Register now for WACA's Cover to Cover conference call on Wednesday, July 24, at 9:00-9:30 AM ET, featuring Anna Fifield, Beijing Bureau Chief at The Washington Post.
The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un
The behind-the-scenes story of the rise and reign of the world’s strangest and most elusive tyrant, Kim Jong Un, by the journalist with the best connections and insights into the bizarrely dangerous world of North Korea. Anna Fifield reconstructs Kim’s past and present with exclusive access to sources near him and brings her unique understanding to explain the dynastic mission of the Kim family in North Korea. The archaic notion of despotic family rule matches the almost medieval hardship the country has suffered under the Kims. Few people thought that a young, untested, unhealthy, Swiss-educated basketball fanatic could hold together a country that should have fallen apart years ago.
Education: University of Canterbury, New Zealand, postgraduate diploma in journalism; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, BA
Anna Fifield is the Beijing Bureau Chief for The Washington Post, covering all aspects of greater China. She was the Post's Bureau Chief in Tokyo between 2014 and 2018, focusing on Japan and the Koreas but periodically reporting from other parts of the region. She particularly concentrated on North Korea, trying to shed light on the lives of ordinary people there and also on how the regime managed to stay in power. She is the author of "The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un." She started as a journalist in her home country of New Zealand, then worked for the Financial Times for 13 years. During her time there, she reported from almost 20 countries, from Iran and Libya to North Korea and Australia. During the 2013-2014 academic year, she was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard, studying how change happens in closed societies.
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