Featuring Larry Siems, Nancy Hollander, Richard Boyd Barrett and John Lonergan
“the global war on terror … has found in a Mauritanian captive its true and complete witness”
The Guardian
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary is one of the global publishing events of the year. Handwritten from his cell in 2005, and published after years of legal wrangling, it describes the ordeal of a man who, despite never being charged, has spent fourteen years in the prison, subjected to endless forms of torture under Donald Rumsfeld’s “special interrogation plan”.
Larry Siems, the book’s editor, joins Nancy Hollander, Slahi’s attorney (and one of the few people to have got to know Slahi since his incarceration), to discuss how Slahi wrote the book and life inside an institution that President Obama promised to close. The event is chaired by Carole Coleman, RTE’s former Washington Correspondent who reported from Guantanamo shortly after it was opened. This event will feature live readings from actor Alan Devine (Fair City, The Tudors) Richard Boyd Barrett, campaigner and chair of the Irish Anti-War movement, and John Lonergan, former Governor of Mountjoy Prison, and a recorded reading by Stephen Fry. Guantánamo Diary is one of the festival’s must-see events.