Refugee Tales

Offered as a modern day reworking of the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together the stories of fourteen real-life refugees whose voyage to the UK has not been a journey of spiritual salvation, rather one of sheer, physical survival. Told by leading novelists and poets (including Ali Smith, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka, Patience Agbabi, and Avaes Mohammed), these Tales have been developed in collaboration with refugees, former immigration detainees, and those who work with them. With titles like ?The Detainee’s Tale’, ?The Appellant’s Tale’ and ?The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale’, each is based on close conversations with the people behind the stories (whose anonymity is preserved for reasons of security), and offers a compelling, shocking and truthful account of what it means to seek asylum in the UK.

David Herd is a poet, critic, and teacher. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), and Through (Carcanet 2016), and his recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, has worked with Kent Refugee Help since 2009, and is a coordinator of Refugee Tales. Anna PIncus, a founder and co-ordinator of Refugee Tales, has worked for Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group for ten years supporting people held in immigration detention and the volunteers who visit them weekly, managing outreach work and raising awareness about the campaign to end indefinite detention.