Frank Dikötter

Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Asia in 2006, he was Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has published a dozen books that have changed the way we look at the history of China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to China before Mao: The Age of Openness (2007). His People's Trilogy has documented the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis on new archival material, much of it never seen before. The first volume, Mao's Great Famine, won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2011 and was translated into thirteen languages. The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 concludes the trilogy and was published in May 2016.