During most summers since 2015 refugees, their supporters, poets and novelists have walked as a group the route of the Canterbury Tales in reverse. The refugees share their stories with the writers while walking, they are written up and shared as the convoy overnights in community halls, after which they are published in collections, of which there are four volumes to date.

It’s a unique collaborative process in which established authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many others midwife anonymous stories, and refugees gain allies and solidarity in a new literature and location. Some of the narratives are predictable, in terms of lived experience and form. Lorries, pitiless border staff, stark detention centres and moments of injustice and legal limbo figure prominently.

A few collaborations stand out and ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as shaped by Stephen Collis is one.

we were in motion
complicating
the empty category
– ‘we’ –  
moving north

His montage of poetry, reportage, reflections on Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and general disregard for boundaries between genres of writing – an analogue, perhaps, for the project’s aims – sets the bar high for future volunteers.

First published in Refugee Tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma Press, 2016