Nadia Murad’s new memoir, I Choose My Beginning: A Story of Courage and Activism, will be released in the United States on 15 September 2026. Less than two weeks later, she will discuss the book at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC. Ahead of its release, Murad joined human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney for a public conversation at the Oxford Justice Roundtables. The discussion offered a fuller picture of what the memoir represents: not a return to the events of 2014 alone, but an account of the life, choices and work that followed.
Murad began by speaking about the person she was before ISIS attacked Kocho. She grew up in a farming family in Iraq and was due to become the first of her siblings to complete high school. Education, she explained, had already opened a different horizon for her, particularly as a young woman from a rural village. That earlier life matters because I Choose My Beginning does not present her only as a survivor or public figure. It returns to her hopes, her family and the ordinary future she expected to have before violence interrupted it.
At Oxford, Murad described arriving in Germany after escaping captivity and imagining a life in which she could go to school, disappear from public attention and leave the shame imposed on survivors behind. “I can choose my new beginning here,” she said. Yet the possibility of a private life existed alongside a feeling of responsibility toward the Ezidis who were still in captivity, the families searching for relatives, and the women and girls whose experiences remained unheard. Her decision to speak publicly was therefore never simply about personal visibility. It was about refusing to let those who were taken, killed or silenced become anonymous figures in a distant tragedy.
That insistence on human dignity runs through her understanding of justice. Murad spoke of the first conviction in Germany connected to ISIS crimes against Ezidis as a moment that gave survivors hope, but she was equally clear that justice cannot end with a single trial. For families, it also means recognition, reparations, the return of displaced Ezidis to rebuild their lives with dignity, and the chance to recover and bury their loved ones. She noted that more than 2,000 Ezidi women and children remain missing, including members of her own family. “My family were not numbers. They were human beings,” she said, challenging the language that can make the scale of genocide easier to repeat but harder to truly understand.
The discussion also addressed the long road of accountability. Murad and Clooney reflected on the need to preserve evidence, pursue perpetrators across borders and ensure that organisations or corporations that enabled ISIS face consequences. They spoke about the ongoing civil action in the United States involving Ezidi survivors against Lafarge, the French cement company that admitted making payments to armed groups in Syria. For Murad, accountability must mean more than punishment after the fact. It must recognise the damage done to survivors and support their ability to rebuild their lives.
The memoir’s central idea is therefore not that healing erases the past. Rather, it is about claiming the right to a future despite the past. Murad spoke at Oxford about learning that caring for oneself can also be a form of resistance and justice. She also recalled the difficult transition from displacement to studying in the United States, where she wanted to be seen not only as an activist or survivor, but simply as Nadia: a student, a friend and a young woman learning how to live an ordinary life alongside extraordinary responsibilities.
Her closing message to the students in the room was simple but powerful: change does not belong only to governments or leaders. It belongs to people who refuse to look away, who remain engaged and who understand that silence is also a choice. That message gives I Choose My Beginning its wider meaning. The book is not only about what Nadia Murad endured. It is about what she has chosen to build from it—for herself, for the Ezidi people and for survivors everywhere.
Nadia Murad will appear at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, DC, on Monday, 28 September 2026 at 7:00 p.m.
