Barbara Demick is an American journalist who is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and soon-to-be Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. She is famous for writing narrative nonfiction books, in which she uses individual characters to tell complicated and challenging stories. She started her journalism career in Eastern Europe, and wrote Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, which describes one street’s experience during the siege of Sarajevo. In 2009, she published Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea about a group of six North Koreans living in the real-life version of George Orwell’s 1984. This year, she published Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, which follows a group of characters in Ngaba, a town in the Tibetan part of China’s Sichuan province. Ngaba has become famous for being the self-immolation capital of the world, after scores of Tibetans started setting themselves on fire in the small town i