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Lindsey Hilsum

Roger McGough is joined by foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum to make a selection of listeners' requests for poetry about war.

Foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum - newly returned from reporting from the trenches in Ukraine - joins Roger McGough to discuss whether poetry can tell us something about war that TV and news reporting can't.

Together they make a selection from our listeners' requests for poetry about war and Lindsey shares some of the poems that have accompanied her through her years of reporting from war zones. Her choices include poems by Ilya Kaminsky, Fiona Benson, Warsan Shire, WB Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, AE Housman, WH Auden and Wisława Szymborska, And Roger shares one of his own poems, inspired by his childhood experiences of sheltering with his parents in the bomb shelter during the bombing of Liverpool.

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 the war in Ukraine, and the aftermath of the US withdrawal from 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.

Produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Audio

28 minutes

Last on

Sat 14 Jan 2023 23:30

This Week's Poems

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An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

by W.B. Yeats

From The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition

Published by Palgrave

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We Lived Happily During The War

by Ilya Kaminsky

From Deaf Republic

Published by Faber & Faber

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Eurofighter Typhoon

by Fiona Benson

From Vertigo & Ghost

Published by Vintage

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My Little Eye

By Roger McGough

From All the Best: The Selected Poems of Roger McGough

Published by Puffin

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War Poem

by Warsan Shire

From The Pity

Commissioned and Published by The Poetry Society

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Epitaph on a Tyrant

by W.H. Auden

From Another Time

Published by Random HouseÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý

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The Child at the Window

by Siegfried Sassoon

From Rhymed Ruminations

Published by Faber & Faber

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Here Dead Lie We (XXXVI)

By A E Housman

From A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems : The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman

Published by Penguin

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The End and the Beginning

by Wislawa Symborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak

From Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska

Published by W.W. Norton & Company Inc.

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Broadcasts

  • Sun 8 Jan 2023 16:30
  • Sat 14 Jan 2023 23:30