War correspondent Sally Hayden: 'In a crisis situation, you will always find love'

Ahead of her appearance at the West Cork Literary Festival, award-winning international correspondent Sally Hayden speaks with Donal O’Keeffe about her new book, This Is Also A Love Story

TIME OF REFLECTION: Sally Hayden, author and journalist, will discuss her latest book at the West Cork Literary Festival on July 13. Picture: Moya Nolan

Irish writer Sally Hayden gave a reading last month at the English-language bookshop near her Beirut home. It was her most poignant book event.

The Dublin writer has lived in the Lebanese capital for more than two years, and the bookshop had got an advance copy of This Is Also A Love Story and circulated it among locals.

Hayden had misgivings about doing the event, with Lebanon under renewed bombardment from Israel since the end of February. “I was thinking, ‘Well, is it kind of strange to do an event with the war ongoing, and to even think about books?’

“I was also thinking, ‘Does this feel a bit irrelevant’, or ‘what will they even think of me having written this?’, and, actually, it was the most beautiful event that I’ve ever done,” she says.

“A lot of people showed up, and one person came from a city in the south. She travelled an hour to get there, and another was a doctor who came from an emergency room, where she was on a shift. She’d been working already for 11 hours.”

This Is Also A Love Story is Hayden’s second book, and is subtitled Searching For Good In A Divided World. It highlights stories of love and connection — romantic, platonic, community, and familial — among people suffering war, separation, and loss across nine countries.

In the book, we meet couples separated by war, orphaned survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide who have formed ‘artificial families’, Nigerian families traumatised by the murders and enslavements carried out by Boko Haram, and gay soldiers who fight for their homeland when they dare not hold hands in public.

The book follows Hayden’s 2022 Orwell prize-winning My Fourth Time, We Drowned, which looked at the experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary.

This Is Also A Love Story is, in some ways, not just a meditation on love, but also a powerful defence of the innate decency of humanity, even against all of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

That bookshop event in Beirut last month was a beautiful moment, she says, because the attendees told her they were grateful that somebody was showing not just a one-sided version of what it’s like to live through war and hardship, but also the complexity of life in adversity.

I was really touched, because writers are not important compared to doctors; for example, my work means nothing compared to somebody who’s treating air-strike victims, or saving lives, but to feel that that could mean something to people who are living through that, that means a lot.

I first met Sally Hayden last December, in Beirut, when we were accompanying Taoiseach Micheál Martin to visit Irish Unifil troops stationed in Camp Shamrock. After our doorstep interview with Mr Martin, he took her aside, telling her how much he admires her work.

Former president Michael D Higgins is also a fan, and it has been reported President Catherine Connolly has been seen reading My Fourth Time, We Drowned.

Hayden is thoughtful, low-key, almost shy, and seemingly entirely without ego. She says when she was young, she read “all the time”, initially fiction, before discovering non-fiction, and she became “quite obsessed with the news” after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, when she was 13.

In transition year, an essay competition won her a week’s work experience in the Irish Star, and in university she began writing for the student paper, but “only in second year. In first year, I was too shy to approach them”.

After university, she worked in various internships, including at the BBC in London and at CNN. Winning the Simon Cumbers Media Fund award brought her to Malawi and later to Rwanda.

Although she had long believed she was the first journalist in her family, she recently discovered her great- great-grandfather was Tim Harrington, who was born in Castletownbere in 1851, and in 1877 founded the nationalist and pro-tenant newspaper the Kerry Sentinel. He later became lord mayor of Dublin, serving from 1901 until 1903.

Like many reporters, Hayden routinely falls a little out of love with her vocation, and says she writes to try and understand the world.

“A lot of this book is me making sense of what I’ve witnessed and what I’ve seen over more than a decade now as an international reporter.

“I think the one thing about crisis situations is that love always exists in them; you always see love in these situations.

We saw that when we went to Camp Shamrock, and people were talking about their family members, their children at home, their partners, their parents, the people that they would miss at Christmas. 

“When you’re in these situations, people always begin talking about love. Even if they don’t explicitly say they’re talking about love, they are. It is always present.”

• Sally Hayden will discuss her book at the West Cork Literary Festival on Monday, July 13. See westcorkmusic.ie. This Is Also A Love Story is available in bookshops now.