Stephen Sackur, former presenter of BBC HARDtalk, talks about his book 'Hard Truth' in conversation with BBC Midlands correspondent Navtej Johal.
Stephen Sackur is coming to QUAD on Saturday 14 November, where he'll be talking about his new book, Hard Truth: Investigations That Shook the World – and Why They Matter Now. He's not doing it alone, either: he'll be in conversation with BBC Midlands Correspondent Navtej Johal, so it's a proper sit-down discussion rather than a solo reading.
If you recognise the name, it's probably from HARDtalk, the BBC show Sackur presented for years, where his whole job was holding political leaders to account. Hard Truth takes that same interest in accountability and turns it on the people doing the digging. He looks at ten dramatic cases where journalists — many of them women — showed astonishing bravery uncovering the truth, sometimes paying the ultimate price for it. It's a broad sweep: from Woodward and Bernstein's exposé of a crooked American president to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who confronted deep-rooted corruption in Malta.
From there, the book takes you inside global investigations stretching from the West Bank to Washington, Moscow and Manila. Along the way, Sackur asks whether journalists should see themselves as 'activists for the truth' in a media landscape dominated by tech oligarchs. Jon Sopel called it 'a vital book on the importance of journalism and the insidious threats to it', and Rory Stewart described Sackur as 'a journalist of rare courage and toughness'.
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The talk is part of the Derby Book Festival's Autumn Edition, which runs from 12 to 15 November with 28 events across the city. Sackur's session runs from 7:30pm to 8:30pm at QUAD, and tickets are £12.
