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.

‘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

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK AWARD

Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world and her anecdotes about encounters with figures like Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat were incomparable. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story.

Fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum draws on unpublished diaries and interviews with friends, family and colleagues to produce a story of one of the most daring and inspirational women of our times.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year
‘A stunningly good biography’ WILLIAM BOYD