Our social fabric is being ripped apart by violent forms of intolerance. The increasing number of conflicts born of intellectual oppositions often lead to radicalisation that affects us all. How can we produce a genuine debate of ideas while avoiding intolerance, exclusion or ideological conformism? Is free speech still a right?
The panellists are: Anastasia Colosimo (Professor of Political Theology, Sciences Po Paris), Lionel Shriver (author of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Thomas Chatterton Williams (author and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine). Chaired by Philippe Sands (author and Professor of Law, University College London).
Festival of Ideas continues its partnership with the Institut français and Night of Ideas. Launched by Institut français in 2016, the Night of Ideas is a project staged simultaneously in Paris, London and worldwide. Crossing French, British and European perspectives, Night of Ideas will engage audiences in debates with the theme ‘Together’ as the common thread to tackle the latest ideas behind issues central to our times. All events are free.
This event is part of a series that Festival of Ideas is running with many partners through 2020/2021 on the future of democracy and free speech as part of the English PEN Common Currency programme.
In partnership with/
Speakers
Anastasia Colosimo is a Professor of Political Theology at Sciences Po Paris. She also holds a law and criminology degree from Pantheon-Assas University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Columbia in 2014. She won the Elina and Louis Pauwels award for her essay ‘Les bûchers de la liberté’, published by Stock in January 2016.
Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at UCL and a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers. He has been involved in many of the most important international cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Guantanamo and the Rohingya. He is the author of Lawless, Torture Team, East West Street (which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction) and The Ratline. He is a contributor to the Financial Times, Guardian, New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair, and makes regular appearances on radio and television. He is President of English PEN and a member of the board of the Hay Festival.
Lionel Shriver is a writer and journalist. She is the author of National Book Award finalist So Much for That; the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World; and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted in 2010 in the eponymous film starring Tilda Swinton. Her work as journalist has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times; the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Her latest book The Motion Of The Body Through Space was published in 2020.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at the American Scholar and a 2019 New America Fellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books and Harper’s, among others, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.
