When

Where

Summary

Annual Lecture 2017
Your Money or Your Life: Gary Younge on why global capital respects no borders, but people must

28 June | 6.30pm–9.30pm | £10 (including a drink), via Eventbrite
Migration Museum at the Workshop
26 Lambeth High Street, London, SE1 7AG

Journalist and author Gary Younge looks at how immigration is understood in the current age and what the consequences are in terms of migration, social anxiety and democracy.

In a wide-ranging talk, influenced by his work and travels in the US and by his recent experience of covering the 2017 UK general election, Gary will consider the political and economical dimensions of the current debate around immigration and how it differs and relates to ongoing debates about globalisation, capital and trade.

Tickets: £10 via Eventbrite. Booking essential

About Gary Younge:

Gary Younge is an author, broadcaster and editor-at-large for The Guardian, based in London. He also writes a monthly column, ‘Beneath the Radar’, for the Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for The Nation Institute.  After several years of reporting from all over Europe, Africa, the US and the Caribbean, Gary was appointed the Guardian’s US correspondent in 2003, writing first from New York and then Chicago. In 2015 he returned to London where is now the Guardian’s editor-at-large. 

He has made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit and has enjoyed several prizes for his journalism. In 2017 he received the James Aaronson Career Achievement Award from Hunter College, City University of New York. In 2016 he won the Comment Piece of the Year from The Comment Awards and the Sanford St Martin Trust Radio Award Winner for excellence in religious reporting. In 2015 he was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year by The Comment Awards and the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “It’s the powerless on whose behalf he writes,” said the Center’s director. In 2009 he won the James Cameron award for the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his coverage of the Obama campaign. From 2001 to 2003 he won Best Newspaper Journalist in Britain’s Ethnic Minority Media Awards three years in a row.

He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. 

His books have also won many awards. This year Another Day in the Death of America won the J Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation, was shortlisted for the Helen Berenstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism from New York Public Library, the Jhalak prize and the Orwell Prize for Books. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction from American Library Association. Who Are We? was shortlisted for the Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. No Place Like Home was shortlisted for the Guardian’s first book award. 

He has also enjoyed considerable acclaim from academia. Currently a visiting professor at London South Bank University, he was appointed the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor for Public Policy and Social Administration at Brooklyn College (CUNY) from 2009 to 2011. In 2016 he was made a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and in 2007 he was awarded Honorary Doctorates by both his alma mater, Heriot Watt University, and London South Bank University. 

Born in Hertfordshire to Barbadian parents, he grew up in Stevenage until he was 17, when he went to Kassala, Sudan, with Project Trust, to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school. On his return he attended Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, where he studied French and Russian, translating and interpreting. 

In his final year at Heriot Watt he was awarded a bursary from the Guardian to study journalism at City University and he started working at the Guardian in 1993. In 1996 he was awarded the Laurence Stern Fellowship, which sends a young British journalist to work at the Washington Post for three months. 

He lives in London with his wife and two children.