Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

MAP OF HOPE AND SORROW

Eyad Awwadawnan Helen Benedict

Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece

Award-winning author Helen Benedict and Syrian writer and refugee Eyad Awwadawnan team up to present the stories of five refugees from the Middle East and Africa who fled violence or persecution only to become trapped in some of the world's worst refugee camps in Greece.

Map of Hope and Sorrow offers a rare insight into the lives of refugees. Both authors spent years getting to know the interviewees and winning their trust. The result is five powerful stories of resilience, suffering and hope.

Hasan, Asmahan, Evans, Mursal and Calvin each tell their story in their own words, retaining control and dignity, while revealing intimate and heartfelt scenes from their lives. They describe their homes and families in Syria, Nigeria, Afghanistan or Cameroon; their arduous journeys of escape; and recount how they ended up trapped in the Europe they believed would give them freedom, only to be abused and reviled instead.

There are more displaced people on the globe than ever since World War Two, fleeing a combination of war, civil unrest, religious conflict, dire poverty, local violence and climate change - forces often inextricably intertwined - just at a point when anti-immigrant, authoritarian governments are rising all over the world, threatening democracies and breaking their postwar commitments to protect refugees and uphold human rights. As a result, refugees today are being persecuted, demonized, and denied their legal rights, both within Europe and the USA, the very places that are supposed to protect them, and that, in some cases, caused them to become refugees in the first place.

This is the scenario being played out in Greece, the major gateway to Europe that the EU has deliberately turned into a trap.

HELEN BENEDICT is a recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism. She is the author of 13 books, including the award-winning The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women at War Serving in Iraq, and the novel, Wolf Season. Her writing inspired both a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of people sexually assaulted in the military and the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary, The Invisible War. She is a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, New York. For more information, visit www.helenbenedict.com.

EYAD AWWADAWNAN, formerly a law student from Damascus, Syria, is a writer and poet currently living as an asylum-seeker in Reykjavik, Iceland. During his four years in Greece, he worked as a cultural mediator, translator and interpreter for various NGOs. He also published a featured article in Slate Magazine detailing his escape from Syria.

Available products
Book Published 2022-10-18 by Footnote Press

Comments

Heartfelt, eye-opening, timely, essential: these stories remind us of the plight of refugees, people just like us, who are desperate to build new lives for themselves and their loved ones.

Simple, powerful stories told in refugees' own voices. I couldn't stop reading, hand to mouth, my chest tightening. A vital collaboration between two sharply observant writers who know how to get out of the way.

This is a treasure-trove of story, of heart, of humanity's failures and achievements.

We were not born refugees. We had homes and jobs. But because of the problems in our country, we had to leave. I am sure if you were us, you would do what we did.

This meticulously reported, beautifully written book is timely and important. People leading family lives in peaceful streets or country villages, bucolic farms or city streets, are forced to flee their homes in the face of unspeakable violence, only to find themselves trapped on the cusp of Europe with no way to move forward or back. These are stories at once compelling, poetic and necessary.

With more displaced people in the world since World War II, Map of Hope and Sorrow feels both timely and necessary... These deeply intimate stories are told with such grace and openness, a testament to Benedict's skills as an interviewer and journalist.

Never since World War II has the world seen so many displaced people. They are women, the gay, the impoverished, the persecuted. In news accounts they have become a faceless tsunami of humanity as they suffer an increasingly brutal reception in Western nations. In this important book, Helen Benedict and Eyad Awwadawnan humanize them in the best way possible by letting them speak in their own voices. Map of Hope and Sorrow is darkly poetic, haunting--vital.