My Battle of Hastings

In winter 2021, Xiaolu Guo bought a tiny dilapidated flat on the Hastings seafront, a room of her own where she could write away from her domestic duties as a mother and wife in London. As Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the landscape and its past, especially the historic violence between Normans and Saxons.My Battle of Hastings is a chronicle of Xiaolu's life in Hastings and a portrait of a dislocated artist seeking to connect with her local environment in the hope of finding a deeper connection to her adopted nation. Filled with profound, beautiful and wry reflections on war, history, migration and belonging, Xiaolu's journey into the past completes the triptych of memoirs that began with Once Upon A Time in the East, charting her childhood in China, then continued with Radical: A Life of My Own as she moved to New York without her husband and child.My Battle of Hastings is above all an exploration of how an immigrant, an outsider and a woman can truly embrace local and national history.