Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Professor Frank Dikotter returns to the festival after his successful talk on the award-winning Mao’s Great Famine to introduce the second instalment of his The People’s Trilogy on modern Chinese history. It follows China after Mao Zedong raised the red flag in Beijing in 1949. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive authoritarian regime that sent at least five million civilians to their death. Dikotter draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs to uncover the violence and brutal politics and the stories of individual lives caught up in it.

Dikotter is chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and has written widely on China. The first part of his trilogy, Mao’s Great Famine, won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2011 and was described by Wild Swans author Jung Chang as ‘the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history’.

Supported by Eileen and Munir Majid.