This event features Tania Branigan, the Guardian‘s foreign leader writer and author of Red Memory, in conversation with Preti Taneja who is the Director of NCLA and Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

‘Tania Branigan has written an exceptional book. Red Memory not only exhumes a buried, and alarmingly recent, history, it also offers insights at once deep and clear into universal and timeless questions – of memory and forgetting, of horror and what it takes both to survive it and inflict it. It is haunting, evocative and written with an almost painful beauty. I cannot recommend it too highly.’ Jonathan Freedland

Red Memory is born of the seven years Tania Branigan spent in Beijing as the Guardian’s China correspondent – writing about the Communist Party’s politics, satirical novels, rural development, feminist activism, protests in Hong Kong, natural disasters, ethnic unrest and much more. Tania interviewed everyone from artists and tycoons to factory workers, farmers and a missile researcher turned volunteer: she became fascinated by the dizzying scale of the country’s extraordinary transformation, which was reshaping the world, as well as impacting on people’s lives at the most intimate level. 

Red Memory won the Cundhill History Prize 2023, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2023 and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

This event took place on the 23rd of November 2023 in the Culture Lab.