Frank Dikötter’s history of Mao’s great famine took the Samuel Johnson prize last. The prize is the most prestigious non-fiction award in Britain, carrying a cheque for £20,000. It also gets an hour long special on BBC2’s The Culture Show, worth its weight in pixels to publishers of challenging and largely unmarketable books. The programme airs tonight.
The general consensus is that Dikötter is a worthy winner, who succeeded in finding new seams from that very well mined area of research on Mao’s pig-headed ignorance. As Jasper Becker wrote in his Spectator review of Dikötter’s book,
‘In a brilliant work, backed by painstaking research, Professor Frank Dikötter, has trawled through the Chinese archives to reveal some staggering new details and insights on how Mao bravely ignored everyone’s advice.
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