The journalist and television presenter Anjan Sundaram — who has been described by Fergal Keane of the BBC as “one of the great reporters of our age” — had two memoirs reissued last month: Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo and Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship (Daunt Books, £11.99 each). He will be interviewed about them next Thursday (September 10) at Daunt Books in Cheapside, London, by Sophie Monaghan-Coombs, culture editor at Monocle magazine.

Sundaram was born in India but grew up in Dubai and went to university in the United States. When he travelled to the Congo in 2005 at 22, to cover a war he felt the western media was ignoring, he was new to the trade. Having turned down a job as a mathematician with the investment bank Goldman Sachs, and bought a one-way ticket, he worked as a stringer — a freelance paid by the word — for the US-based Associated Press agency for 18 months. Stringer is both a portrait of life in a broken, lawless country and a memoir of his own coming of age. In Bad News, Sundaram, who spent almost five years in Rwanda on a training project for journalists, tells of the battle for free speech under the regime of President Paul Kagame. Ian Birrell, reviewing the book for The Observer on its initial publication in 2016, said it was “a superb exposé of a dictatorship”, showing “how the tentacles of totalitarianism squeeze the life from a society”.