PALEWELL PRESS

Roz Doe holds an MSc in Forced Migration and has been working with young refugees and asylum seekers for over 20 years. In 2004, she co-founded the charity, Young Roots, which worked with young refugees in Lebanon, Egypt and Nepal and currently provides services for young people living in London. The poems in Welcoming Blue Robins were inspired by young refugees she worked with and the pamphlet also contains poems written by and with young refugees in London. 

So Many Unavoidable Journeys is an anthology of short prose about refugee journeys, emotional as well as physical, from where a person once lived to settling into a new home. Writing about travellers from Bhutan, Iraq, Eritrea, Iran, Bangladesh, Syria, Palestine and Russia, authors with personal knowledge help us understand how it feels to be compelled to migrate.

Nick Alldridge's new poetry pamphlet collection, The God of Coffee Shops and Kindness, addresses some of our most vital needs as social beings like kindness, respect and a willingness to compromise. With courage, humour and compassion, Nick tackles the sensitive topics of gender, mental health and poverty.

Antony Johae's intriguing prose memoir, Lines on Lebanon, is about the ongoing financial and political crises in Lebanon. Arranged as a sequence of anecdotes, these are lines written about Lebanon, lines of approach to Lebanon, and lines of communication which frequently get snarled up and become a tangle at both political and every-day practical levels.

The poems in Heronless are strongly influenced by the deaths of Sophia's parents. They fuse personal grief with the sense of loss many of us experience due to the climate crisis. This pamphlet collection is a stunning, beautiful expression of love, loss, the haunting of grief and memory.

The Hope We Still Hang Onto is a vivid and inspiring memoir by Arinda Ojeda Aravena of her experiences while a political prisoner during the Pinochet era. The book has been translated into English by Barbara Mitchell. Despite the fragility of human bodies subjected to inhuman degradation, Arinda’s account shows how personal strength and solidarity among the female political prisoners played a crucial part in helping them survive.

The writing in Hold to Record - Voice Notes from Refugees grew out of the Voice Notes international creative writing and sound arts project, exploring the role of the telephone call for those who have experienced forced displacement. Featuring messages from twelve refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, the anthology offers new ways to think about displaced voices, creative networks and different modes of talking and listening across cultures.

Ahmed Zaidan is a Finnish-Iraqi refugee journalist. Mosul - Story of Hope defies stereotypes and crosses borders, venturing beyond the safety of familiar territory. The author brings together memoir, reportage and storytelling to communicate how his birthplace, Mosul in Iraq, was occupied by ISIS, and now, thanks to its heroic residents, the city is rising from the ashes of that experience.