David Olusoga (1970–) and Casper Erichsen (1973–)
Pioneering historians who co-authored The Kaiser’s Holocaust, published in 2010, the definitive work on Germany’s ‘forgotten genocide’ – that of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia in the first years of the twentieth century. Erichsen grew up in Denmark, but has spent much of the last two decades based in Namibia, researching this genocide. He is currently a special advisor for IPPF and lives in London. Olusoga was born in Nigeria and grew up in Britain. As well as his highly regarded books of history, including Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), he is an acclaimed broadcaster, responsible for the groundbreaking, BAFTA award-winning BBC series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (2015) – made in partnership with the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, based at University College London.
Arundhati Roy (1961–)
Writer and activist. She grew up in Kerala, India, and originally studied architecture at university, before working in film and television. In 1997 she published her first novel, The God of Small Things, which immediately reached a global audience. Following this success she’s devoted much of her time to activism, becoming a powerful critic of nationalism, neo-imperialism and globalisation. She has published brilliant collections of essays, including The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), which focussed on the legacy of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, and Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy (2009) which analysed the disturbing nationalistic forces at play behind India’s growing economic power. Her long-awaited second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published in 2017, and a collection of non-fiction, My Seditious Heart was published in 2019. She sees all of her writing as being about ‘the relationship between power and powerlessness’, saying that ‘fiction dances out of me (but) non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning’.
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995)
Writer and activist. He grew up in Ogoniland, in southern Nigeria, and studied English at the University of Ibaden, before starting to teach at Lagos University. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he took jobs in local government, before establishing himself as a successful businessman. But his real passion was writing, and by the 1980s he was able to focus on this full-time, creating a highly successful television series, Basi & Co. and publishing his satirical masterpiece Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English in 1985. From 1990 onwards Saro-Wiwa’s life became dominated by his activism, as he saw his Ogoni homeland becoming more and more devastated by the environmental impacts of the oil industry, particularly Shell and Chevron. He became the charismatic leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and rapidly built a highly effective, non-violent campaign, which soon gathered global support, writing vividly about this process in A Month and a Day. In 1994 he was arrested on trumped-up charges of murder, and, following a show trial, on 10 November 1995, he and eight fellow Ogoni activists were executed in Port Harcourt. His view of what writing and art could achieve is inspirational: ‘It’s not… an ego trip, it is serious, it is politics, it is economics, it’s everything, and art in that instance becomes so meaningful, both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.’
W. G. Sebald (1944–2001)
Writer and academic. Born in a small Bavarian village towards the end of World War II, Sebald studied English and German literature in Germany and Switzerland, before taking a lectureship at the University of Manchester in 1966. In 1970 he completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia, where he worked for the rest of his life, becoming Professor of European Literature and establishing the British Centre for Literary Translation. He began to publish outside academia relatively late – his first novel, Vertigo only being published in 1990. The Emigrants (1992) and The Rings of Saturn (1995) rapidly consolidated his growing reputation – his writing being utterly distinctive and uncompromisingly out-of-step with modern life. Extraordinarily empathetic portraits of individuals left behind by the march of ‘progress’, culminating in his greatest work, Austerlitz, published in 2001 – an astounding meditation on time, memory loss and the Holocaust, seen through the eyes of a Kindertransport survivor.
Jorge Semprún (1923–2011)
Writer and screenwriter. Born in Spain, but after Franco came to power his family moved to the Netherlands and then France, where Semprún began studying at the Sorbonne in 1939. Following the Nazi occupation, Semprún joined the Communist Party and became active in the Resistance. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he returned to France, working for two decades as an organiser for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, serving on the executive committee. He also wrote his first book, Le grand voyage, (eventually published in 1963) a fictionalised portayal of his experience in Buchenwald, In the late 1960s, following his expulsion from the Party for not following ‘the party line’, he began to concentrate more on his writing, not only novels but also screenwriting including two films with the director Costa-Gavras, Z (1969) and The Confession (1970). After serving as Minister of Culture in the Socialist government of Felipe González in the late 1980s, in 1994 he published his greatest work, Literature or Life – a gripping account of not only his time at Buchenwald but the legacy of those years in his life afterwards.
Gitta Sereny (1921–2012)
Writer. She grew up in Vienna, but moved to France after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. After the war she worked with the United Nations refugee programme, trying to reunite children who had been separated from their families under Nazism. In 1949 she settled in London and began her career as an investigative journalist, particularly for The Sunday Times and the Telegraph; much of her work focussed on vulnerable children and the social services. But her most important work – all of which involved trying to understand what lies behind the lazy label of ‘evil’ – was yet to come. She spent weeks interviewing Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, and this eventually became Into That Darkness, published in 1974 – probably the greatest ever study of the mind of a mass murderer. Her meticulous interviewing technique and combination of exceptional empathy and unsparing judgement is also evident in her other master work – Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) – which managed to go far deeper than any historian or biographer before or since, in understanding how such a ‘civilised’ and educated man could have become a centrally important figure in the regime of Nazi Germany.
George Steiner (1929–)
Writer, critic, philosopher, academic and polymath. From a Viennese Jewish family, Steiner grew up in Paris, but in 1940, with the Nazi occupation of France imminent, his family were forced to relocate again, this time to New York. He studied literature, as well as mathematics and physics at Chicago, Harvard and Oxford University. After periods as an academic in the United States and Austria, he became a founding fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1961, before becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974, a post he held for twenty years. In addition to being an inspirational teacher, he has published prolifically throughout his life, works on a dizzying range of subjects, though he has also stated ‘my whole life has been about death, remembering and the Holocaust’. To select just three of the most outstanding works – Language and Silence (1967) is a brilliant collection of essays on literature and the Holocaust, In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) raised profound questions about the proximity of civilisation and barbarism, and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981) is a vivid novel which imagines Israeli agents in 1977 finding an elderly and feeble Adolf Hitler deep in the Amazonian rainforest. It divided its critics, as Steiner often has, but it contains extraordinary passages relating to the Holocaust, the origins of antisemitism and the power of language, and its abuse.