Don't marginalise migrants

I left Greece in 1999 and came to the UK to study. Since then, I’ve lived at 32 different addresses, worked in restaurants, factories and libraries, met people I would have never had the chance to meet in my home town, and written a novel. I’m one of those people who stares at the floor a lot, but once every two or three years, I look up and realise where I am. And it hits me: if you’ve never left, you’d never have done this.

That is my story. But anyone who has moved to the UK from another country, whether as a refugee or migrant, has a similar experience, sometimes more dramatic and certainly fascinating. We all carry some cultural baggage with us and often view the world through a unique outsider’s perspective. And we are 14.4% of the UK population – roughly one in seven of the crowd in your bookshop or the bored commuters on the train home. Yet while the publishing industry is slowly improving diversity, this often stops short of representing first-generation migrants and refugees at a time when they are in the public eye. Although it is hard to find data on this group directly, 91% of published authors are white, and two-thirds of those working in the industry come from professional backgrounds. By contrast, recent waves of migration have included EU citizens working in hospitality and trade, overseas care workers from Nigeria and the Philippines, and international students from China and India among other nations. As a recent Spread the Word report noted: “Do not cater only for ‘Susan’. Rethink the idea of there being a ‘core’ audience and understand that modern Britain consists of multiple audiences.”

It was to address this gap that I set up The Other Side of Hope in 2021, a literary magazine edited by refugees and migrants and containing stories written by these groups as well. The idea came to me at a time when I was both delivering creative writing workshops at a refugee charity, and also sending out short stories to literary magazines. With funding from Arts Council England, I created a team of editors. We publish poetry, fiction, non-fiction, book reviews and author interviews. So far, we’ve published three print issues and two online, with the third due to publish later this month. In January, we’ll publish Other Tongue, Mother Tongue, a separate project where writers send us their work in any language, and we publish them alongside the English translation.

While the publishing industry is slowly improving diversity, this often stops short of representing first-generation migrants and refugees at a time when they are in the public eye

The Other Side of Hope aims to be a quality literary magazine, but there are a few things we do differently. Firstly, it’s inevitable that we will have to reject many submissions, but we try to do so in a way that isn’t crushing. If we do reject a submission, we encourage them to work on the writing and send something to us again. And we don’t reject on technicalities. If someone submits without a cover letter, or doesn’t specify what genre it’s in, we’ll email back and say: “Can you tell us more?” Hopefully this way people feel more comfortable. We also avoid submission forms, because people who have dealt with the immigration system, especially those who have been in the asylum system, have filled in enough forms already.