& L' X& c- {+ oMao's Great Famine wins Samuel Johnson Prize4 u9 H0 p4 E$ S" O
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A book about China's disastrous Great Leap Forward policy has won the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.! `- \0 A; Y5 i0 O
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Mao's Great Famine, by Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, beat five other short-listed titles to the award. ; r" ]6 G N0 w+ m & e3 [% l3 P O6 a, dChair of the judges Ben Macintyre praised the book as an "epic record of human folly".; i5 K1 ]- @5 h- l Z5 B% r+ e
2 Y, @, V- U$ N! f- F a) A6 q& S9 W3 J8 SHe added it was "essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th Century". P9 N8 S$ C$ r! Q0 P# n 1 @6 e \+ ?9 N d; HMao's Great Famine reveals new details of the period from 1958-1962, providing fresh historical perspectives on Mao's campaign to increase industrial production during which tens of millions starved to death.: i2 W8 O+ n, S6 o" s# Z
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The academic - currently chair of professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong - was one of a small number of historians to be given access into the Chinese archives.1 `% I H; G5 }! X$ K
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This year's runners-up were Andrew Graham Dixon's Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles, Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck: A Life, and John Stubbs' Reprobates.9 z/ I7 Y1 j/ H8 B
6 @, h) t! ^+ O3 QThey each received £1,000. / [9 `. U6 k. t# { , k/ C2 A e* {# A9 K; U5 AThe prize was open to non-fiction books published in English by writers of any nationality between 1 May 2010 and 30 April 2011.
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