Southbank Centre's Book Podcast: literature and the refugee crisis

In this fourth edition of our literary podcast, recorded in 2018, our Head of Literature and Spoken Word, Ted Hodgkinson spoke with Nick Makola about politics, family, and the poet’s own experience of fleeing Uganda as a child.

We also hear extracts from Khaled Hosseini’s then recent appearance at the Southbank Centre where he discussed his novel Sea Prayer, which is written in the form of a letter from a father as he watches over his sleeping son and charts the dangerous voyage away from their war-torn homeland across the sea that lies before them. The novel was inspired by the images of three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body was washed up on a Turkish beach, three years ago.

‘I connect with that man running from his country and not knowing he has to leave, with tears in his eyes, while he holds his mother’s hand’

Nick Makola, poet, on being forced to flea your homeland