Lucy Popescu
Lucy Popescu is a writer, editor and arts critic with words for publications such as The Observer, Financial Times, TLS, Guardian, Independent, Literary Review, New Humanist and Huffington Post. Her latest anthology, A Country to Call Home, focuses on the experiences of young refugees, and has been selected to be part of the Empathy Collection 2020. She also compiled and edited A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on refugees and asylum seekers by some of Britain and Ireland’s finest writers.
Lucy is a volunteer writing mentor for Write to Life, the creative writing group at Freedom from Torture. She edited refugee writer Jade Jackson’s collection Moving a Country and the Write to Life anthology, Body Maps.
The Good Tourist, her book about human rights and ethical travel, was published by Arcadia Books. She co-edited the PEN anthology Another Sky (Profile Books) featuring the work of writers that PEN has helped over the last 40 years.
She has sat on various judging panels including the Stanford Dolman Travel Book Award, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and the Spanish New Books Panel. She is chair of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.
Lucy is a volunteer writing mentor for Write to Life, the creative writing group at Freedom from Torture. She edited refugee writer Jade Jackson’s collection Moving a Country and the Write to Life anthology, Body Maps.
The Good Tourist, her book about human rights and ethical travel, was published by Arcadia Books. She co-edited the PEN anthology Another Sky (Profile Books) featuring the work of writers that PEN has helped over the last 40 years.
She has sat on various judging panels including the Stanford Dolman Travel Book Award, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and the Spanish New Books Panel. She is chair of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.
Bedford: Reading your anthologies, A Country of Refuge (2016) and A Country to Call Home (2018), I was struck by the sheer range of feeling towards issues of asylum and refuge – the diversity of experience, the conflicted emotions, the weight of personal and national histories. I’d like to start by asking where your interest in refugee stories originated? You’ve spoken elsewhere of how Andrew Graham-Yooll’s book A State of Fear (1986) helped spark your interest in human rights work, but I’m curious as to how that interest came together with literary work in the course of your career. When did the two become intertwined for you?
Popescu: My first degree was in English and European Literature, and I recall many Russian writers teaching me about suffering and compassion – how could I avoid reading Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, who both spent time in exile. I started working odd jobs at the English centre of PEN, the international association of writers when I was seventeen. Later, I became Director of its Writers in Prison Committee. So my two passions – human rights and literature – dove-tailed quite easily. PEN taught me the power of storytelling and how one could use words to effect change, and I’ve always believed reading encourages empathy. I would read the work of the imprisoned writers PEN tried to help, if they were translated into English, and in 2007 I co-edited the PEN anthology, Another Sky, which features the work of persecuted and exiled writers from around the world.
Graham-Yooll’s A State of Fear inspired my work in human rights, but I had immersed myself in literature with a political slant from an early age. I also trained and worked as an actress. Many playwrights were active in PEN – Ariel Dorfman, Ronald Harwood, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard – and their plays reflected some of the human rights abuses PEN campaigned against: Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Pinter’s Mountain Language, Stoppard’s Professional Foul (dedicated to Václav Havel), to name a few.
As the climate of repression changed in certain parts of the world, PEN increasingly campaigned on behalf of writers in exile – some governments realised that it was easier to exile dissidents rather than imprison them. When I finally left PEN, it felt a natural progression to volunteer to help refugee writers at Freedom from Torture.
Bedford: You mentioned there that you’ve always believed reading encourages empathy, which is, I think, just one step from that line in your Introduction to A Country to Call Home: ‘Empathy engenders change.’ I wonder if, either while compiling these anthologies or following their subsequent success, you saw this phenomenon in action. Did you see these stories making an impact on empathy in the real world?
Popescu: I hope both anthologies have touched people’s hearts and made them think about the plight of refugees and how we can all contribute to a kinder environment. That was very much my intention.
In terms of impact, two things happened in response to A Country of Refuge. It became the University of Hertfordshire’s book choice for their ‘Common Reading Experience’ (www.herts.ac.uk/connect), distributed to first-year students to read and participate in events throughout the year. Then Michaela Fyson, a reader in the north of England, fundraised to buy 650 copies to give to our MPs to read over the Christmas break. This helped bring some welcome media attention and broadened the anthology’s reach.
A Country to Call Home was also warmly received. It was selected to be part of the Empathy Collection 2020, and I was invited to give a TEDx presentation on the power of words by the London Business School.
I hope these warm responses demonstrate the impact these books have had on readers who were inspired to take things further.
Bedford: We’ve spoken about the impact of reading refugee stories, but I’m also curious about what it means for refugees to write about their own experiences. Through your work with Write to Life, Freedom from Torture’s creative writing programme, you must have witnessed firsthand the complex effects that writing one’s story can have. How have you observed those effects on the refugees and asylum seekers you’ve worked with? What have been the challenges?
Popescu: The biggest challenge has been to ensure refugee writers aren’t retraumatised by sharing or telling their stories. I’ve met vulnerable people who have been so traumatised they’ve lost their voices. They can write down feelings and ideas, but when it comes to reading out loud, they clam up. Some can only whisper. Others become tongue-tied, finding it impossible to verbally express the words they’ve written on the page.
Layla AlAmmar’s novel Silence is a Sense (2021) is about just this. Her protagonist is a Syrian refugee living in the north of England, who is so traumatised she has stopped speaking. However, she derives some small comfort from writing about her experiences for a magazine. AlAmmar is studying for a PhD on the intersection of Arab women’s fiction and literary trauma theory, and her novel demonstrates how trauma can, quite literally, rob you of speech.
The cathartic effects of writing are well known, and for some, once they start writing, the stories pour out of them and provide relief. They find a release in getting their words onto a page. Other people are overwhelmed by grief about the people they’ve left behind or the families they’ve lost and are slower to respond. Writing helps them to regain trust and find their voices again. It’s wonderful to see this happen and witness them gain enough confidence to eventually read from their work publicly. Several refugees, once they recover their strength and/or have mastered the English language, want to use their voices to make a difference, to write about their experiences, or to speak up against the UK’s hostile environment.
Bedford: Aside from writers with direct experiences of refugee trauma, there are also authors in the anthologies who provide an outside perspective – authors who describe how these disparate stories have impacted their thoughts and feelings towards the wider issues. A.L. Kennedy, whose essay ‘The Migrants’ closes A Country of Refuge, has described writers as ‘guardians of the imagination’ with a moral duty to write against the propaganda of media and government – a pertinent statement in regards to the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. Do her sentiments ring true for you? Do writers have a duty to challenge harmful representation and to speak truth to power?
Popescu: Yes, I think they do, and this was my inspiration from the start and the impetus behind the two anthologies.
When I worked at PEN in the 1990s and noughties, writers were particularly vocal and active on behalf of their colleagues. Harwood, Ian McEwan, and Pinter had rallied around Salman Rushdie in 1989 after he was issued with a fatwa. In 1995 there were many notable demonstrations with William Boyd, Antonia Fraser, Wole Soyinka, Stoppard, and Graham Swift in front of the Nigerian Embassy in London on behalf of Ken Saro-Wiwa (tragically executed by General Sani Abacha’s junta in December 1995). Other high-profile writers such as Mavis Cheek, Elaine Feinstein, Deborah Moggach, and Joan Smith, led by the indefatigable Moris Farhi, gathered outside the Iranian embassy for the Iranian journalist Faraj Sarkohi. Many members of PEN felt it was their duty to speak up for their fellow writers, imprisoned or exiled for their work and denied a voice, and to join the international campaigns against repressive regimes.
I asked well-known writers to contribute to both refugee anthologies because I wanted them to use their imaginations, as well as their profiles, to highlight the plight of the vulnerable, those unable to speak for themselves, or just to write about what it feels like to leave home because one has no choice, to arrive in a foreign country friendless and alone or to be treated as other.
Bedford: Finally, I’d like to ask about the role you feel literature might have in shaping our views of refugees and asylum seekers moving forwards. I feel as though the language around immigration and refuge has become so weaponised that these stories are more crucial now than ever, compounded of course by the problems of our ‘hostile environment’, as you alluded to earlier. How do you see the future of these developing challenges in the UK, and what part can writers and readers play in trying to shape that future in a more positive and humane way?
Popescu: I am heartbroken by the appalling rhetoric of Priti Patel and the Home Office’s continued hostile environment. Where has such hatred and scorn come from? And the hypocrisy. Write to life recently published a zine to mark Refugee Week 2021. One of our writers, Shahab, observed:
Even people in positions of remarkable power are refugees or migrants of some sort or other. Our prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel: Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather was the Ottoman journalist Ali Kemal, of Turkish and Circassian origin, who was murdered for his anti-nationalism. Priti Patel’s grandfather was from Gujarat. As Home Secretary, she has cut the rope connecting her to new migrants to the UK, despite being born in a Ugandan-Indian family who could not have migrated with the new migration rules.
I first conceived of A Country of Refuge in January 2014, after receiving a copy of the anthology A Country Too Far, co-edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally. Their book aimed to set the record straight about asylum seekers in Australia and to protest their government’s treatment of them. Inspired, I sent out a flurry of emails, got some terrific writers on board and immediately set about trying to find a suitable publisher here. My agent approached a number of mainstream publishers but drew a blank. I then spent a further year trying the smaller, independent presses with no success. No one wanted to publish an anthology highlighting the plight of refugees, despite the writers involved. Fortunately, in June 2015, Unbound Books came on board, and I crowdfunded both anthologies.
I am glad that now more books about the refugee experience are being published and widely read. Here are just a few to look out for:
Refugee Tales – four volumes edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2016-2021)
Dalila by Jason Donald (Cape, 2017)
The Invisible Crowd by Ellen Wiles (Harper Collins, 2017)
The Beekeeper of Aleppo (Bonnier, 2019) and Songbirds by Christy Lefteri (Manilla, 2021)
Silence is A Sense by Layla AlAmmar (Borough Press, 2021)
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (World Editions, 2021)
And for children:
The Boy At the Back of the Class by Onjali Q Rauf (Hachette, 2018)
Where the River Runs Gold by Sita Bramachari (Hachette, 2019)
Media reports and documentaries are often impactful when first aired but are easily forgotten. Personal stories linger in the mind for longer. Novels and short stories challenge the negative narratives surrounding migration, articulate the despair felt by asylum seekers in search of safety, and illustrate the trauma of many refugees. I hope readers will arm themselves with these stories, better understand the reason people leave their home countries, and speak up against the abuse of traumatised people.
Popescu: My first degree was in English and European Literature, and I recall many Russian writers teaching me about suffering and compassion – how could I avoid reading Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, who both spent time in exile. I started working odd jobs at the English centre of PEN, the international association of writers when I was seventeen. Later, I became Director of its Writers in Prison Committee. So my two passions – human rights and literature – dove-tailed quite easily. PEN taught me the power of storytelling and how one could use words to effect change, and I’ve always believed reading encourages empathy. I would read the work of the imprisoned writers PEN tried to help, if they were translated into English, and in 2007 I co-edited the PEN anthology, Another Sky, which features the work of persecuted and exiled writers from around the world.
Graham-Yooll’s A State of Fear inspired my work in human rights, but I had immersed myself in literature with a political slant from an early age. I also trained and worked as an actress. Many playwrights were active in PEN – Ariel Dorfman, Ronald Harwood, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard – and their plays reflected some of the human rights abuses PEN campaigned against: Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Pinter’s Mountain Language, Stoppard’s Professional Foul (dedicated to Václav Havel), to name a few.
As the climate of repression changed in certain parts of the world, PEN increasingly campaigned on behalf of writers in exile – some governments realised that it was easier to exile dissidents rather than imprison them. When I finally left PEN, it felt a natural progression to volunteer to help refugee writers at Freedom from Torture.
Bedford: You mentioned there that you’ve always believed reading encourages empathy, which is, I think, just one step from that line in your Introduction to A Country to Call Home: ‘Empathy engenders change.’ I wonder if, either while compiling these anthologies or following their subsequent success, you saw this phenomenon in action. Did you see these stories making an impact on empathy in the real world?
Popescu: I hope both anthologies have touched people’s hearts and made them think about the plight of refugees and how we can all contribute to a kinder environment. That was very much my intention.
In terms of impact, two things happened in response to A Country of Refuge. It became the University of Hertfordshire’s book choice for their ‘Common Reading Experience’ (www.herts.ac.uk/connect), distributed to first-year students to read and participate in events throughout the year. Then Michaela Fyson, a reader in the north of England, fundraised to buy 650 copies to give to our MPs to read over the Christmas break. This helped bring some welcome media attention and broadened the anthology’s reach.
A Country to Call Home was also warmly received. It was selected to be part of the Empathy Collection 2020, and I was invited to give a TEDx presentation on the power of words by the London Business School.
I hope these warm responses demonstrate the impact these books have had on readers who were inspired to take things further.
Bedford: We’ve spoken about the impact of reading refugee stories, but I’m also curious about what it means for refugees to write about their own experiences. Through your work with Write to Life, Freedom from Torture’s creative writing programme, you must have witnessed firsthand the complex effects that writing one’s story can have. How have you observed those effects on the refugees and asylum seekers you’ve worked with? What have been the challenges?
Popescu: The biggest challenge has been to ensure refugee writers aren’t retraumatised by sharing or telling their stories. I’ve met vulnerable people who have been so traumatised they’ve lost their voices. They can write down feelings and ideas, but when it comes to reading out loud, they clam up. Some can only whisper. Others become tongue-tied, finding it impossible to verbally express the words they’ve written on the page.
Layla AlAmmar’s novel Silence is a Sense (2021) is about just this. Her protagonist is a Syrian refugee living in the north of England, who is so traumatised she has stopped speaking. However, she derives some small comfort from writing about her experiences for a magazine. AlAmmar is studying for a PhD on the intersection of Arab women’s fiction and literary trauma theory, and her novel demonstrates how trauma can, quite literally, rob you of speech.
The cathartic effects of writing are well known, and for some, once they start writing, the stories pour out of them and provide relief. They find a release in getting their words onto a page. Other people are overwhelmed by grief about the people they’ve left behind or the families they’ve lost and are slower to respond. Writing helps them to regain trust and find their voices again. It’s wonderful to see this happen and witness them gain enough confidence to eventually read from their work publicly. Several refugees, once they recover their strength and/or have mastered the English language, want to use their voices to make a difference, to write about their experiences, or to speak up against the UK’s hostile environment.
Bedford: Aside from writers with direct experiences of refugee trauma, there are also authors in the anthologies who provide an outside perspective – authors who describe how these disparate stories have impacted their thoughts and feelings towards the wider issues. A.L. Kennedy, whose essay ‘The Migrants’ closes A Country of Refuge, has described writers as ‘guardians of the imagination’ with a moral duty to write against the propaganda of media and government – a pertinent statement in regards to the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. Do her sentiments ring true for you? Do writers have a duty to challenge harmful representation and to speak truth to power?
Popescu: Yes, I think they do, and this was my inspiration from the start and the impetus behind the two anthologies.
When I worked at PEN in the 1990s and noughties, writers were particularly vocal and active on behalf of their colleagues. Harwood, Ian McEwan, and Pinter had rallied around Salman Rushdie in 1989 after he was issued with a fatwa. In 1995 there were many notable demonstrations with William Boyd, Antonia Fraser, Wole Soyinka, Stoppard, and Graham Swift in front of the Nigerian Embassy in London on behalf of Ken Saro-Wiwa (tragically executed by General Sani Abacha’s junta in December 1995). Other high-profile writers such as Mavis Cheek, Elaine Feinstein, Deborah Moggach, and Joan Smith, led by the indefatigable Moris Farhi, gathered outside the Iranian embassy for the Iranian journalist Faraj Sarkohi. Many members of PEN felt it was their duty to speak up for their fellow writers, imprisoned or exiled for their work and denied a voice, and to join the international campaigns against repressive regimes.
I asked well-known writers to contribute to both refugee anthologies because I wanted them to use their imaginations, as well as their profiles, to highlight the plight of the vulnerable, those unable to speak for themselves, or just to write about what it feels like to leave home because one has no choice, to arrive in a foreign country friendless and alone or to be treated as other.
Bedford: Finally, I’d like to ask about the role you feel literature might have in shaping our views of refugees and asylum seekers moving forwards. I feel as though the language around immigration and refuge has become so weaponised that these stories are more crucial now than ever, compounded of course by the problems of our ‘hostile environment’, as you alluded to earlier. How do you see the future of these developing challenges in the UK, and what part can writers and readers play in trying to shape that future in a more positive and humane way?
Popescu: I am heartbroken by the appalling rhetoric of Priti Patel and the Home Office’s continued hostile environment. Where has such hatred and scorn come from? And the hypocrisy. Write to life recently published a zine to mark Refugee Week 2021. One of our writers, Shahab, observed:
Even people in positions of remarkable power are refugees or migrants of some sort or other. Our prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel: Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather was the Ottoman journalist Ali Kemal, of Turkish and Circassian origin, who was murdered for his anti-nationalism. Priti Patel’s grandfather was from Gujarat. As Home Secretary, she has cut the rope connecting her to new migrants to the UK, despite being born in a Ugandan-Indian family who could not have migrated with the new migration rules.
I first conceived of A Country of Refuge in January 2014, after receiving a copy of the anthology A Country Too Far, co-edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally. Their book aimed to set the record straight about asylum seekers in Australia and to protest their government’s treatment of them. Inspired, I sent out a flurry of emails, got some terrific writers on board and immediately set about trying to find a suitable publisher here. My agent approached a number of mainstream publishers but drew a blank. I then spent a further year trying the smaller, independent presses with no success. No one wanted to publish an anthology highlighting the plight of refugees, despite the writers involved. Fortunately, in June 2015, Unbound Books came on board, and I crowdfunded both anthologies.
I am glad that now more books about the refugee experience are being published and widely read. Here are just a few to look out for:
Refugee Tales – four volumes edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2016-2021)
Dalila by Jason Donald (Cape, 2017)
The Invisible Crowd by Ellen Wiles (Harper Collins, 2017)
The Beekeeper of Aleppo (Bonnier, 2019) and Songbirds by Christy Lefteri (Manilla, 2021)
Silence is A Sense by Layla AlAmmar (Borough Press, 2021)
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (World Editions, 2021)
And for children:
The Boy At the Back of the Class by Onjali Q Rauf (Hachette, 2018)
Where the River Runs Gold by Sita Bramachari (Hachette, 2019)
Media reports and documentaries are often impactful when first aired but are easily forgotten. Personal stories linger in the mind for longer. Novels and short stories challenge the negative narratives surrounding migration, articulate the despair felt by asylum seekers in search of safety, and illustrate the trauma of many refugees. I hope readers will arm themselves with these stories, better understand the reason people leave their home countries, and speak up against the abuse of traumatised people.
Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely, and are available alongside his interview series Writers on Research via joebedford.co.uk.
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