LONDON (AP) — A book that gives a rare glimpse of everyday life inside one of the world's most secretive states won Britain's leading nonfiction book prize Thursday.
Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea" was named winner of the 20,000 pound ($30,000) Samuel Johnson award at a ceremony in London.
Demick, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, interviewed North Korean defectors and drew on smuggled photographs and videos to tell the story of six residents of the totalitarian Communist state, including a pair of clandestine lovers, a homeless boy and a patriotic factory worker with a rebellious daughter.
Journalist Evan Davis, who chaired the judging panel, said Demick's book was a gripping and moving account of a country "all too easily comically typecast by massive parades of coordinated flag-wavers."
Named in honor of the 18th-century essayist and lexicographer, the Samuel Johnson Prize is open to English-language books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
Demick beat five other finalists on topics ranging from mathematics — "Alex's Adventures in Numberland," by Alex Bellos — to the Wall Street crisis, recounted in "Too Big to Fail" by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
The other runners-up were Luke Jennings' fishing memoir "Blood Knots"; Jenny Uglow's study of King Charles II, "A Gambling Man"; and "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human," by Richard Wrangham.
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Online: www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk