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Adam Johnson, writer of THAT North Korea novel, on his absurd world

The Hong Kong International Literary Festival speaker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Orphan Master’s Son, talks about his lonely childhood and why his stories tend to veer towards the bizarre

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A North Korean couple sit by the river in Pyongyang. Adam Johnson wanted to know about the people who didn’t defect, who strolled beside the river in Pyongyang and had picnics. Picture: AP
When Adam Johnson won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for a novel set in North Korea, many were surprised that an American academic who had spent just five days in the country could write so convincingly and colourfully about the hermit kingdom. Understand a little about the author and his life, though, and it begins to make sense.

THE SUCCESS OF The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) turned Johnson almost overnight from what he calls a “normal writer” into one with celebrity status.

“North Korea is a topic that people care about around the world, so suddenly I started getting invited everywhere,” says Johnson, a professor of English at Stanford University, in the United States.

But there was a drawback to the international invitations – separated from his family he began to get lonely. The solu­tion? Take them with him.

“Everywhere I go I drag my wife and kids,” says Johnson.

So, when he arrives for the Hong Kong International Literary Festival this week, he’ll do so accompanied by a family entourage of four.

Author Adam Johnson.
Author Adam Johnson.
"I’m a writer and [when he disappears into his study] I’ll say to them, ‘I’m going to go off and work’ and it doesn’t seem like work to them, it only seems like I’m missing. It’s only at events like this that they realise maybe what the product of that is,” says Johnson, by Skype from his home in San Francisco.
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