Angry Writing - The Art and Politics of Literary Protest

with:

Ed Vulliamy and Ian Cobain: award winning investigative journalists from the Guardian newspaper;

Andrew Williams from Warwick's Centre for Human Rights in Practice; and

Maureen Freely from the Writing Programme

As part of the Writing Wrongs Project we will be discussing the topic of Angry Writing. There will be readings from recent 'angry' works to provoke debate:

Ed Vulliamy: The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia the Reckoning which examines the legacy of the Bosnian War 20 years after its outbreak 

Ian Cobain: Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture in which the UK's persistent use of torture since 1945 is exposed

Andrew Williams: A Very British Killing which investigates the miurder of Baha Mousa in Iraq and the British instutional indifference that followed.

Short Biographies:

Ed Vulliamy is a journalist and writes for the Guardian and Observer. He has been shortlisted for an Amnesty International Media Award for his reporting on Mexico. For his work in Bosnia, Italy, the US and Iraq he has won a James Cameron Award and an Amnesty International Media Award and has been named International Reporter of the Year (twice) and runner-up at the Foreign Press Association Awards. In 1996 he became the first journalist to ever testify at an international crimes court, at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. A believer in the duty of journalists to testify in matters of humanitarian law, he has since lectured extensively on the subject.

Ian Cobain was born in Liverpool in 1960. He has been a journalist since the early 1980s and is currently an investigative reporter with the Guardian. His inquiries into the UK's involvement in torture since 9/11 have won a number of major awards, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize and the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism. He has also won several Amnesty International media awards. Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture is his first book.

Andrew Williams’ is a professor of law in Warwick University. His non-fiction book, A Very British Killing tells the inside story of the death of Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist in Basra, arrested and tortured by a British Army unit in 2003. It examines the institutional brutality, the bureaucratic apathy, the flawed military police inquiry and the farcical court martial that attempted to hold people criminally responsible. Even though a full public inquiry reported its findings into the crimes in September 2011, its mandate restricted what it could say. The full story shows how this was not simply about a few bad men or 'rotten apples'. It shines a light on all those involved in the crime and its investigation, from the lowest squaddie to the elite of the army and politicians in Cabinet.

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, professor at Warwick University and a member of English PEN. Her novel, Enlightenment, was an exploration of the persecution of writers in Turkey, and was published by Marion Boyars in March 2007. The translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours and The Museum of Innocence), she is active in various campaigns to champion free expression. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.

For further information please contact: j.c.wilson@warwick.ac.uk