How, in the twenty-first century, can we do commemoration better? In particular, how can commemoration contribute to post-war reconciliation and reconstruction? In this book, a global roster of distinguished writers, artists, musicians, religious leaders, military veterans and scholars debate these questions and ponder the future of commemoration. They include the world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz, the award-winning novelists Aminatta Forna and Rachel Seiffert, and the human rights lawyer and Gifford Baillie Prize-winner Philippe Sands. Polemics and reflections together with poetry and creative prose movingly illuminate a subject that speaks to our common humanity.

«This timely book is an intelligent, thought-provoking and sensitive journey into remembrance. It enables us to understand why commemoration is part of our present as much as our past.» (Shaista Aziz, journalist, writer, activist)

Catherine Gilbert, currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, will take up a NUAcT Fellowship at Newcastle University from September 2020. She is the author of From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (2018), which received the SAGE Memory Studies Journal and Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019.

Kate McLoughlin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She is the author, most recently, of Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare (2018). In 2019, she was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to write a literary history of silence.

Niall Munro is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University, where he is also Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Centre’s pamphlet press, ignitionpress. He is author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic (2015).