I Brought the War with Me

Stories and Poems from the Front Line

Lindsey Hilsum

$36.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Chatto & Windus
17 September 2024

Biography; Memoirs; Poetry anthologies; Military history; Warfare & defence

A unique collection of memories of 40 years of reporting from conflict zones, set aside war poems from all over the world, by the Channel 4 News' International Editor and award-winning author.

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 Palestine to Kosovo to Rwanda, Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has always carried a book of poetry. It helps her make sense of the senseless, salve her soul as the world around her rages, and remember those she has met in the darkest of times.

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, translated from different languages and by writers from all around the world. Alongside each, she recalls a memory from her own work, whether interviewing the warlords of Bosnia and Sudan, meeting child soldiers in Uganda or giving testimony about the genocide 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.

Vital, authentic, a read like no other, this is the first account Lindsey has written of her experience, accompanied by the voices of poets through the ages who have fought, witnessed terror or fled their homes, yet found the words to capture their humanity.

By: Lindsey Hilsum
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 225mm, Width: 145mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 405g
ISBN: 9781784745349
ISBN 10: 1784745340
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 17 September 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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 war in Ukraine, 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 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From 2006-8 she was based in China, and in 1994 was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda as the genocide started. She has won many awards, including the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year and the Royal Geographical Society Patron's Medal. She contributes regularly to newspapers and literary magazines. Her first book was Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.

Reviews for I Brought the War with Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line

Remarkable: an excoriation of war’s devastations, but also a celebration of our shared humanity -- ANDREW MOTION A book of great power and poignancy... Lindsey Hilsum has no end of courage, sustained by an intellectual and emotional hinterland that makes her the finest foreign affairs journalist of her generation -- FERGAL KEANE A fantastic, beguiling and movingly profound book. Memorable and inspiring -- WILLIAM BOYD Lindsey Hilsum writes beautifully, with so much integrity, sensitivity, true experience and courage, her prose combines with these poems to form a profoundly affecting work. The depth, the sensitivity, the reaching for truth, across cultures, through so many awful wars. It's all here in this book -- LARA PAWSON Incredibly moving, resonant and thought-provoking. Everyone who has been affected in some way by war – and that's everyone – should read Lindsey Hilsum's I Brought the War with Me. The excellent twinning of reportage and poetry creates a space in which revealing connections are sparked. It offers solace, invites empathy, re-sensitises, and helps us to think deeply about war and its terrible effects. I know I'll return to it frequently -- PRISCILLA MORRIS From Ukraine to Iraq, to Rwanda, Syria, West Bank, and beyond Lindsey Hilsum takes us on a global journey punctuated by wars, death and destruction, but also by verses of poetry-- sounds of muses that refused to be silent when the cannons were heard -- SERHII PLOKHY As long as there has been war, there have been poets chronicling it; Lindsey Hilsum has woven poems and war stories together to bring us darkness and light in the most moving magical way -- CHRISTINA LAMB