GENOCIDE : Personal Stories, Big Questions (BIG STORY Book 1)

Journalist Heidi Kingstone has spent her career covering events around the globe for prominent publications from the Financial Times to the Mail on Sunday. Her interest in human rights and dictatorships led her to Iraq on four occasions, travelling to Baghdad, Irbil, and Basra before and after the invasion in 2003. She has also reported from Africa and the Middle East. Arriving in an old Soviet helicopter and a C130 military aircraft, she reported extensively from Afghanistan. She later wrote her first book: Dispatches from the Kabul Café is a memoir of a country at a tipping point.War and genocide have fuelled Kingstone’s pursuits and informed her work. Like so much in her life, from moving to London from her native Toronto to ending up in Iraq and Afghanistan, serendipity played its part in writing Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions. She met a woman born in Bergen-Belsen, the former Nazi concentration camp liberated by the British. She taught English to some Yazidi victims of Isis brutality, who had settled in Canada – as she had done generations before. These encounters kindled Kingstone’s study of the Holocaust, something she had known about all her life as the granddaughter of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. As the book took shape, it seemed inevitable that the genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries, each unique, had much in common, not least the depths to which humanity can sink. Read more