Conversation with Sally Hayden and Patricia Evangelista

Exposing the Lie: Reporting Inside the Migrant Crisis

Patricia Evangelista invites Sally Hayden, an award-winning Irish journalist who has reported extensively across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, to talk about the ways states and institutions can obscure atrocities with humanitarian language.

Orwell Prize winner and award-winning Irish journalist Sally Hayden documented a humanitarian crisis along “the world’s deadliest migration route". Her book My Fourth Time, We Drowned (Melville House, 2022) began as a text message from an Eritrean migrant inside a Libyan detention centre. It led Hayden into a years-long investigation into the lives of hundreds of North African detainees, as well as a condemnation of the organisations who claim to be their protectors. The human rights violations, she said, were happening in the name of European citizens.

The conversation with Patricia Evangelista will focus on the ways states and institutions can obscure atrocities with humanitarian language, the challenges of reporting trauma up close and from a distance, and the ethical role of a journalist in a situation where the most desperate people have nowhere to turn beyond the journalist who tells their stories.