As journalists who cover conflict and as the public that consume the coverage, we are confronted with so much death and suffering that it can often lose meaning. Through rewriting, fictionalising and in some ways poeticising the things he has seen and heard, writer and journalist Sándor Jászberényi has sought explanations for the irrational horror.
From Cairo to the Gaza Strip, from Benghazi to Budapest, his characters contemplate the meaning of home, love, family and friendship in the face of brutality and trauma.
Jászberényi will be talking about the stories he tells, the characters and situations that inspire them and the meaning he is able to bring by blending reportage with fiction. Can this kind of storytelling, in the tradition of Hemingway and Kapuściński, go beyond the headlines to create a true portrait of humanity?
Sándor Jászberényi is a Hungarian writer and Middle East correspondent who has covered the Darfur crisis, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, the Gaza War, and the Huthi uprising in Yemen, and has interviewed several armed Islamist groups. A photojournalist for the Egypt Independent and various Hungarian newspapers, he currently lives in Cairo, Egypt.
