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The Assignment Interview

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Factual

WSEnglish 16 9 Updated

Owen Bennett-Jones talks to four distinctive journalists about their work and their lives

In this series Owen Bennett-Jones talks to four distinctive journalists who have helped shape how we see the world around us about their work and their lives.

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The Assignment Interview: 05/06/2021 GMT

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05/06/2021 GMT

BBC World Service - The Assignment Interview, 05/06/2021 GMT

Barbara Demick: True stories from North Korea.

Barbara Demick: True stories from North Korea


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.

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The Assignment Interview

05/06/2021 GMT

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