Reporting The Stories In Changed, Strange Times
The changing face of journalism will be the subject under discussion with Christina Lamb, award winning journalist from The Sunday Times and Emirati political commentator Sultan Al Qassemi on Thursday 2 July 2020 at 19:30 UAE.
The debate is the latest event in the Literary Conversations Across Borders series which uses a digital platform to host Emirati writers and commentators in live discussions with high profile experts from around the world on a variety of critical topics.
The speakers will consider how news reporting has changed in the last ten years, in particular the impact of twitter and the spread of fake news. Christina Lamb has been Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times and recently named Sue Lloyd Roberts Journalist of the Year for ‘outstanding reporting on refugee issues’ for her reports on Boko Haram and the Chibok Girls. Her book, Nujeen, was co-written with inspirational young refugee Nujeen Mustafa and I Am Malala, co-authored with Malala Yousafzai. Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is an Emirati columnist and researcher on social, political and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States. His tweets became a major news source during the Arab Spring, rivalling the major news networks at the time, and in 2018 Sultan ranked 19th on the “Arabic Thought Leader Index” by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
The inaugural event of Literary Conversations Across Borders saw more than 3,500 people from 46 countries register and able to tune in to the live event with Indian politician Shashi Tharoor and His Excellency ZakiNusseibeh Minister of State: Office of Public and Cultural Diplomacy, in a debate on how the events of 2020 will change the course of history.
Other sessions included H.E. Omar Ghobashand journalist Lesley Hazleton as they debated the impact of the pandemic on faith and belief systems, and celebrated environmentalist Dr. Jane Goodall and H. E.Mariam bint Mohammed Al MheiriMinister of State for Food Security on how the pandemic might influence global food supply challenges and the natural world.
The ‘Literary Conversations Across Borders’ project is a new initiative to promote international cultural understanding through the power of books and words launched by the UAE Office of Public and Cultural Diplomacy and the Emirates Literature Foundation.
There will be eight sessions in this first Literary Conversations Across Borders series. Further details and more authors will be announced shortly.
The sessions are free to watch but pre-registration is required at www.elfdubai.org/en/literary-conversations-across-borders
After the event the session will be hosted on the Emirates Literature Foundation YouTube channel. Full details on the upcoming programme will be available on the OPCD https://opcd.ae/and Emirates Literature Foundation https://www.elfdubai.org/ websites.
