Sally Hayden

speaker

649 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 21 Jun

Sally Hayden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Women's Podcast · Festival women / Sally Hayden on love during wartime · 4 Jun 2026 podcast

I think one of the things about love and about writing about love is like often it's not expressed.

So often you see love through actions.

People, they're really bad at talking about it.

It's like everywhere probably in the world.

But

I did think that this was very notable how when you explicitly ask somebody, particularly mothers, like they always talk about or mothers will talk about their children.

You know, it's a very kind of it can be a very pure, pure and beautiful love.

Yeah, I mean, so that was when ISIS was in control.

So for the book, I set one chapter in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city.

And I actually traveled to Iraq on, I think I arrived on Valentine's Day in 2024.

And I

I yeah it was quite interesting again going around particularly that chapter focuses on weddings and I wanted to look at kind of the history of this city but through weddings and how the various you know the American invasion for example sanctions how the various kind of stages affected weddings in the city and the story that I ended up focusing on was when ISIS were in control

I met a couple called Marwa and Saif, and they basically... So people, I don't know how much they know about the situation under ISIS, but what happened was they obviously took over the city, but a lot of civilians stayed, which I think is maybe not always understood.

So a lot of people fled, but then some people were like, well...

You know, we don't want to leave our homes.

If we leave our home, it's going to be commandeered and we'll lose our property.

And like a lot of people, they had been through kind of so much different changes and who was in control and all of this that they were like, let's just keep our heads down and wait for this to end.

Like everyone pretty much that I spoke to who wasn't involved in ISIS was like, we just assumed it's like a phase almost and it's going to pass.

And so ISIS took over.

Marwan and SAFE basically fell in love in this period through phone calls.

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