For fans of The Kite Runner, Girl at War and The Cellist of Sarajevo, The Longest Winter is Kevin Sullivan’s inspiring and authentic debut novel about life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
The Longest Winter is a portrait of a city and its people in a moment of enormous suffering and remarkable grace. In the aftermath of the assassination of a government minister, three life stories are intertwined in a dramatic quest for redemption.
Kevin Sullivan covered the siege of Dubrovnik as a journalist in 1991 and the war in Bosnia from 1992. The descriptions of fighting around Sarajevo and conditions inside the city are taken from his own first-hand reporting. Kevin was seriously wounded in a land-mine explosion in early 1993. While recovering, he wrote an early draft of The Longest Winter. He now lives in Sarajevo and manages communications at ICMP, the international organization established in 1996 to account for the missing from the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.
The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.
For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet – aurelie.bourguet@www.beta.frontlineclub.com
]]>The Mayor of Mogadishu tells the story one family’s epic journey through Somalia’s turmoil, from the optimism of independence to its spectacular unravelling. Mohamud ‘Tarzan’ Nur was born a nomad, and became an orphan, then a street brawler in the cosmopolitan port city of Mogadishu – a place famous for its cafes and open–air cinemas. When Somalia collapsed into civil war, Tarzan and his young family joined the exodus from Mogadishu, eventually spending twenty years in North London. But in 2010 Tarzan returned to the unrecognisable ruins of a city largely controlled by the Islamist militants of Al-Shabaab. For some, the new Mayor was a galvanising symbol of defiance. But others branded him a thug, mired in the corruption and clan rivalries that continue to threaten Somalia’s revival.
The Mayor of Mogadishu is an uplifting story of survival, and a compelling examination of what it means to lose a country and then to reclaim it.
Andrew Harding has worked as a foreign correspondent for the past twenty-five years in Russia, Asia and Africa. He has been visiting Somalia since 2000. His television and radio reports for BBC News have won him international recognition, including an Emmy, an award from Britain’s Foreign Press Association, and other awards in France, Monte Carlo, the United States and Hong Kong. He lives in Johannesburg with his family.
The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.
The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.
For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.
]]>This is an evening to allow new members to be introduced to the Club and make acquaintances over a glass of wine or a beer. These are complimentary, from 6pm-8pm. All members are welcome.
Hope to see you there.
]]>Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the maelstrom in the Middle East.
Bejan’s poetry is certainly engaged in her people’s struggles, currently spilling across borders that ill-define ravaged eastern Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. She has been jailed by the Turkish regime, and – with other writers – faces continuous menace and harassment. She writes dissident journalism and a prose work based on interviews with Kurdish men and women became an instant bestseller in Turkey.
Her first book of translations into English, In The Temple of a Patient God, refers in stark terms to an Exodus by stateless people who “… walked with touches of the moon / veiling our pain / but still we were tired”. And more vividly: “My mother shows the dead / to my brother / and has become the journey. / They weep together”.
And yet there is always this palpable mysticism in her writing, close to nature, imagining dragons and leopards, meditating on creation – a dialogue with God. Or what her translator calls “an endless spiritual quest to understand the nature of being”. And this is what propels a second translated volume, How Abraham Abandoned Me, which Matur wrote after being impelled to abandon a trip to Lebanon and listen to the poetry in her mind inspired by her native Diyarbakir. The result can only be likened to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – visionary, as though dictated from some outer world, writing of: “A long sleep in the garden / and before roses / and birdsong / the serpent, / his body unfamiliar with earth / would slither along / and steal heaven away from us.” Or: “Where poets / and prayers / and words cannot reach / a lover’s breath / and his throbbing breast / will be the guide. / A lover’s swelling heart / watching the river at night / will summon the tiger”.
For this very special BookNight, Bejan will talk about her work and people, but – here’s the difference – sections of Bejan’s poetry will be read first in translation, and then by her in Turkish or Kurdish, according to the original.
Recommended reading: In The Temple of a Patient God, and How Abraham Abandoned Me, both published by Arc.
The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.
The event will be hosted by Senior Correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.
For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.
]]>This is an evening to allow new members to be introduced to the Club and make acquaintances over a whisky or gin. These are complimentary, from 6pm-8pm, thanks to our friends and sponsors at Chivas Regal. All members are welcome.
Hope to see you there.
]]>This is an evening to allow new members to be introduced to the Club and make acquaintances over a whisky or gin. These are complimentary, from 6pm-8pm, thanks to our friends and sponsors at Chivas Regal. All members are welcome.
Hope to see you there.
]]>This is the true story of Danuta: her formative years in German-occupied Warsaw, her decision to become a freedom fighter at the age of 14, her life on the front line. Wira’s journey does not end with Germany’s surrender but continues with the long–term consequences of that wartime decision, as her life unfolds in exile as a political refugee. George Szlachetko manages to delve deep into Wira’s story as only a son can, revealing buried emotions and intimate details of his mother’s extraordinary life that have lain dormant for over 70 years.
The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, followed by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM.
Three course menu costs £25 per person – drinks not included.
The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.
For more information about membership and the other benefits on offer, please contact membership coordinator Aurélie Bourguet.
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We welcome our members, both recently joined and ongoing, for an evening of conversation and drinks kindly sponsored by Chivas Brothers.
Please ask our friendly bartender to mix you up a free gin & tonic or a whisky & ginger ale. The offer is available from 6:00-8.00 PM but both members and their guests are welcome to stay in the clubroom after the offer ends, the bar will remain open until late.
All members are welcome. We hope you enjoy your evening at the Club.
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For our latest BookNight, the members were treated to an Italian themed evening with an award-winning author, John Hooper, presenting his new book The Italians. The evening was accompanied by a delicious three course meal served with wines from the heart of Tuscany.
Our next BookNight with Patrick Bishop, presenting his latest book Churchill’s Funeral, will take place on Thursday 23 April, 2015. Places are limited so please book now.
On Monday 15 September, the Clubroom hosted another fascinating night of discussion following the presentation of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
It was a popular event and those lucky few who booked their tickets left the night, as promised by our exceptional chair Ed Vulliamy, merrier and wiser.
The next BookNight coming up in October will present Robert McCrum and his compilation of the hundred greatest novels of all time. The books “choose themselves”, says Robert, but how fascinating it will be to hear how he chooses novels that choose themselves; what gets left out, how the public reacts – and we round the table, indeed – to his selection. Here’s the list so far.
Robert is a former editor-in-chief at Faber and Faber (during crucial years, 1980–96, pioneering and championing the new fiction of Milan Kundera, Paul Austin, Peter Carey and illustrious others – plus the poetry of Seamus Heaney) and now über-literary-editor of The Observer and The Guardian.
Please watch this space,
The Frontline BookNight Team
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