About the Author

B.R. Myers was born in the US and educated in Bermuda, South Africa and Germany, where he received a Korean Studies Ph.D. with a thesis on North Korean literature. He now specializes in the research of North Korea's ideology and propaganda, subjects on which he has written for peer-reviewed academic journals in the US, Canada and South Korea, as well as for the New York Times, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. His book Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) was the first English-language academic book on North Korean cultural history. He is also known for "A Reader's Manifesto" and other essays on literature and animal rights in The Atlantic. His book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2009) was praised by Christopher Hitchens as "finely argued and brilliantly written," and by South Korea's Yonhap News Agency as "perhaps the most significant work on [North Korea] since Kim Jong Il came to power." It has since been published in French, Chinese, Korean, Czech and Polish versions. Myers teaches in the international studies department at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.