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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Besieged: Life Under Fire in a Sarajevo Street

Book of the Week: Besieged: Life Under Fire in a Sarajevo Street: Episode 1

Besieged: Life Under Fire in a Sarajevo Street

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Besieged: Life Under Fire in a Sarajevo Street, Episode 1

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick revisits her eyewitness account of the siege of Sarajevo. In this episode bellicose rumbles are denied.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo the award winning journalist Barbara Demick revisits her evocative eyewitness account of how the residents of one street in the city endured three and half years of living in a warzone. Today, bellicosity is met with denial before harsh and terrifying realities kick in. 

Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street is the first UK publication of Barbara Demick's first book. To counter the effects of "compassion fatigue" the book began life as a series of articles evoking the daily lives of several families and how they endured years of deprivation, terror, and the loss of loved ones and friends. Her portrayal of Logavina Street's residents is at once intimate and vivid.

Barbara Demick's coverage of the war in Sarajevo won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. She is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Beijing. In 2010 she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.

Read by Laurel Lefkow
Abridged by Julian Wilkinson
Produced by Elizabeth Allard.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Barbara Demick's eyewitness account of the siege of Sarajevo. Read by Laurel Lefkow

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