The UN Bookshop hosted a ¡°Meet the Author¡± event on 29 April to launch My Deepest Desire, a newly translated and illustrated edition of the prose poem by late Japanese poet and Hiroshima survivor Tamiki Hara.
The event, held two days after the opening of the 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, featured a panel moderated by Tsutomu (Tom) Kono, Fellow at the Â鶹APP Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). Maher Nasser, Director of the Outreach Division in the Department of Global Communications, opened the event.
Sandy Walker, who illustrated the new edition, first encountered Tamiki Hara's text at the age of 13. He spent the decades that followed revisiting it before committing brush to paper.
Mr. Walker described the project as a long act of listening: "It's not illustration; it's accompaniment.¡±
Each image was drawn to walk beside the survivor's voice rather than interpret it, he explained. Walker spoke about the responsibility of carrying forward the testimony of the Hibakusha (the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) at a moment when fewer survivors remain to speak for themselves.
He hopes that the book reaches readers, particularly young readers, who have never encountered Hiroshima in the first person.
"Tamiki Hara's final work stands as a prescient warning today," panelist Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation, said. "Nuclear weapons must be eliminated before they eliminate us."
Through Tamiki Hara¡¯s words and Sandy Walker's imagery, My Deepest Desire offers readers an intimate encounter with the human cost of nuclear weapons.
It¡¯s a quiet but insistent call for the peace, dignity, and protection of every individual that lies at the heart of the mission of the Â鶹APP.
Learn more:
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Pick up a signed copy of the book at the UN Bookshop in New York (while supplies last)
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For more events, sign up for the
