With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released.
In
Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.
Patrick was born on 31 January 1962 on the Isle of Wight. He finished his formal education with an English degree from New College, Oxford in 1983. His first two novels, The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease were published by Abacus on the same day in June 1986. The following year he moved to Camelford near the north coast of Cornwall and began a love affair with the county that has fed his work ever since. He now lives in the far west, on a farm near Land's End with his husband, Aidan Hicks. He chairs the North Cornwall Book Festival, patron of Penzance LitFest and a director of both Endelienta and the Charles Causley Trust. His chief extravagance in life is opera tickets. David Herd is a poet, critic, and teacher. He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012) and Outwith (Bookthug 2012) and his next collection, Through, will be published by Carcanet in 2016. His critical work includes Contemporary Olson (ed.), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature and John Ashbery and American Poetry and he is currently writing a book on modern poetry and the state of exception. His recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax and Almost Island. In 2011 he co-founded the Sounds New Poetry Festival and he is a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales. He supervises doctoral projects in the area of Modern Literature and is Head of the School of English at Kent. 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. Gillian Slovo is a South African-born novelist, playwright and memoirist. She has lived in London since 1964, working as a writer, journalist and film producer. Her first novel, Morbid Symptoms (1984), began a crime fiction series featuring female detective Kate Baeier. Other novels in the series include Death by Analysis (1986), Death Comes Staccato (1987), Catnap (1994) and Close Call (1995). Her other novels include Ties of Blood (1989), The Betrayal (1991) and Red Dust (2000).
Featuring: Monica Ali, Lisa Appignanesi, David Constantine, Bernardine Evaristo, Patrick Gale, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Emma Parsons, Ian Sansom, Jonathan Skinner, Gillian Slovo, Lytton Smith, Roma Tearne and Jonathan Wittenberg.
