New Books Network

n this podcast, North Korean refugees who visited the University of Bradford share their harrowing experiences of life in North Korea, escape, and the challenges of building new lives in freedom. They are supported by Freedom Speakers International (FSI), a Seoul-based non-profit that helps North Korean refugees rebuild their lives through personalised English education, mentoring and public-speaking opportunities. Crucially, FSI enables refugees to tell their own stories in their own voices.

Their testimony reveals the human cost of repression in North Korea while highlighting the importance of the humanitarian work undertaken by FSI: helping refugees develop the skills and confidence to pursue their ambitions, rebuild their independence and ensure that their experiences are heard internationally.

Freedom Speakers International (FSI) is a Seoul-based non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting North Korean refugees as they rebuild their lives after escape from North Korea. Founded in 2013 by Casey Lartigue Jr. and Eunkoo Lee, it began as Teach North Korean Refugees and has developed into an organisation focused on empowering refugees through education, mentoring and public speaking opportunities.

FSI provides North Korean refugees with tuition-free, individualised English and public-speaking mentorship. This is particularly important because many refugees arrive in South Korea having experienced severe disruption to their education and face significant disadvantages in employment and higher education, where English proficiency can be important. FSI works with refugees according to their own objectives, helping them improve their language skills, confidence and ability to participate fully in South Korean and international society.

An especially important part of FSI's work is enabling North Korean refugees who wish to do so to tell their own stories. Through its public-speaking programme, its “I Am From North Korea” English Speech Contest and its Keynote Speaker Network, FSI gives refugees opportunities to communicate their experiences directly to international audiences rather than having others speak on their behalf. Its speaker network now includes more than 30 speakers.

The humanitarian importance of this work extends well beyond language teaching. North Korean refugees have often endured repression, traumatic journeys of escape, separation from their families and the considerable difficulties of adapting to an unfamiliar society. Effective resettlement therefore requires more than providing physical safety. It also means helping people recover independence, confidence and the ability to determine their own futures. FSI's personalised model is particularly valuable because it treats refugees not simply as recipients of assistance but as individuals with their own ambitions, experiences and voices. Its work helps turn escape from persecution into the possibility of a genuinely independent life.

At the same time, by enabling refugees to speak about North Korea from personal experience, FSI performs a wider human-rights function. First-hand testimony preserves awareness of conditions inside North Korea and ensures that the experiences of those who have escaped remain part of international discussion. Supporting North Korean refugees in finding their own voices is therefore both an important humanitarian activity and a contribution to the broader defence of human dignity and freedom.

Christoph Bluth is Professor of International Relations and Security at the University of Bradford.
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As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen.

With vivid personal anecdotes, emotional tributes, and probing reflections, Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World (Broadleaf Books, 2026)shows how Haley’s vision gave birth to a genealogy movement, inspired generations to reclaim their identities, and challenged America to confront its past. From a sixth-grader who became the first lawyer in her family, to a blind musician empowered by his father’s retelling of Roots’ most iconic scene, Johnson traces the ripple effects of Haley’s griot storytelling across time and culture.

As debates rage over which histories get told, Remembering Roots boldly asserts the necessity to remember and retell our stories. A call to action, this book reaffirms that storytelling is not just an art — it’s a path to healing. A companion reading and viewing guide to the book and film is available here.

Lucas L. Johnson II is a former reporter for the Associated Press, where he worked for more than twenty years mainly covering politics, education, and religion. He is the author of Finding the Good and coauthor of Youth Change Agent. Lucas works in higher education and has taught high school and college students. A freelance writer and communications strategist, Lucas lives in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find him at his website.

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In The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II (Grand Central Publishing, 2026), an immigration journalist and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin—a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love.Daniela Gerson and her wife, Talia Inlender, met at a picnic in Los Angeles, not knowing that 75 years earlier, their grandparents had left homes only blocks away from each other in a small Polish town, and fled east to Ukraine. The Gersons and the Inlenders would go on parallel odysseys of 5,000 miles to survive the Holocaust—journeys that would, after a deceitful loyalty test from Stalin, put them on cattle cars to a Soviet Gulag, trap them for years in limbo in Central Asia, and would end, after a decade on the run, with new lives built on secrets and lies.For years, Daniela and Talia simply accepted this painful shared history as a sign that they were b’shert, meant to be. Their families’ refugee past fueled their work: Daniela as an immigration journalist; Talia an immigration attorney. But as Daniela uncovered more, she realized that their grandparents shared this escape path in the Soviet Union with most Polish Jews who survived; a group—sometimes collectively called “the Wanderers”—that is almost entirely absent from popular understanding of World War II. And unlike most Holocaust sagas that focus on the exceptionality of the Nazi genocide, theirs was also a universal story of refugees making impossible decisions when forced to seek safety, protect their children, and find new homes.
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Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read.

Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here
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Beginning in the 1880s and spanning three generations through the 1980s, Vanishing Point (Apprentice House Press, 2026) explores the life and family of Pennsylvania artist George Hetzel and his large, complex family. We watch him and his wife, Mary Louise, mourn losses, celebrate triumphs, and struggle with the tension between their family life and Hetzel’s art. We learn about the lives of Hetzel’s children, especially focusing on his daughter Lila, also a painter, and his granddaughter, Dorothy, a writer. Weaving together stories of personal lives, insight into the ongoing struggle of women to rise in the creative arts, and pivotal artistic events in Pittsburgh, Scalp Level, and Somerset, Pennsylvania, Vanishing Point is a gorgeous historical novel.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell grew up in Pennsylvania and Rockville, Maryland. A graduate of Smith College, Simmons School of Social Work, and The Bennington Writing Seminars, she practiced psychotherapy for many years. Her historical novels The Bowl with Gold Seams and Frieda’s Song and her collections of short stories have garnered awards and recognition, and best of all – readers. Ellen blogs for The Washington Independent as Girl Writing and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives with her husband in Washington, DC and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. Ellen loves travel, reading, writing, and swimming everywhere she goes. Connect online here
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