Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (Walker & Company/Bloomsbury Publishing, USA and UK, 2010), by Dutch historian Frank Dikötter (1961), a book about China's disastrous Great Leap Forward policy, has won the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

The book reveals new details of the period from 1958-1962, providing fresh historical perspectives on Mao's campaign to increase industrial production during which some forty five millions starved to death.

Dikötter characterises the Great Famine as "the worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere."

The academic - currently chair of professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London - was one of a small number of historians to be given access into the Chinese archives in 2008, when Chinese authorities made an opening because of the Olympics.

Chair of the judges Ben Macintyre praised the book as an "epic record of human folly". He added it was "essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th Century".

Dikötter hopes his book can be translated into Chinese.