Julia Lovell's history of China wins Jan Michalski Prize 2012
An examination of China's relationship with foreign powers won this year's prestigious and international Jan Michalski Prize, which went to The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Dr. Julia Lovell.
An examination of China's relationship with foreign powers won this year's prestigious and international Jan Michalski Prize, which went to The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Dr. Julia Lovell.
The book's purpose is to lay the foundation for an understanding of modern China and, especially, the present-day importance of the Opium Wars in terms of a national sense of identity and China's place in the world.
An award of 50,000 swiss francs goes to Dr. Lovell; also in contention were two other non-fiction works in the form of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder and Kaiser von Amerika (lit. King of America: The Great Escape from Galicia) by Martin Pollack.
Previous years' winners were novels; György Dragomán won in 2011 with The White King, and 2010 saw Aleksander Hemon take the prize for The Lazarus Project.