Outlanders

WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO SURVIVE? What sacrifices would you endure for a better life? Would you swim a vast river? Would you trek across a desert or float through a malarial rainforest? How about breaking out of a slave plantation? Boarding a leaky ship? Escaping a siege?



Outlanders is a compilation of ten real-life stories from refugees and asylum seekers, whom the author met while working in the field of refugee resettlement in the US and Ireland. They are old people and young, recently arrived and well established, originating from Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, Somalia, Iraq, South Africa, Bosnia and Palestine.



Outlanders is the first work of its kind to explore the subject from a creative perspective, setting it apart from previous journalistic work available on the subject. The stories are presented in a style that immerses the reader in the journey of the refugee, the sights, smells, sounds they experienced, how it felt along the way. These unique individual narratives are bound together by recurring themes: daily life, the eruption of conflict and the privations endured to escape it. Outlanders offers a glimpse into the lives of the displaced, not through screen or newsfeed, but through the very eyes of those who survived.



Séan Ó Tuathaigh was born and raised in Sligo and has an MPhil in Creative Writing from TCD. Before that course, he taught English in Hanoi, Vietnam. After graduation, in 2016, he moved to the US for 18 months, where he worked as a refugee biographer in a resettlement agency and, following that experience, he wrote Outlanders.