I Brought the War with Me
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  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784745349
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.99

I Brought the War with Me

Stories and Poems from the Front Line

Formats & editions
Hardback
17 Sep 2024
EBook
19 Sep 2024
Audiobook
19 Sep 2024
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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.
  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784745349
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.99
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About the author

Lindsey Hilsum

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News International Editor. She has covered many of the conflicts of recent years, including Syria, Ukraine and the Arab Spring – sometimes alongside Marie Colvin. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide began. She was in Belgrade for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, and in Baghdad for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. She has won awards from the Royal Television Society and BAFTA amongst others, and was the recipient of the 2017 Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Her last book Sandstorm: Libya from Gadaffi to Revolution was described by the Observer as ‘an account with historical depth to match dramatic reportage.’ In Extremis was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and won the James Tait Black Award.

portrait photo of Lindsey Hilsum

Also by Lindsey Hilsum

In Extremis
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Praise for I Brought the War with Me

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

I can think of no better use of poetry in any anthology I have ever read: a profound, revelatory, distressing and timely account of humanity at war

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Reading I Brought the War with Me you’re reminded that even in humanity’s darkest moments, language provides light, a light that can sometimes redeem us, maybe even save us from permanent horror and despair. This is a profound, and profoundly moving book

RISHI DASTIDAR

Lindsay Hilsum’s unflinching accounts of human conflicts take us to the frontline and witness the painful devastation in Ukraine, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria and many war-torn places beyond recognition. Sharp-eyed, tender yet unsentimental, Hilsum’s prose, juxtaposed with poetry, has created a terrifying dance of death and a soaring dance of hope. It’s an unforgettable reading experience

KIT FAN

'A really good book... [and] very interesting memoir'

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
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