Refugee authors’ views of language in their creative writing

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the way that refugees experience creative writing their resettlement country. In this study, six refugees involved in a creative writing programme were interviewed in a semi-structured format, with the aim of understanding the way that the participants experienced the creative writing process. The interviews initially focused on poetry and short stories by the participants which they had selected for discussion. Following this, the second interviews expanded on themes from the initial analysis of the first set of interview data.

Cet article aborde l’expérience que des réfugiés ont de l’écriture dans leur pays de réinstallation. Dans le cadre de cette étude, des entretiens semi-structurés ont été réalisés avec six réfugiés inscrits dans un programme d’écriture créative, dans le but de comprendre comment ces derniers ont vécu le processus d’écriture. Les entretiens ont porté dans un premier temps sur des poèmes et des nouvelles que les participants avaient choisi de discuter. Dans un deuxième temps, les entretiens suivants se sont penchées sur des thèmes qui sont ressortis de l’analyse initiale des premières données d’entretiens.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• creative writing
• multilingual writing
• researching multilingually
• authors

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank her supervisor, Prue Holmes, for her support both in the writing of this piece and the conduction of the research. The author was forever grateful to her participants and to the mentors of the writing group, for sharing their writing and wisdom with her, and allowing her to work alongside them. This work would not have been possible without the funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, and the support of the other members of the Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State project. The author particularly thanks Naa Densua Tordzro and Julian Danero Iglesias, for their assistance in translating the abstract.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Melissa Chaplin is a doctoral researcher at the University of Durham. She has several years of professional teaching experience and is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne. Her PhD research focuses on the experience of creative writers whose work deals with issues of displacement writing in the UK. In addition to this, her research interests include: multilingual creative writing; researcher and participant well-being; and the ethical implications of working with refugee participants in research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK under grant [AH/L006936/1].