Корреспондент Irish Times Салли Хейден выпустила книгу о силе любви в условиях глобальных кризисов

Sally Hayden’s second book, This Is Also A Love Story: Searching For Good in a Divided World, finds the Irish Times foreign correspondent conducting an international exploration of the many and varied ways love has endured, sustained and surprised in the most dire of circumstances across the world. Hayden explores romantic love in times of crisis as she hears from a married Ukrainian couple separated by the ongoing Russian invasion, speaks to the Iraqis forced to wed in secret under Isis rule and spends time among the close-knit queer community in Ghana where homosexuality has been outlawed. The power of familial love is covered too, as Hayden meets the Nigerian women forced to take extreme measures to protect their children from Boko Haram militants, speaks to those who refuse to give up searching for the partners and children ‘disappeared’ by the Assad regime in Syria, and learns about the ‘artificial families’ established to provide care and support for the orphans of the Rwandan genocide which are still thriving 30 years on. “I think the reasons why I wanted to write this book kind of shifted,” explains Lebanon-based Hayden, who won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her best-selling debut, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route. Read more: Eight EU members say Syria should be reassessed for voluntary refugee returns “I became a journalist around 2013, and I’ve always done international reporting, so very quickly I was seeing cruelty, violence and exploitation, and just really horrible, horrible things that make you despair about how cruel people can be to each other. “About eight years ago, I was really struggling - but then I realised that there’s another way of looking at a lot of the situations I’m reporting on, which is these stories of love. “I see love in every crisis situation that I’m in. As journalists, we tend to be trained to look for the wrongdoing and the bad, which of course has to be exposed, but it’s not a full picture of the reality that we actually witness ourselves. “So, originally, I thought that I wanted to kind of just highlight these incidents of good and beauty as well. But then I kind of got distracted doing other reporting that became my first book. “When I went back to this idea [for This Is Also A Love Story], there were also other motivations, like how we are becoming more and more aware of the use of dehumanisation as a kind of tool for enabling atrocities. “I mean, I guess [the book] is a kind of atonement for feeling like I perhaps have played some role in reducing and flattening the lived experiences of people who undergo crisis.” “I think that’s something a lot of other journalists grapple with too.” Having been named Journalist of The Year at the 2025 Irish Journalism Awards, the chapter on post-genocide Rwanda finds Hayden coming full circle in her reporting career: one of her first international assignments was covering the country’s 20th anniversary commemorations in 2014. It details her time spent with Dr Paul Henri, a founding member of the Association of Student Genocide Survivors at the University of Rwanda which set up ‘artificial families’ for orphans of the 1994 Hutu-led slaughter, as well as a memorable interview with the fearless Zula Karuhimbi, a self-styled witch who risked her life to shelter over 100 Tutsis at her home. However, the Irish journalist’s plans to return to Rwanda while writing the book were unexpectedly scuppered. “When I tried to go back in 2024, they wouldn’t let me on the plane,” explains Hayden, who studied law at University College Dublin before completing her masters in international politics at Trinity College Dublin. This book is a kind of atonement for feeling like I have played some role in reducing and flattening the lived experiences of people who undergo crisis — Sally Hayden “My understanding is that it’s related to some reporting I did in 2020 about the treatment of refugees there. “Rwanda, as we know, is like a police state, and there’s no freedom of the media. I haven’t officially been told that’s the reason, I just know I wasn’t allowed to board the plane. “But I still managed to follow up and speak to people I originally met when I was 24 and pretty much on my first professional assignment. “When you start out, you never think ’10 years later, I’m going to be following up on the same story’, but it was amazing that I got to do that. It was kind of extraordinary.” Other chapters in the book find the foreign correspondent interviewing the Lebanese man who became a folk hero after holding up a bank to pay for his father’s medical care in the wake of his savings being wiped out by his county’s economic meltdown, meeting the Japanese grandfather who runs a ‘drifting post’ service handling letters written by the bereaved to those lost in the 2011 earthquake, and witnessing ‘radical forgiveness’ as former child soldiers are reunited with their families in Uganda many years after being abducted and forced to commit atrocities. Having documented these many and varied expressions of love, care and kindness during the course of writing the book, Hayden now describes love as being “the most important motivator” for all kinds of positive human behaviour even under the most extreme conditions - hence the title, This Is Also A Love Story. “When I first had this idea and I was telling people ‘I’m writing a book about love’, I noticed that they kind of looked at me a bit funny,” admits the journalist and author, who has also reported for outlets including The Guardian, CNN, Time, The New York Times and The Washington Post. “I’m not like a ‘love expert’, even after spending years talking to people about it, but I think love is a big motivator, you know? “When we look at why people make the decisions they make, and how they act in crisis situations, I would say love is maybe the most important motivator. And I think that that does get overlooked, and it’s not understood.” She adds: “I mean, everywhere in the world people are pretty bad at talking about love - and I say this as someone who’s also bad at talking about it. They will not necessarily express it, you know? “These aren’t stories of people saying very eloquently who they love and why they love them. It’s more like something that you see through [their] actions. “It’s not just romantic love or love for family or community, but also what I call love for humanity: people just doing good things for people they don’t even know, often very courageous things. “I see that on a very regular basis through my work. For me, it’s important that there’s an understanding that it really exists in all of these situations. “It’s like a sign that there is goodness in humanity, that we are still capable of good and kind and generous things.” Sally Hayden will be in conversation with Brian Rowan and the Court House in Bangor on Sunday August 23 during the Open House Festival. Tickets and full festival programme available via openhousefestival.com.