Refugee Tales: Volume IV

Robert Macfarlane is the author of books about people, place and nature including Underland, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and, with the artist Jackie Morris, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Bidisha is a broadcaster, journalist and film-maker. She specialises in human rights, social justice and the arts and offers political analysis, arts critique and cultural diplomacy tying these interests together. She writes for the main UK broadsheets and broadcasts for BBC TV and radio, ITN, CNN, ViacomCBS and Sky News. Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, is based on her outreach work in UK prisons, refugee charities and detention centres. Her first short film,An Impossible Poison, received its London premiere in March 2018. It has been highly critically acclaimed and selected for numerous international film festivals. Her latest publication is called The Future of Serious Art and her latest film series is called Aurora. 

Shami Chakrabarti is a human rights lawyer, campaigner, life peer and privy counsellor. She was the director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) from 2003 to 2016 and the Shadow Attorney General from 2016 until 2020. She is a Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple and carried the Olympic Flag at the London Games in 2012. She was formerly Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and the University of Essex. She has written, spoken and broadcast widely and is the author of two books: On Liberty (2014) and Of Women (2017). Both are published by Penguin.

Kyon Ferril was born in Jamaica and has lived in Canada since he was four years old. Currently detained, Kyon is intent on rebuilding his life and community through poetry. 

David Herd’s collections of poetry include All Just (2012), Outwith (2012), Through (2016), and Songs from the Language of a Declaration (2019). His essays and poems have been widely published and his recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in From the European South, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paideuma, and the TLS. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent and a founder and co-organiser of Refugee Tales. 

Brought up in London, Christy Lefteri is the child of Cypriot refugees. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Brunel University, where she is now a lecturer. Her novel, the international bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo, won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She is also the author of A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible, which was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her latest novel, Songbirds, is published July 2021. 

Khodadad Mohammadi was born and raised in Daykundi province in Afghanistan. He left Afghanistan in January 2016 and has been in Germany since November 2020.

Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices. Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian’s most widely read long reads in 2017. A fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, among other honours. Her work has been published in 20+ countries and in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Anna Pincus is a founder and coordinator of Refugee Tales and has worked with people in immigration detention for over fifteen years. She is currently Director of Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. 

Amy Sackville teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent, and writes fiction and other prose. She is the author of three novels, most recently Painter to the King (Granta, 2018).

Philippe Sands QC is Professor of Law at University College London and a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers. He appears as counsel before international courts and tribunals, and sits as an international arbitrator. He is author of Lawless World (2005) and Torture Team (2008) and numerous academic books on international law, and has contributed to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the New York Times. His latest books are East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (2016) (awarded the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, the 2017 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the 2018 Prix Montaigne) and The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive (2020), also available as a BBC podcast. Philippe is President of English PEN and a member of the Board of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature. 

Rachel Seiffert has published four novels, A Boy in Winter, The Dark Room, Afterwards, and The Walk Home, and one collection of short stories, Field Study.  In 2003, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2011, she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Dublin/IMPAC Award, and longlisted three times for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, most recently in 2018. She currently teaches at Birkbeck, University of London, and runs workshops for young writers with First Story.

Natalia Sierra is a multi-passionate woman. She was born on a beautiful island in the Caribbean Sea and grew up in the cosmopolitan Bogota. Her passion for social justice led her to flee Colombia with her family and seek asylum in Switzerland in the year 2016. Her family and her waited four years to be recognised as refugees. Her time as an asylum seeker allowed her to realise the innate power and love in people forced to flee and the endless grace of God toward those who seek refuge in Him.

Simon Smith is a poet who lives in London. His most recent books appeared in 2018: The Books of Catullus (Carcanet), DAY IN DAY OUT (Parlor Press) and some Municipal Love Poems (Muscaliet Press). In January 2020 he appeared on the Radio 4 programme ‘In Our Time’ to speak about Catullus. 

Maurizio Veglio is a clinical faculty member at the International University College (IUC) of Turin and a lawyer – admitted tothe Turin bar – specialising in immigration law. Since 2011 he is a lecturer at the Human Rights and Migration Law Clinic (HRMLC). He is author of articles and contributions on the topic of asylum, administrative detention, legal storytelling and cultural translation. In 2014 he co-authored the textbook ‘Lo straniero e il giudice civile’ (Utet). Among his recent works, ‘Uomini tradotti. Prove di dialogo con richiedenti asilo’ (Diritto, immigraziomne e cittadinanza), ‘L’attualità del male. La Libia dei Lager è verità processuale’ (Seb27, 2018) and ‘La malapena. Sulla crisi della giustizia al tempo dei centri di trattenimento degli stranieri’ (Seb27, 2020).