Kate Whitehead

Myanmar’s first international book festival drew the country’s guiding light, leading writers and a home crowd intrigued by the give-and-take of it all

Jonathan Spence – historian, intellectual and eminent China scholar – is not one for a snappy answer.

The peace activist and international speaker recounts how she was torn from her happy childhood in Vienna and ‘saved’ from the concentration camp’s angel of death, Josef Mengele, by a hat Nazi invasion: I was born in Vienna, into a young family. My father was 21 when he married my mother, who was 18. They had…

2023 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Mahbouba Seraj recalls growing up in Afghanistan’s ‘best years’, exile in the US and feeling compelled to confront the Taliban I was born in Afghanistan in 1948. My aunt chose my name. Mahbouba means “beloved”. If you take the “a” off the end, it becomes a man’s name. I didn’t…

Ireland’s Brian O’Driscoll, South Africa’s Jean de Villiers and Hong Kong adventurer Annabelle Bond talk about setting yourself challenges and the sense of achievement to be had from training to reach, and achieving, them

This is a children’s emergency, says former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, of the 600,000 desperate Muslims who fled Myanmar, more than half of whom are aged under 18 and at risk of being trafficked or enslaved