I Brought the War with Me

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Brought to you by Penguin.

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

Critics Review

Innovative... I Brought the War with Me isn't just an excellent anthology. It also makes one reflect, not always comfortingly, on news reporters, poets and their relation to the terrible deeds of the world
Times Literary Supplement
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
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
A fantastic, beguiling and movingly profound book. Memorable and inspiring
WILLIAM BOYD
'A really good book... [and] very interesting memoir'
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
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
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
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
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
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

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