Date/Time: Thursday 1 December 2022, 7pm to 8pm

Venue: Culture Lab, Newcastle University

The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history. Journalist Sally Hayden’s first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route (Fourth Estate, 2022) documents her powerful investigation across North Africa, hearing from people en-route who suffered enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder, tuberculosis and sexual abuse as they tried to reach safety. She also lays bare the economics of the 21st Century slave trade and the EU's role in it; negligence of NGOs, and corruption to ask – who was accountable for the abuse? My Fourth Time, We Drowned is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear. It is the winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022.

'Compassionate, brave, enraging, beautifully written and incredibly well researched. Hayden exposes the truth about years of grotesque abuse committed against some of the world's most vulnerable people in all our names. After this, none of us can say we didn't know.' (Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland.)

Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer currently focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. She contributes to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, CNN International, the BBC, the Irish Times and others.

Preti Taneja is Director of NCLA and Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Free event, and all very welcome.

Please note bookings close at 4pm on the day of the event.