Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of Stillness, for which she won the prestigious Whiting Award. She has worked for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and for Physicians for Human Rights.

When she was twenty-three years old, Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. She helped set up a morgue in Tuzla, assisting pathologists with autopsies and laying out personal effects for photographing. Later, she helped excavate graves at Srebrenica, where many thousands had been indiscriminately slaughtered.

This was not the only excavating she was doing. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family’s history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother’s childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood, and imprisonment during WW II for hiding her Jewish lover.

“Every once in a while one comes across a person who is self-evidently a ‘writer’ in the true sense: gifted, passionate, single-minded but with a heart as proudly mysterious as the stories of our wild world and as big as all the suffering we witness.”

- Breyten Breytenbach

Event co-presented with Human Rights Watch