US author's stories from N. Korea secure UK award

Author Barbara Demick scooped the UK's top non-fiction award with her "gripping and moving" account of an Orwellian society.

The Los Angeles Times journalist won the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize For Non-Fiction last night after following the stories of six North Korean citizens to pen Nothing To Envy: Real Lives In North Korea.

She beat five other shortlisted works including Alex Bellos's bid to bring maths to the masses in Alex's Adventures In Numberland and New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin's spotlight on the global financial meltdown in Too Big To Fail.

The £20,000 prize winner was announced by BBC Radio 4's Today programme host Evan Davis, who headed the judging panel, at the Royal Institute for British Architects in London.

Mr Davis said: "It is the personal detail in Nothing To Envy that makes it both gripping and moving.

"Nowhere will you find a better account of real life in North Korea, a society that is all too easily comically typecast by massive parades of coordinated flag-wavers.

"I think we knew this book had something when we found ourselves reading it out loud to spouses and partners.

"And it is a real testament to Ms Demick's writing that a book on such a grim topic can be so hard to put down."

Prize organisers said that Ms Demick had shown in a "compelling and unforgettable way" how the country had made George Orwell's landmark novel 1984 a reality. Among the people she followed in Chongin were two lovers who dated secretly for a decade and feared to criticise the regime to each other, and a young homeless boy.

The title of the book is derived from a song taught to North Korean children containing the words: "We have nothing to envy in the world."

Ms Demick is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she has reported from the Middle East and South Korea. She lives in Beijing.

Her coverage of war in Sarajevo won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

The five authors who made the shortlist received £1,000 each.

Another shortlisted title, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, saw author Richard Wrangham argue that cooking transformed us from apes.