What is the responsibility of the writer in documenting and unpicking the violence around us?

In Édouard Louis’s book The History of Violence, he explores violence from the point of view of the victim of rape and attempted murder, but also the violence that the perpetrator has experienced from society.

In the novels Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King, about the bloody Ethiopian revolution and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, Maaza Mengiste has herself explored forms of violence – both on an individual level and on the level of society.

In this personal lecture, Mengiste will talk about her relationship to Louis’s novel and give us her own reflections on the writer’s place in a violent world.