Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.
Authors
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin, currently living in Sheffield, England. Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany after World War II. Her family then moved to England where she now lives. She was educated at Keele University and works as a lecturer in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her fiction, Lewycka has written a number of books giving practical advice for carers of elderly people, published by the charity Age Concern.
Patience Agbabi (born 1965) is a British poet, author and performer. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Patience Agbabi was born in London to Nigerian parents, and from a young age was privately fostered by a white English family, who when she was 12 years old moved from Sussex to North Wales, where Agbabi was raised in Colwyn Bay. She studied English language and literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She earned an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education from the University of Sussex in 2002, and in September that year was appointed Associate Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Agbabi was Canterbury Festival's Laureate in 2010. In 2018 she was Writer In Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Chris Cleave was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. He studied experimental psychology at Balliol College, Oxford. His debut novel, INCENDIARY, won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and is now a feature film. His second novel, LITTLE BEE, is a New York Times #1 bestseller with over 2 million copies in print. GOLD is his third novel. He lives in London with his wife and three children. Chris Cleave enjoys dialogue with his readers and invites all comers to introduce themselves on Twitter; he can be found at twitter.com/chriscleave or on his website at http://www.chriscleave.com Q & A What was your favourite childhood book? The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis Which book has made you laugh? Great Lies to Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley Which book has made you cry? The Road by Cormac McCarthy What are your top five books of all time, in order or otherwise? Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) Germinal (Zola) Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Céline) The Road (McCarthy) 100 Years of Solitude (Garcia Márquez) What is your favourite word? "Nooba". It's a word peculiar to my family, although I can't remember where it came from or which of my kids coined it. To "do the nooba" is to muck around when you're supposed to be going to sleep. As in, "Stop doing the nooba, boo-boo, it's way past your bedtime." I like it because you can only say it with a smile. Which fictional character would you most like to have met? Sally Seton, Clarissa Dalloway's childhood companion, when we were all young. Is there a particular book or author that inspired you to be a writer? Definitely. In my teens it was Milan Kundera who made me realise how exciting it would be to write, and Primo Levi who made me realise how important it was, and Tibor Fischer who made me suspect the whole thing would be fun.
