About this Event
What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us?
In This Is Also a Love Story, celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across.
She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.
We hope you'll join us for this conversation illuminating the small actions that matter.
Order THIS IS ALSO A LOVE STORY: A REPORTER’S SEARCH FOR GOODNESS IN A CRUEL WORLD here!
Sally Hayden is an award-winning author, photographer and journalist, who has reported across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. ‘This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World' is Sally’s second book, published by Scribner in June 2026. Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing; the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award; the Michel Déon Prize; Il Premio Terzani; and was shortlisted for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, among others. She was named overall 'journalist of the year' at the Irish Journalism Awards in 2023 and 2025. She is also an adjunct professor at the UCD Sutherland School of Law, and is currently based in Lebanon.
Molly McCloskey is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction. She lived in Ireland for 25 years, and worked in Kenya for the United Nation's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Somalia. She now lives in Washington, D.C. Her work has been published in the U.K. by Penguin and in the U.S. by Scribner and Overlook Press. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, The Dublin Review, and The Irish Times. She has taught writing at Trinity College Dublin, Boston University, and George Washington.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Ivy Bookshop - Back Patio, 5928 Falls Road, Baltimore, United States
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