During a career spanning more than 30 years, BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane has covered brutal conflicts in South Africa, Rwanda and Bosnia. It’s taken a lasting toll on his mental health, and in 2020 he stepped back from frontline reporting, revealing that he’s suffering from acute PTSD. In his memoir The Madness, newly published in paperback, he goes into greater detail, powerfully describing multiple breakdowns, alcoholism, and the inherited trauma that shaped his Irish childhood, as well as the resilience he’s found in himself. He will be talking at the Edinburgh International book festival on 17 August.
What part of The Madness was hardest to write?
Most difficult was what it was like to be in a psychiatric hospital. People talk about going mad and it conjures up all kinds of stereotypical images, but it’s terrifying, it’s this implosion. I’ve never been so afraid in my life.
