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D. B. John was born in Wales. He began training as a lawyer but switched to a career in publishing, editing popular children's books on history and science. In 2009 he moved to Berlin, Germany, to write his first novel, Flight from Berlin. A visit to North Korea in 2012 inspired Star of the North. He lives in Angel, London.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
The idea for this story came to me during a visit to North Korea in 2012, when my small tour group was suborned into some of the daily rituals of the cult of Kim. On each day of the tour we were asked to pay our respects by lining up and bowing before one of the innumerable statues of Kim Il-sung, the country's founder and self-styled Great Leader. To refuse would have risked getting our two guides, a man and a woman, into trouble. My group formed a real bond with the guides. They were friendly, likeable, and highly educated, yet they would faithfully parrot the regime's propaganda, and solemnly tell us mythic stories from the life of Kim Il-sung, as if reciting parables from the Bible. Surely they didn't believe this stuff. Or did they? A job such as theirs - guiding foreign visitors - is only awarded to the most loyal, the most politically trusted individuals. Most likely, their minds performed the kind of doublethink described by George Orwell in 1984 - to know and not know at the same time - in order to account for the daily discrepancies between the propaganda and the evidence of their own eyes.
So much about North Korea is stranger than fiction. It is a hereditary Marxist monarchy whose ...
Barbara Demick has been interviewing North Koreans about their lives since 2001, when she moved to Seoul for the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club award for human rights reporting, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Star of the North
Try:
Nothing to Envy
by Barbara Demick
Paul Fischer is an author and film producer based in the United Kingdom. His first book, A Kim Jong-Il Production has been translated to date into twelve languages. It was nominated for the Crime Writers' Association's ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Star of the North
Try:
A Kim Jong-Il Production
by Paul Fischer
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