Samuel Johnson Prize Awarded to Mao's Great Famine

Mao's image still looms large in modern China (photo by bokurdotnet)

The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction has been awarded to Frank Dikotter for his seminal work on the life and of Chairman Mao, titled Mao’s Great Famine. The Dutch historian beat five other short listed titles including a biography of Caravaggio and a study of Bismarck’s life to claim the £20,000 prize.

Focusing on the so called ‘Great Leap Forward’ which took place between 1958 and 1962, the book studies Mao Zedong’s attempt to ‘overtake’ the British Economy within a fifteen year period which resulted in widespread hardship, famine and directly led to the death of over 45 million people.

Chair of this year’s judging panel, Ben Macintyre, describes the Mao’s Great Famine as ‘ an epic record of human folly’, going as far as to claim that the study ‘casts Chinese history in a radical new light, with a devastating psychological portrait of the dictator’.

The prize is the largest awarded for non fiction within the UK and is open to all non fiction genres.

Each of the short listed authors (see below) also received £1000 in prize money for their titles.

Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011 Shortlist was:

• Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury)
• Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham Dixon (Allen Lane)
• Liberty’s Exiles by Maya Jasanoff (HarperPress)
• The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (Fourth Estate)
• Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg (Oxford University Press)
• Reprobates by John Stubbs (Viking)