An account of life in North Korea drawn from interviews with defectors (afhoppere) has won the 20.000 pound BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, BBC online reports Friday.
“Nothing to Envy” is written by Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick, now living in Beijing.
Evan Davis, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today show and chairman of the judges, called the book “gripping and moving”. He said it was “a real testament” to Demick’s work “that a book on such a grim topic can be so hard to put down (lægge fra sig)”.
Subtitled “Real Lives in North Korea”, Demick’s book tells of six North Korean citizens living in the only country in the world not connected to the internet.
Its title comes from a song North Korean children are taught entitled “We Have Nothing To Envy in the World”.
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
by Barbara Demick
314 pages
Granta Books
£14.99
