Thursday 19 June 2025 @ 18:30
£10
Foyles Charing Cross
The lives of Mishal Husain’s grandparents changed forever in 1947, as the new nation states of India and Pakistan were born. For years she had a partial story made up of memories and anecdotes. Decades later, the fragment of an old sari sent Mishal on a journey through time, using letters, diaries, memoirs and audio tapes to trace four lives shaped by the Raj, a world war, independence and partition, movingly explored in Broken Threads.
In The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, Wingate Literary Prize winner Simon Parkin considers a profound detail in the devastating story of the longest blockade in recorded history. At the centre of the embattled city of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, stood a converted palace that housed the greatest living plant library ever amassed – the world’s first seed bank. Drawing on previously unseen sources, The Forbidden Garden tells the remarkable and moving story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the siege, risking their lives in the name of science.
Mishal Husain is a journalist and broadcaster, who presented BBC Radio 4’s Today programme before joining Bloomberg News as the host of a new multi-platform interview show and Editor-at-Large of its Weekend Edition. In 2024 she won the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Journalism.
Simon Parkin is an award-winning British writer and journalist. He is a contributing writer for the New Yorker and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), and is the author of A Game of Birds and Wolves and The Island of Extraordinary Captives, which was a New Yorker Book of the Year and won the Wingate Literary Prize. He lives in West Sussex.
This event will be chaired by Orwell Prize judge Thangam Debbonaire, Member of Parliament for Bristol West 2015-2024, serving as a Labour Whip and as Shadow Brexit Minister. From the start of Keir Starmer’s leadership she served in his Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, then Shadow Leader of the House, finally as Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. She now writes, does media and provides consultancy primarily for arts creative industries and cultural partnerships.
The event will be followed by an audience Q&A. Tickets include a complimentary glass of wine.
Book event