Barbara Demick: True stories from North Korea

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

North Korea and Tibet are two of the most tightly-controlled societies on earth, and as a consequence their peoples are often misunderstood by the world’s media, caricatured respectively as aggressive communists and spiritual hermits. But Barbara Demick, former Los Angeles Times correspondent in Seoul and Beijing, confesses that she likes a challenge, and so set out to build a more nuanced picture of individuals’ real lives in both places. Moreover, she did this with minimal location reporting; indeed in the case of North Korea, she never visited the city she wrote about at all. Using an almost forensic level of investigation, Demick conducted lengthy and highly detailed interviews with people who had left both places, cross-referencing testimonies and drawing on additional research to corroborate their accounts. She then used the resulting material to inform a vivid, factual storytelling style that she calls narrative non-fiction. As she explains in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones, it is a difficult process, but one that yields fascinating insight into places whose repressive leaders would rather we knew far less about.

Producer: Michael Gallagher Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: Soldiers at a military parade in North Korea. Credit: EPA/How Hwee Young)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC World Service, Hello, this is Owen Bennett Jones with assignment.
0:04.6	In conversation once again with a distinctive journalist whose workers proved to be globally
0:10.0	significant.
0:11.4	And today I'm joined from her apartment in New York by a print journalist
0:16.1	whose overseas postings enabled her to branch out into so-called narrative
0:21.6	non-fiction books. called Narrative Non Fiction Books.
0:24.0	Barbara Demix's work involves accounts, close up and personal ones of how people live in places
0:31.0	even though in one case she never even went to the city
0:34.2	she was writing about now that was in North Korea and the book was called
0:38.1	nothing to envy and there's also one on Tibet just coming out called Eat the Buddha.
0:44.0	By conducting exhaustive, heavily cross-checked interviews with people who have left those places,
0:51.0	she can give a real impression of what life is like there.
0:54.1	And the result is authoritative new material describing provincial cities in North Korea and Tibet.
1:01.0	So Barbara Demick, welcome to the program.
1:02.8	Thanks so much for having me.
1:04.2	And you've said about doing your work this way.
1:07.0	What kind of advantages did you think you might be able to achieve through using this method?
1:12.2	I was really trying to give the reader the sense of you are there to reconstruct the
1:18.3	smells, the sounds, the sights, you know, what it's like to be in North Korean, what it's like to be in North Korean, what it's like to be a Tibetan.
1:27.0	And something that prompted me to do the North Korea book is a funny thing, but I was at a luncheon in Seoul with a diplomat who said to me you know we
1:37.5	know all about the North Korean nuclear program but we don't know much about North Korean
1:43.7	life.
	...

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