UCL Europe Lecture | This is Europe: An Evening with Ben Judah

About This is Europe

What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population of 750 million, sprawled from Portugal to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home, and who has newly arrived from elsewhere, hoping for better? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries, steward our criss-crossing planes, craft our legacy wines, fish our depleted waters, and risk life itself in search of safety and a new start?

In a series of vivid, ambitious, sometimes darkly funny, often painfully visceral portraits of other people’s lives, Ben Judah invites us to meet them. As they tell their important stories, they reveal a frenetic and vibrant continent transformed by complex supply chains, by migration, Islam, ideologies, the internet, by climate change, Covid and war.

Laid dramatically bare, it may not always be a Europe we recognize – but this is Europe.

This event is organised in partnership between UCL European Institute and UCL European and International Political Studies (EISPS).

It is the inaugural UCL Europe lecture, organised on an annual basis to spotlight contemporary European issues at UCL.

About the author

Ben Judah is a Franco-British author and journalist. He has reported from across Europe, with his writing on politics and society featuring widely, including in The New York Times, The Financial Times and Foreign Policy.

His first book, Fragile Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2013. His second book, This Is London, published by Picador, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016 and for the 2019 Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage. He speaks English, French, Russian and Hebrew. He lives in New York City with his wife and cat.