Frances Stonor Saunders

Writer, broadcaster, and documentary-maker Frances Stonor Saunders explains how she went in search of her father and his family’s elusive past after being handed an old suitcase and tells of the stories and silences that protect us and the literal and figurative borders we construct.

Saunders says the unopened suitcase with her father’s papers represented everything that had made him unknowable to her in life. Her father’s life was a study in borders. He was exiled from Romania during the war and crossed to Turkey, Egypt and eventually Britain. Ultimately, says Saunders, he crossed into the borderless territory of Alzheimer’s.

Frances Stonor Saunders is one of those writers you read no matter what she writes. She is that good… this is family history at its best… the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind… The Suitcase will haunt you.’ James McConnachie, Sunday Times

Stonor Saunders is former arts editor of the New Statesman. Her first book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, won the Royal Historical Society’s William Gladstone Memorial Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.