When Anna asked me if I’d be a patron to the project I said an immediate yes and a big thank-you for asking me. The most heartening work I did last year was the work I did with Refugee Tales, and the highpoint of my year was the night I came to Charing to meet and read with the walkers.

Late last year too I was in the audience at an event in London featuring the great writer and cultural visionary John Berger.   Someone in the audience asked him what he thought we could do about the movement of people across the world and the reactions of countries to those who arrive in them seeking help and refuge. He sat and thought in silence for a moment or two. Then he began to talk about storytelling.

The telling of stories is an act of profound hospitality.  It always has been; story is an ancient form of generosity, an ancient form that will tell us everything we need to know about the contemporary world.  Story has always been a welcoming-in, is always one way or another a hospitable meeting of the needs of others, and a porous artform where sympathy and empathy are only the beginning of things. The individual selves we all are meet and transform in the telling into something open and communal.

Imagine if every city, if every country, greeted refugees with signs which said in many languages the word welcome, and the words you are safe, like Vienna did last summer.

We will tell it like it is, and we will work towards the better imagined.
Welcome to this year’s Refugee Tales.

Ali Smith

Ali Smith’s ‘The Detainee’s Tale’ is available on the Guardian website.

About Refugee Tales

A Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

Since 2015, Refugee Tales walkers have made a large scale walk every summer In solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and people who have been held in immigration detention. Walkers have been met with hospitality every step of the way. Working in collaboration with migrants and those who have experienced the UK asylum system, and taking Chaucer’s great poem of journeying as a model, established writers and people with lived experience of detention have shared tales in evening events.

The tales are published in four volumes by Comma Press. Through the sharing of tales the project has gathered and communicated experiences of migration, and has sought to show the reality of indefinite detention. As the project walks it creates a space in which the language of welcome is the prevailing discourse.

Since Refugee Tales walked for the first time, the debate around human movement has fluctuated dramatically, as pressure for a change of policy on indefinite detention has continued to build. It is a cruel and debilitating practice that continues to do untold damage to tens of thousands of lives.

Refugee Tales hosts a self-advocacy project for people with lived experience of detention who share the tales with parliamentarians and people of influence and calls for change. We are very grateful to all those who have shared their stories, to the writers, musicians and hosts who have worked with us. Thank you, walkers and thank you to our patrons, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Ali Smith.