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I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. The words of a poem came to me when I could no longer find my own.
In nearly four decades as a journalist covering conflict from Rwanda to Kosovo to Palestine, Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has always carried a book of poetry. In Ukraine, she tweeted a poem a day, and people began to read, to share, to ask for more.
Here, Lindsey collects her favourite poems from ancient times to modern, by writers from all around the world. Alongside each, she recalls a memory from her own work, whether interviewing the warlords of Bosnia, meeting child soldiers in Uganda or giving testimony in Rwanda. Her prose reveals comic absurdity and astonishing courage, meaning and its absence, unexpected moments of love and the untold consequences that come long after most cameras disperse. She explores the pity of war – and its fatal attraction.
'Remarkable: combines her exceptional experience as a war correspondent with selected poetry in an act of witness' ANDREW MOTION
'Profound, revelatory, distressing and timely' CAROL ANN DUFFY
'Fantastic, beguiling and movingly profound' WILLIAM BOYD
'Brings us darkness and light in the most moving, magical way' CHRISTINA LAMB
© Lindsey Hilsum 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024