Migrant writing: redefining home and belonging is a collective project developed by Gabriele Lazzari and Melanie Han, Amir Darwish, Malika Abdulhamidova, Natalia Knowlton Vásquez, Rifat Mahbub, Sahra Abdulrehman, and Yuxin Zhao.
The project started in April 2024 with a workshop in which—through writing activities and collective discussions—writers identified a specific location in London they felt particularly attached to. In the following weeks, they met with Gabriele to shoot some black and white photos in each selected location. These places are as varied as the attachments and feelings they evoke: a public park, a bus route, a theater, a pagoda, a local store, a city road.
Each writer then worked on their piece of prose or poetry. The final submissions accompanied by the photos were shared during an event open to the public. This was the culmination of the project: a night of literature, photography, and community making on 27 July in Brixton.
Our aims
In mainstream media, right-wing rhetoric portrays migrants as threats to national security and economic stability, if not to ethnic purity. Within more liberal spaces, migrants are often seen as recipients of philanthropic compassion, people who should only be passively grateful to their host country.
This project seeks to challenge both of these dangerous discourses by making visible the narrative agency of writers who have experienced migration. Through the imaginative power of literature, the project highlights the importance of place for building a sense of home and belonging across cultures and traditions.
The choice of a global metropolis is not casual. Against hegemonic and elitist narratives of London as a hub of financial capital, Migrant writing wants to foreground places that do not conform to this paradigm, and instead show what it means to practice a cosmopolitanism from below.
People
Gabriele Lazzari is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey. His research explores how literature engages with transnational migrations and the legacies of colonial and racial modernity. He has written a book on contemporary realism.
Born in Korea and raised in East Africa, Melanie Hyo-In Han recently moved from the U.S. to the U.K. She is the author of My Dear Yeast (Milk & Cake Press, 2023) and Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips (Finishing Line Press, 2021).
Natalia Knowlton Vásquez
Natalia Knowlton Vásquez is a Chilean-Canadian poet, playwright and theatre maker based in London, UK. Reoccurring themes in her writing include Latin American and migrant identity, nostalgia and coming-of-age stories. Her writing is inherently feminist and political. Her first poem, “Assimilation,” was published online by the other side of hope.
Yuxin Zhao
Yuxin Zhao is a writer from Hangzhou, China and currently based in the UK. Yuxin mainly writes experimental fiction and poetry on immigration, language, family history, and queer desire. Yuxin’s debut novel, The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, was published by Calamari Archive.
Amir Darwish
Amir Darwish is a British Syrian poet and writer of Kurdish origin who lives in London. Born in Aleppo in 1979, he came to Britain as an asylum seeker in 2003. His poetry was translated into Arabic, Bengali, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish, amongst other languages. His two collections of poetry are Dear Refugee (Smokestack, 2019) & Don’t Forget the Couscous (Smokestack, 2015).
Rifat Mahbub
Rifat Mahbub writes when words demand. Her life in Bangladesh, where she was born and raised, was largely uneventful and so it is in London, UK, where she lives now. Thus writing, both academic and creative, makes things exciting for her. She completed her PhD from the University of York, UK.
Malika Abdulhamidova
Malika Abdulhamidova is a young writer based in London, of Uzbek and indigenous Pamiri origins. You can find her recent poetry in the other side of hope and Interpret Magazine.
Sahra Abdulrehman
Sahra Abdulrehman is a British Somali-Yemeni writer based in London. She has recently been announced a 2024 “Writer on the Rise” by Pan Macmillan and the Black British Book Festival, using the platform to work on her debut novel, a historical fiction set in East Africa in the 1970s. She also currently leads on the MFest Writers lab, a national writing development programme for Muslim writers in the early stages of their career in the UK.
Partners
Funders
Migrant Writing 