Description
“I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.” So said the indefatigable war correspondent and travel writer, Martha Gellhorn.
This fearless spirit is imbued in our two panellists: Sara Wheeler, whose adventures have taken her to some of the most exciting and far-flung places on the planet, from Zanzibar to the Antarctic, and award-winning journalist and bestselling author, Christina Lamb, one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents.
Widely seen as Britain’s foremost woman travel writer, Sara sought escape from her humdrum existence and started travelling in her 20s, embarking on an epic journey from pole to pole via Poland. She talks about this, the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl, and the perils of an Antarctic lavatory in her new book, Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road.
Christina Lamb started her career reporting on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Since then she has covered wars from Iraq to Libya, Angola to Syria, and journeyed to the far reaches of the Amazon to visit remote tribes, covering issues such as the girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria, Yazidi sex slaves in Iraq, and the ongoing plight of women in Afghanistan.
Join the duo for a conversation exploring their remarkable lives in transit and the challenges and rewards of working as trailblazing women in two notoriously male-dominated fields, as well as the work they have both done to platform the plight and stories of other women.
Related Book
Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road
Sara Wheeler
About the Authors
Christina Lamb
Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times and one of Britain’s leading foreign journalists as well as a bestselling author. She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots starting with Afghanistan after an unexpected wedding invitation led her to Karachi in 1987 when she was just 21. She has since been awarded Foreign Correspondent of the Year six times as well as Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux, and was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Editors. She is the best-selling author of ten books including Farewell Kabul, The Africa House, and The Sewing Circles of Herat and co-wrote the international bestseller I am Malala with Malala Yousafzai and The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa.
Sara Wheeler
Sara Wheeler’s prizewinning books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic and Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990–2010. She has also written biographies of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Denys Finch Hatton; and O My America! . The Sunday Times found her last book, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age ‘Superlative’. Sara is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a contributing editor of the Literary Review.
About the Chair
Daniel Hilton
Daniel Hilton is Middle East Eye’s head of news. In April 2021, his reporting from the Libyan town of Tarhuna on civil war atrocities was recognised with an Amnesty International Media Award. He has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux awards for war correspondents and journalist of the year at the Drum awards. Previously Hilton was based in Beirut, where he was region editor of Lebanon’s The Daily Star newspaper.
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