Please note: This is an online event.

Please join us for the first session for 2022 of the Readings / Australian Red Cross book club on the laws and impact of war.

In this session we will be joined by Yuot Alaak, to discuss his acclaimed memoir, Father of the Lost Boys.

During the Second Sudanese Civil War, thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks from northern government troops. Many became refugees in Ethiopia. There, in 1989, teacher and community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak assumed care of the Lost Boys in a bid to protect them from becoming child soldiers. So began a four-year journey from Ethiopia, through Sudan, to the safety of a Kenyan refugee camp. Together they endured starvation, animal attacks and the horrors of landmines and aerial bombardment. Father of the Lost Boys is the eyewitness account of Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot. It is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun.

Yuot Alaak arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1995, and now lives in Perth with his family, where he works as a mining professional. Alaak has appeared twice at the Perth Writers Festival. Father of the Lost Boys was shortlisted for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award.

The ‘laws and impact of war’ book club is a partnership between Readings and the Victorian International Humanitarian Law Advisory Committee of the Australian Red Cross.

International humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the laws of war, is the body of law that applies during war to protect those who are not, or who are no longer participating in hostilities, and that seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare. Find out more by visiting the website of Australian Red Cross.

This event is free to attend but bookings are essential.

Please book here.

How to ‘attend’ a virtual event at Readings

This event commences online at 7pm using the video conferencing platform Zoom.

To book for this event, you must provide your email address.

To ensure the Zoom event stays private, participants will be emailed a unique zoom link and a password 30 minutes before the event begins on the day of the event. Please check your email.

All bookings for online events will be closed one hour before the event begins.

You do not need to have a Zoom account to join a meeting, but mobile users will need to download the Zoom app for their device. Desktop and laptop users can either download the Zoom application or access the event via their web browser.