Blaine Harden

Blaine Harden is an American author and journalist.

His most recent book is Escape From Camp 14, on sale March 29 in the United Kingdom. It's the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person to have been born and raised in a North Korean prison camp -- and to have escaped to the West.

"If you have a soul, you will be changed forever by Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14," writes Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Lost in Shangri-La.

BBC Radio 4 has selected Escape from Camp 14 as a "Book of the Week" and selections from it will be read on the air. Foreign Policy named it as one of 21 books that will matter in 2012.

In an early review, Publisher's Weekly said the book "reads like a dystopian thriller."

Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, writes: "More so than any other book on North Korea, including my own, Escape from Camp 14 exposes the cruelty that is the underpinning of the North Korean regime."

And Suzanne Scholte, a Seoul Peace Prize Laureate, says: ""A beautifully written account of a horrible place, Escape from Camp 14 is both a shocking expose of North Korea's political prison camps as well as a testament to the human spirit's ability to dream and hope even in the darkest hell."

Harden is also the author of A River Lost. It's about well-intentioned Americans (including the author's father) who dammed and degraded the West's greatest river, the Columbia. The New York Times called it a "hard-nosed, tough-minded, clear-eyed dispatch on the sort of contentious subject that is almost always distorted by ideology or obscured by a fog of sentiment." An updated and revised edition of A River Lost will be published by Norton in the spring of 2012 to coincide with a PBS American Experience program about Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River.

Blaine's first book, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, was described by The Independent (London) as the "best contemporary book on Africa."

Blaine now reports for PBS Frontline and contributes to The Economist. He worked for The Washington Post in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and writer for the NY Times Magazine.

He lives in Seattle with his wife Jessica and their two children, Lucinda and Arno.