I really enjoyed the anthology edited by Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott. A country too far features fiction, memoir, poetry and essays about seeking asylum by 27 of Australia’s best writers including: Anna Funder, Kim Scott, Raimond Gaita, Christos Tsiolkas, Gail Jones, Les Murray and Dorothy Hewitt.

It was released in 2013 and I can remember attending a writer’s festival event to hearTom and Rosie talk about how the book came together. Rosie talked about the way in which the best writers can get to the heart of things because of their clarity of language and powerful insights. Tom, in in his eloquent way, reminded politicians that the inflammatory and inaccurate language they were using was de-humanising. In the introduction to the book he wrote “the fact that they are talking about the most marginalised people on earth – deeply traumatised refugees who have lost their countries, homes and families through disasters of every kind – is lost in a storm of venom and cliché.”

It is a powerful book of unique voices and experiences.

Little did I know that it also inspired another book in another country. While on holiday, I spent my obligatory self-indulgent morning trailing over all the floors of Foyles Bookshop in London and came across A Country of Refuge – an anthology of writing about asylum seekers by outstanding British and Irish writers.  Editor Lucy Popescu conceived of the idea in 2014 when she received her copy of A country too far just as the European refugee crisis began to make news when thousands of people fled across the Mediterranean into Europe.

Featuring outstanding writers like Sebastian Barry, Rose Tremain, Marina Lewycka and William Boyd, it takes the same approach as A country too far, combining, memoir, short fiction and essays with poetry. Barry’s opening short story ‘Fragment of a journal, author unknown’ recalls Ireland’s famine years in the nineteenth century when tens of thousands of starving people risked voyages across the Atlantic in hazardous coffin ships. Many disturbing parallels can be drawn between the exodus of the famine years and the current refugee crisis.

The book is poignant and thought-provoking.

Both anthologies are highly readable and can be picked up and put down as the mood strikes, which given the topic, is not a bad way to read and reflect on them.

Barbara Kingsolver, praising the skill required to write a memorable short story, described the form as entailing ‘the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces.’ All The writing in A Country of Refuge and A country too far may be short, but you won’t forget what you read for a long time.

A Country of Refuge – edited by Lucy Popescu (Unbound, 2016)