Jeremy Harding
Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. His books include The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man’s Gate, Small Wars, Small Mercies, and Mother Country.Blog
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"Tightly coiled, unpredictable": Jeremy Hardings Border Vigils reviewed in the Guardian
Writing in the Guardian, Andy Beckett nominates Jeremy Harding's Border Vigils as Book of the Week, describing its "ambitious... economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose".
Border Vigils is a powerful work of reportage, combining analysis of the politics of migration with first hand accounts of the people struggling to survive as they are faced with anti-immigration zealots.
Beckett writes:In recent years, the economic slump has made immigration even more politically sensitive than during more confident eras. His underlying stance is liberal: broadly supportive of the migrants, highlighting the human cost when their desires are blocked. But as a longstanding writer on the ambiguous relationships between rich and poor countries, he is too streetwise to be pious. He is alert to the complexities of a world where refugees and economic migrants are not always easy to tell apart – even in the minds of the immigrants themselves – and where the same traffickers smuggle people, willing and not, and other illegal cargoes. "Nothing in the world of unauthorised migration," he writes early on, "is quite what it seems."
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Wilmers and Harding in the US
Mary-Kay Wilmers and Jeremy Harding will be embarking on an east-coast tour of the US this month. This is a rare opportunity for Americans to hear from Mary-Kay Wilmers, author of The Eitingons and editor of the London Review of Books, and Jeremy Harding, author of Mother Country and an LRB contributing editor, on the role of memoir in contemporary letters.
Wilmers and Harding will be joined by guests including Michael Wood and James Shapiro in Boston, New York, Princeton, and New Haven. We hope to see you at one of their talks ...
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The Boston Globe on Jeremy Harding's "stunning" memoir, Mother Country
In a recent piece for the Boston Globe, reviewer Amanda Heller reads Jeremy Harding's memoir, Mother Country, as a comment on national character:
If the secrecy surrounding adoption in America has to do with sex, in England, just as revealing of national character, it has to do with class. Harding's quest soon led him to the stunning realization that his own origins were not the only ones his parents had deliberately obscured.
Visit the Boston Globe to read the full review.
