2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end Second World War. Gary Younge, renowned journalist, author and broadcaster, returns to WoWFEST to highlight how, following the war, despite the huge role that they played in WW11, black people have been written out of the story.
The 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris offers an opportunity to explore the discrepancy between race-based mythologies around Black involvement in the Second World War. Revisiting a photographed moment from near the end of the second world war, ‘through the eyes of the colonised’, Younge will ‘explore a range of mythologies about who fought and what they were fighting for’. and what that tells us about Europe as a whole and how Black people’s presence here is misunderstood. He will also ‘unpick what that tells us about Europe as a whole and how black people’s presence here is misunderstood today’.
Gary asks how conversations about responsibility, patriotism, immigration, integration, equality, and justice would be understood if the contribution of black people was written back in rather than written out, and their role fully acknowledged?
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian, he has written six books, most recently Dispatches From the Diaspora. Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism and the 2025 Robert. B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ and The New Statesman, among others, and made radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. His fifth book, Another Day in the Death of America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation.
In partnership with: Libraries, Museums and Galleries University of Liverpool.