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Barbara Demick

Goodreads Author

Born

The United States

Genre

Nonfiction

Member Since

August 2010

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Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). Her next book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010.

Demick was 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 categor Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). Her next book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010.

Demick was 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. She was stationed in the Middle East for the newspaper between 1997 and 2001.

In 2001, Demick moved to the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper's first bureau chief in Korea. 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. In 2005, Demick was a co-winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy's Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs. 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. 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. The book was also nominated for the U.S.'s most prestigious literary prize, the National Book Award.

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. She moved to Beijing for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and became Beijing bureau chief in early 2009. Demick was one of the subjects of a 2005 documentary Press Pass to the World by McCourry Films. ...more

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Combine Editions
Barbara Demick’s books

Average rating: 4.43 · 107,883 ratings · 11,679 reviews · 4 distinct works • Similar authors

	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea 4.45 avg rating — 97,011 ratings — published 2009 — 32 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town 4.15 avg rating — 6,706 ratings — published 2020 — 33 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood by Barbara Demick (Goodreads Author), John Costello (Photographer) 4.28 avg rating — 2,516 ratings — published 1996 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins 4.33 avg rating — 1,651 ratings — published 2025 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Barbara Demick's Blog

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Identical twins, one Chinese and one American. How they were separated, how they were reunited and what they teach us about our identity.

This story dates back to 2009, when I was a China-based journalist reporting in the countryside. There I met a nine-year-old girl who told me how her twin sister was taken away by officials because they were too poor to pay the fines for violating the one-child p Read more of this blog post »

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Published on May 01, 2025 06:40

Barbara is Currently Reading

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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins

by Barbara Demick (Goodreads Author)

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May 01, 2025 08:54PM

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Barbara’s Recent Updates

Barbara Demick is now friends with Emma
Aug 11, 2025 02:24AM · 1 like · like
Barbara Demick wants to read The Weimar Years Rise and Fall 1918-1933 by Frank McDonough	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:49AM · 1 like · like
Barbara Demick rated a book it was amazing Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:49AM · 8 likes · like
Barbara Demick has read Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:48AM · 1 like · like
Barbara Demick rated a book it was amazing Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:48AM · 4 likes · like
Barbara Demick has read Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:48AM · like
Barbara Demick has read Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:48AM · 1 like · like
Barbara Demick has read Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:47AM · like
Barbara Demick has read Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:47AM · 1 like · like
Barbara Demick has read Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle with China for My Land and My People by Dalai Lama XIV	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 02, 2025 07:47AM · 2 likes · like

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Quotes by Barbara Demick (?)

“North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

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“North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

tags: choices, communism

40 likes

“It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

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Polls

February BoTM Side Read Nominations! 1st Poll

Top 5 books move onto the second poll!

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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

0 votes, 0.0%

68 total votes

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