Author Interviews: Julia Korkman

Continuing our series of author interviews, here comes a round of questions with Dr Julia Korkman, author of Memory Dependent.

Julia Korkman. S&S. Kuva: Miikka Pirinen / S&S

Dr Julia Korkman is a senior programme specialist at the UN-affiliated European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, the elected president of the European Association of Psychology and Law. Memory Dependent is one of HLA’s top non-fiction titles, and it approaches criminal investigations from an unexpected angle: Korkman highlights how people are used to thinking of their memory as an exact image of what they experienced, almost like a surveillance camera. This has important consequences for criminal investigations: the first, that witnesses are the key to the resolution of a case, as they are expected to provide reliable accounts of what happened, and the second that, if a witness is proved wrong by other facts or other witnesses, then someone must be lying.

Except, is that really how memory and investigations work? What do witch trials and modern miscarriages of justice have in common? And how can jazz singing and forensic psychology be a match made in heaven?

You can read the whole interview here.