Celebrated anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes, from childhood in Derbyshire attending Hebrew classes but sent to a C of E boarding school, to a kibbutz in Israel. Bewildered by the silence created by his concealed family history, he sought places of escape. It was only in the deep Canadian Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known, that he had a chance to learn what it can mean to be truly alive. With readings from Olivier-winner Juliet Stevenson.

Sponsored by Dangoor Education, in Association with Jewish Renaissance.

Hugh Brody is a writer, anthropologist and film-maker. After publishing Inishkillane, his classic study of the west of Ireland, he spent many years immersed in communities of indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic Canada. His books include The People’s Land, Maps and Dreams, The Other Side of Eden and a collection of short stories, Means of Escape. His films include Nineteen Nineteen, starring Paul Scofield and Maria Schell, and a series of documentaries made in the Canadian north. He also directed Tracks Across Sand, a set of films made with the ‡Khomani San of the southern Kalahari. He lives in Suffolk with his wife, the actress Juliet Stevenson.

Juliet Stevenson, CBE is an English actor of stage and screen. She trained at RADA and has been nominated for many Olivier and BAFTA awards.

Poet and academic Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance magazine and the resident expert on BBC Radio 4’s On Form, a series exploring the recent resurgence in formal poetry. Her translation of The Eighth Crossing, a book-length poem by Suhrab Sirat about his refugee journey from Afghanistan to the UK, was published in 2021 by Exiled Writers Ink.