Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Yale University and the Bagehot Fellowship in economic and business journalism at Columbia University. From 1993–1997, she lived in Eastern Europe, where she served as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote extensively about the war in Bosnia and its aftermath. In 2001, after a stint in the Middle East, Demick became the Los Angeles Times’s first bureau chief in South Korea, where she wrote about North Korea and interviewed refugees fleeing the regime for China and South Korea. Her books Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea are drawn from her reportage on both regions. Known for her imaginative, novelistic expansions of her interviewees’ testimonials, Demick’s work has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.