Roisin Ingle

Thank you.

That was Jenny Jennings and Fiona McGinn there from Beyond the Pale and Kaleidoscope.

Now, with her new book, This Is Also a Love Story, multi-award winning journalist Sally Hayden found a different lens through which to observe conflicts around the world.

She came in to talk to us about what prompted her to ask the question, if news was recounted through the actions people take for those they love, how different would it look?

And would it become harder to dehumanise those who seem different to us, people from Uganda to Lebanon, Rwanda to Iraq?

And that's kind of why Sally Hayden wrote this book, because as we know, the world feels like it's burning on fire.

There's so much bleak news around the world and she wanted to look at it in a slightly more optimistic and hopeful way.

I think you'll find this a fascinating discussion.

Here's Sally Hayden.

Sally, we're well used to you writing about war-torn places, humanitarian crises and all the wrongs happening in the world.

But your new book is called This is Also a Love Story.

So why did you use love as the prism to talk about stories in all these countries?

It's lovely to have you here, Sally, I have to say.

You've seen sort of the worst of humanity in your work and you've seen such terrible things.

Was writing about the good and the hopeful and the joyful in the midst of all of that, was that an uplifting thing to do as well?

And was it a way to kind of say, yes, the world is burning and the world is in crisis, but look, also these beautiful things are happening even in these worst circumstances?

Yeah.

Because we can kind of lose sight of the human beings, the human stories when we just hear statistics and we hear about drones and people who were killed.

And we kind of can, especially when we're far away or we're not used to a culture, just see it as this generic over there thing.

And what you've done, I think, in the book is bring it much more to life with those individual stories, which we'll talk about in a minute.