Kelly has been called a traitor for leaving her government job to write about immigration. But, she says, something has to be done about the chaos and injusticeOne of the migrants who sticks most in Nicola Kelly’s mind is Parwen, an Iraqi Kurdish mother she met in a camp near Dunkirk. Kelly played with Parwen’s seven-year-old daughter and heard about how, before one attempt to cross the Channel, French police had fired teargas and nearly hit her four-year-old son. Kelly drove away from the camp, and made the crossing – easy for her, with her British passport – that so many people were risking their lives to make. “I was about to go home to my husband and son, warm and safe in a house, knowing that probably their tents were going to be ripped away from them that night, and they’d have to sleep out in the rain and the mud,” she says. “There’s a guilt attached to that. It’s like, I wish I could do more, help in some way, other than just writing, which never really feels like enough.”Kelly’s book, Anywhere But Here, brings such a human and humane perspective to an issue that is politicised and toxic. At the camp, Parwen wished her a safe journey home and, as she was driving away, Kelly spotted some graffiti on a wall which she took for her book’s title – something an asylum seeker might think as they decide to flee, or while forced to survive in a makeshift camp thousands of miles away, but just as easily something people might think about migrants arriving on these shores, or some politicians who wish the issue would go away. Continue reading...