Guardian leader writer Tania Branigan has won the 2023 Cundill history prize for her book Red Memory, about the ongoing trauma of China’s Cultural Revolution told through the rarely heard stories of the people who lived through it. Branigan will receive $75,000 (£60,984) as part of the award, which is the largest cash prize for a book of nonfiction in English. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Montreal on Wednesday evening. Judging chair and historian Philippa Levine said that Branigan’s “sensitive study of the impact of…
Tag: History books
Sparks by Ian Johnson review – China’s underground historians
Those looking for horrors in China’s recent past have no shortage of examples to choose from: the 1967 massacre of more than 9,000 people by Communist party cadres in Dao County, who threw the bodies of “class enemies” into a river to decompose; the starvation and cannibalismof thousands of prisoners at Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu, in the late 1950s. For many, however, the struggle is being allowed to remember that such events happened at all. Memory is a compelling and slippery topic for students of China. Books such…
Red Memory review – the Cultural Revolution up close
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were…