Migration Stories: Past & Present

Migration is one of the prevailing issues of our times, but while regularly debated by politicians and in the media, the intrepid human stories of those who leave their home countries, often risking everything to come to the UK, are more rarely told.

To help us tell some of those migrant stories, we welcome two writers who have made it their mission to get behind the migration headlines in their work.

Horatio Clare is the author of They Came By Sea: Stories of a Greater Britain, which charts his journeys between Dover and Calais, talking both to migrants who arrive here in small boats, and to local people trying to help the vulnerable and desperate.

Colin Grant is the author of What We Leave We Carry: Migration to Britain, which channels the stories of people – originally from elsewhere – who have collectively shaped and enriched our culture in the UK: from an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire to a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh.

Chaired by Caroline Sanderson