Beijing.
