The current trauma of displaced people on the move in Europe is nothing new, and accounts of forced migration have been told since the earliest times. These are some of the best
There’s a paradox inherent in the many and varied experiences of refugees. Their journeys over thousands of miles – epic quests across deserts, mountains and seas – are not normal. But refugees themselves – for all our attempts to “other” them – are very normal. The are doctors, civil servants, electricians and students. People like you and me. As the Guardian’s first-ever migration correspondent, I have spent the past year interviewing them – reporting that I have now turned into a book.
In selecting my favourite texts about refugees, I hope to reflect this paradox. Some of the grandest works in the literary canon – the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Bible and the Qur’an – present refugees as heroes, prophets or messiahs, whose journeys are among the foundational myths of modern society. In more contemporary books, refugees are simply ordinary people – people with whom we have a shared humanity. Yet both approaches essentially point out the same thing: that flight is a phenomenon intrinsic to the human experience.
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