The summer season of women authors is truly global, taking us this time to China.
The superpower image it now exudes overshadows realities in the near past, when poverty was rife and beyond the big cities hundreds of millions were in poverty and often illiterate. The outside world had little knowledge of this, and in the 1990s and early 2000s China was considered a safe source of babies for adoption while also doing a good deed. Tens of thousands of babies, mostly girls, were adopted by Western families, all assured these were abandoned due to the infamous “one child policy”. But reality turned out differently.
Barbara Demick, award-winning journalist and author, penned the incredible Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and the Story of Separated Twins. An author of a number of previous celebrated volumes on North Korea, Tibet and Bosnia, she brings vast experience as an observer of humanity to her reporting and writing.
In a fascinating conversation, we explore how her books were written, how she became involved with the story of the twins, and why China was and remains such a complex subject.
This episode was recorded on 21 July 2026
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