Barbara Demick

Last updated

Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She was the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times . [1] She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). [2] Her second book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010. [3] Her third book Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, focusing on the life of Tibetan people in Ngaba, Sichuan, China, was published in July 2020 by Random House. [4]

Contents

Biography

Demick grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economic history. [5] [6]

Derrick was a correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer in Eastern Europe from 1993 to 1997. Along with photographer John Costello, she produced a series of articles that ran 1994–1996 following life on one Sarajevo street over the course of the war in Bosnia. The series won the George Polk Award for international reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the features category. [7] She was stationed in the Middle East for the newspaper between 1997 and 2001. [8]

In 2001, Demick moved to the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper's first bureau chief in Korea. [9] Demick reported extensively on human rights in North Korea, interviewing large numbers of refugees in China and South Korea. She focused on economic and social changes inside North Korea and on the situation of North Korean women sold into marriages in China. She wrote an extensive series of articles about life inside the North Korean city of Chongjin. [10] In 2005, Demick was a co-winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy's Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs. [7] In 2006, her reports about North Korea won the Overseas Press Club's Joe and Laurie Dine Award for Human Rights Reporting and the Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism. [11] That same year, Demick was also named print journalist of the year by the Los Angeles Press Club.

In 2010, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for her work, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea . [12] The book was also a finalist for the U.S.'s most prestigious literary prize, the National Book Award. [13] and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An animated feature film based on the book and sharing the same title [14] was planned to be directed by Andy Glynne. [14] [15] The project launched in 2012 [16] and a pilot was released in 2015. [17] Its status as of January 2018 is not clear.

Her first book, Logavina Street, was republished in an updated edition in April 2012 by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House. [18] Granta published the book in the U.K. under the title, Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street. [19]

Demick was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007 teaching Coverage of Repressive Regimes through the Ferris Fellowship at the Council of the Humanities. [20] She moved to Beijing for the Los Angeles Times in 2007. She is also an occasional contributor to The New Yorker.

Awards and nominations

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chongjin</span> Capital city of North Hamgyong Province, North Korea

Chŏngjin is the capital of North Korea's North Hamgyong Province (함경북도) and the country's third largest city. It is sometimes called The City of Iron.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinylon</span> Synthetic fiber

Vinylon, also known as Vinalon, is a synthetic fiber produced from reaction between polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber and formaldehyde. Chemically it is polyvinyl formal (PVF). Vinylon was first developed in Japan in 1939 by Ri Sung-gi, Ichiro Sakurada, and H. Kawakami. In North Korea, Ri Sung-gi found a route to produce PVA from domestic anthracite and limestone as raw materials. Trial production began in 1954 and in 1961 the massive "Vinylon City" was built in Hamhung, North Korea. Vinylon's widespread usage in North Korea is often pointed to as an example of the implementation of the Juche philosophy, and it is known as the Juche fiber.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor LaValle</span> American writer

Victor LaValle is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and five novels, The Ecstatic,Big Machine,The Devil in Silver,The Changeling, and Lone Women. His fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinpo</span> Municipal City in South Hamgyong Province, North Korea

Sinpho is a port city on the coast of the Sea of Japan in central South Hamgyŏng province, North Korea. According to the last available census, approximately 152,759 people reside there.

The Kippumjo, sometimes spelled Kippeumjo, is a collection of groups of approximately 2,000 women and girls reportedly maintained by the leader of North Korea for the purpose of providing entertainment, including that of a sexual nature, for high-ranking Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) officials and their families, as well as, occasionally, distinguished guests.

Bob Drogin is an American journalist and author. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for nearly four decades. Drogin began his career with the Times as a national correspondent, based in New York, traveling to nearly every state in the United States. He spent eight years as a foreign correspondent, and as bureau chief in Manila and Johannesburg, before returning to the U.S. He covered intelligence and national security in the Washington bureau, from 1998 until retiring in November 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sosan Stadium</span> Football stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea

Sŏsan Stadium (Korean: 서산축구경기장) is a football stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea. It is currently used mostly for football matches. The stadium holds 25,000 people, and was built by the North Korean army in 1988 for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. It lies next to Ryanggang Hotel which was completed around the same time in 1989.

Steven M. Lopez is an American journalist and four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has been a columnist for The Los Angeles Times since 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spiegel & Grau</span> Multi-platform publisher founded by Celina Spiegel and Julie Grau

Spiegel & Grau was originally a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House founded by Celina Spiegel and Julie Grau in 2005.

<i>Nothing to Envy</i> 2009 nonfiction book by Barbara Demick

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a 2009 nonfiction book by Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick, based on interviews with North Korean refugees from the city of Chongjin who had escaped North Korea. In 2010, the book was awarded the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It was also a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Choe Sang-hun</span> South Korean journalist (born 1962)

Choe Sang-Hun is a Pulitzer Prize-winning South Korean journalist and Seoul Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

Alan C. Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and the founder of the News Literacy Project, a national education nonprofit that works with educators and journalists to offer resources and tools that help middle school and high school students learn to separate fact from fiction. In 2020, NLP expanded its audience to include people of all ages. leader of leftist propaganda.

The Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees, commonly known as Hanawon, is a South Korean facility for the "training for social adaptation" of North Korean defectors, preparing them for life in the South. Three months' stay in this facility is mandatory for all North Koreans arriving in the south, with residents unable to leave of their own free will.

Inminban is a Neighbourhood Watch-like form of cooperative local organization in North Korea. No North Korean person exists outside the inminban system; everyone is a member.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-shamanism movement in Korea</span>

In the history of modern and contemporary Korea, especially between the late 19th century and the 1980s, there have been a series of waves of movement to eliminate indigenous shamanism and folk religions. In Korean, the movement is called misin tapa undong, regarding homegrown shamanism and anything related to it as "superstition" ; the modern Korean word for "superstition" also has the meaning of "illusory" or "false spiritual beliefs", and implies that gods and ancestors do not exist. This term was adopted from Japanese in the late 19th century, and largely emphasized by Christian missionaries to target Korean indigenous religion.

Harmonica house(하모니카사택) is the name used in North Korea for a type of row house found in North Korean cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">North Korean Postal Service</span>

The North Korean Postal Service or Korean Post is operated by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications and Communication Maintenance Bureau, which oversees postal communications, telegrams, telephone services, TV broadcasts, newspapers and other related matters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viet Thanh Nguyen</span> Vietnamese-American writer

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Ko</span> American writer

Lisa Ko is an American writer. Her debut novel, The Leavers, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. She has written for the New York Times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Kaufman</span> American journalist born 1956

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, author, Director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism, and professor of journalism.

References

  1. Times, Los Angeles. "Barbara Demick". Los Angeles Times .
  2. Danner, Mark. Bosnia: The Great Betrayal. New York Review of Books. March 26, 1998.
  3. "Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick - PenguinRandomHouse.com".
  4. "'Eat the Buddha' Reports From the 'World Capital of Self-Immolations'". The New York Times. July 15, 2020.
  5. Staff. "Barbara Demick Named Seoul Bureau Chief", Los Angeles Times , December 10, 2001. Accessed September 21, 2015. "A native of Ridgewood, N.J., Demick earned a bachelor's degree in economic history from Yale University and completed the Bagehot Fellowship in economic and business journalism at Columbia University."
  6. About Barbara Demick Archived August 15, 2015, at the Wayback Machine , Nothing to Envy . Accessed September 21, 2015. "Demick grew up in Ridgewood, N.J. She is currently the Los Angeles Times’ bureau chief in Beijing."
  7. 1 2 Demick, Barbara (2009). Nothing to Envy; Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Spiegel and Grau. ISBN   978-0-385-52390-5.
  8. Matloff, Judith. "Mothers at War." Columbia Journalism Review. Aug 19, 2004.
  9. "Los Angeles Times Names Barbara Demick Seoul Bureau Chief", Business Wire, Dec 10, 2001.
  10. Reporter Gets Rare Glimpse at North Korea, National Public Radio, July 3, 2005.
  11. "Asia Society Announces 2006 Winners of the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism". Asia Society.
  12. "Journalist Barbara Demick wins non-fiction prize with tale of life in North Korea". London Evening Standard. 2010-07-02. Retrieved 2010-07-02.
  13. "Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea – 2010 National Book Award Nonfiction Finalist, The National Book Foundation". www.nationalbook.org.
  14. 1 2 "Nothing to Envy". nothingtoenvy.net. Mosaic Films. 2012. Archived from the original on 2016-01-11. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  15. "Interview with Mosaic Films: defectors' lives to be told through an animated feature". New Focus International. 2012-11-21. Archived from the original on 2018-01-03. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  16. "Mosaic Films launch their new project: Nothing to Envy – the animation". London Korean Links. 2012-10-02. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  17. "Nothing to envy - pilot 2015". Vimeo. 21 April 2015. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  18. Demick, Barbara (2012). Logavina Street. ISBN   978-0812982763.
  19. Besieged on Amazon.co.uk. ASIN   1847084117.
  20. Princeton, Council of the Humanities, fellows [ permanent dead link ]