Hell on Earth

Lydia Cacho, Christian Jungersen and Carolin Emcke

A writer in a conflicting world, whether real or imagined, can take unheard and untold stories and experiences and re-tell them with such powerful honesty that there is no choice but to listen. Yet it can literally be hell on earth.

Mexican author Lydia Cacho, recipient of the 2007 Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children's Rights and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize 2008, was arrested and threatened for her book Los Demonios del Edén (Demons of Eden) in which she accuses high profile politicians of being involved in a ring of child pornography and prostitution. As an editor and war correspondent for German newspaper Der Spiegel, Carolin Emcke has reported on human rights violations and war crimes in places such as Lebanon, Colombia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Christian Jungersen is a Danish author of two prizewinning and bestselling novels, his latest being The Exception, a work which takes place in a small fictitious organisation, The Danish Centre for Genocide Information. This event is chaired by Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor at the Observer whose new book, The Secret Life of War, is available in May.

‘Lydia Cacho is a model for all who wish to work as journalists' Roberto Saviano

‘A horribly vivid and fiendishly clever novel' The Independent on Christian Jungersen's The Exception

(Photos: Lydia Cacho, and Christian Jungersen by Ulla Montan)