War reporters Janine di Giovanni of The Times and Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times will give their own graphic accounts of coming under fire during conflicts in Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in a seminar at the Imperial War Museum next week.
Di Giovanni will read passages from her new book, Madness Visible, A Memoir of War, to be published next year, while Colvin, who lost an eye after coming under fire in Sri Lanka to cover a conflict much of the world had forgotten, will try to explain why she chose such a dangerous career.
Documentary photographer Jenny Matthews, who has been taking pictures of women in conflict since the Eighties, will show a selection of her award-winning pictures and explain how she came to take them.
Former Sunday Express chief reporter Yvonne Ridley, captured and held prisoner by the Taliban in Afghanistan and now working in Qatar on an English-language website for Al-Jazeera, is also on the panel along with Sunday Telegraph foreign editor Topaz Amoore.
The seminar, “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a War Like This?”, chaired by Philippa Kennedy, consultant editor to Press Gazette, takes place on Thursday, 9 October, starting at 6.30pm, on the eve of an exhibition at the museum on women and war.
A joint event organised by Women in Journalism and the London Press Club, it will examine the role of women reporters and photographers on the front line.
Tickets, priced £10 to WIJ & LPC members and £15 to non-members, include wine and canapés and are available from Women in Journalism, 43 St Martins Road, London SW9 0SP.
E-mail WIJUK@aol.com.
Guests will be able to view the new exhibition, Corsets to Camouflage – Women and War, during the evening.
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