Gareth Owen, author of When The Music’s Over: Intervention, Aid and Somalia (Repeater, June 2022), Minoli Salgado, author of Twelve Cries From Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared (Repeater Books, March 2022), and Tom de Freston, the author of Wreck: Gericault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea (Granta, April 2022) will discuss the issues of war, trauma and healing through storytelling and art.
Gareth Owen will discuss his experiences as a young aid worker in Somalia in 1993, and his use of storytelling as a means of reconciling those memories. There will also be readings from Salgado’s account of her island-wide journey through her ancestral home of Sri Lanka, in which she unearthed concealed political violence through the stories of twelve victim survivors of the country’s twenty-six-year civil war, as well as De Freston’s memoir about his obsession with Gericault’s iconic painting, and its continued relevance to the refugee crisis in recent years.
The event will be chaired by Dr Pablo de Orellana, Lecturer at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. It is organised in collaboration with Repeater Books.
**Panelists Bio**
**Gareth Owen, OBE** has been an aid worker since 1993 and the Humanitarian Director at Save the Children UK since 2007. He has led responses to numerous conflicts and disasters, co-founded the START Network and is Chair of the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. He has also written on humanitarianism for the LA Review of Books, The Big Issue and others, and teaches at UK universities. He lives and works in London.
**Minoli Salgado** is a novelist and academic who has written widely on literature from the cultural margins and witness writing. She is the author of three books that focus on the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war: Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (Routledge 2007), A Little Dust on the Eyes (Peepal Tree Press 2014) and Broken Jaw (87 Press 2019). She is Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
**Tom de Freston** is a visual artist based in Oxford. Among various fellowships and residencies, he has held a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. Wreck is his debut non-fiction work.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-artistic-sense-of-trauma-tickets-338986667247
June 14
Time:06:31 pm - 08:31 pm
Click to Register: https://www.meetup.com/Repeater-Books-Meetup/events/286260249Repeater Books Meetup
King's College London
Strand
London, GB, WC2R 2LS