Poetry Please

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Roger McGough introduces selections of poetry on various themes, chosen by listeners.

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Poetry Please: Lindsey Hilsum

Lindsey Hilsum

BBC Radio 4 - Poetry Please, Lindsey Hilsum

Roger McGough is joined by foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum to discuss war poetry.

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.

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