I have been hungry for this book — Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil — and its compelling message urging stories of witness. I’m more than impressed with the background, analysis, and insights that Kim Echlin provides. I’m reading fast, the pages almost turn themselves. Afterward, I’ll settle down and read a second, slower time. Poetry of witness has long been a favourite read of mine, and now I can add a whole basket of writers and stories to delve into. (It’s an old love. In my varied career, I worked a few years under a CIDA-Queen’s grant in the area of development education bringing awareness of the impact of war, displacement and so on to Canadians here at home.)
Hamish Hamilton, a Penguin imprint, 2026
Since Tell Others focuses on prose (literary memoir through creative nonfiction), here’s a list for poetry afficionados, along with my thoughts on a few ‘witness’ collections that I’ve read and reviewed:
The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan (here)
Almond Blossoms & Beyond by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. by Mohammad Shaheen (here)
Songs of Exile by Bänoo Zan (here)
Alien Correspondents by Antony Di Nardo (here)
[…] by Fady Joudah (here)
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk (here)
from Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simić, translated by Amela Simić (here)
Poetry is Blood by Keith Garebian (here)
The Sleep Orchard: A Response to Arshile Gorky by Amy Dennis (here)
Kathryn MacDonald 