Poetry and war

Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo

Il Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo di Perugia è un evento annuale che riunisce professionisti dei media, esperti di comunicazione e appassionati di informazione da tutto il mondo. Si svolge nel centro storico di Perugia e offre conferenze, dibattiti, workshop e opportunità di networking sui temi più rilevanti del giornalismo contemporaneo.

Giornalismo

Pagina tematica del giornalismo

Lindsey Hilsum

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News' International Editor. Her book, In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for biography Recently, she has reported on the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. She has covered the major conflicts and refugee movements of the past three decades including Syria, Mali, Iraq, and Kosovo. In 2011 she witnessed the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya and Egypt. She has also reported extensively from Iran and Zimbabwe, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. She has been Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, and has won the Charles Wheeler Award and the James Cameron Award as well as the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and recognition from One World Media, Amnesty International and BAFTA. Her writing has featured in the New York Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement and Granta, among other publications. Her first book was Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution (2012). Before becoming a journalist, she was an aid worker, first in Latin America and then in Africa. Her latest book is I Brought The War With Me; Stories and Poems from the Front Line (Chatto & Windus, September 2024). “In nearly four decades of reporting from war zones, I have always carried a book of poetry with me. I Brought The War With Me; Stories and Poems from the Front Line comprises fifty stories from conflicts I have covered - from Rwanda to Kosovo, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza - each twinned with a poem. Sometimes, the poem comes from the same country as the anecdote it follows, but mostly I have looked for poems from a different place and time, the idea being that the poem draws out universal resonance from a specific anecdote or experience. The poets range from the very first war poet – the Sumerian princess Enheduana who lived in Ur in 2300 BCE - to Siegfried Sassoon to contemporary Ukrainian poets like Halyna Kruk and the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha who is pouring out poetry right now. The late Irish musician Frank Harte said, 'Those in power write the history; those who suffer write the songs.' A lot of songs and poems have been written in recent years. I hope that the marriage of vivid reportage with both well-known English poetry and the work of lesser known poets from the war-zones of the world provides a rare perspective and helps us make sense of our troubled times.

Kirsty Lang

Kirsty Lang is a journalist and broadcaster with wide-ranging global experience. She has been a news presenter for Channel 4 and BBC World and a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. Kirsty presented BBC Radio’s flagship arts programme Front Row for 19 years and is a regular contributor to the Sunday Times and the Financial Times on a wide range of issues from arts and culture to housing and health. Kirsty has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York and UCL, London. She was a board member of the British Council and chairs the board of the award winning environmental NGO, Global Witness.

---