Where the Water Ends
Seeking Refuge in Fortress Europe
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Seeking Refuge in Fortress Europe
Zoe Holman with Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast
This month marks five years since a landmark deal between Turkey and the European Union that halted the movement of refugees and asylum seekers across the continent. Until then, those who made it to Greece by boat could travel to other countries like Germany but the new policy meant thousands were instead stranded in Turkey, or left to live in refugee camps on the Greek islands.
ABC Radio National BreakfastZoe Holman has carefully documented the varied plight of refugees in Europe in 'Where the Water Ends'
Zoe Holman has documented another instance of Europeans' disposition to pull up the ladder after themselves, to sequester themselves in a privileged, self-protective enclave. She might have added Europeans' handling of the covid vaccine as a coda to her appraisal of European responses to recent refugee flows.
The Canberra TimesAn Australian’s unflinching gaze lights up Europe’s dark side
Athens-based journalist Zoe Holman’s unsettling new book puts a human face on Europe’s protracted and difficult migration crisis. The story is not unknown: it surfaces and then disappears at regular intervals, usually when the camps’ chronic under-resourcing precipitates some fresh crisis – overcrowding, riots, fires, far-right vigilantism – and pushes it back into the headlines.
Financial Review‘The world’s deadliest frontier’ The callousness of the EU border regime
Facing the ‘global refugee crisis’, politicians in Europe and Australia claim they are protecting their countries from the arrival of untold multitudes. Yet the ‘crisis’ is not global but highly specific.
Australian Book ReviewQ&A: Zoe Holman, author of Where the Water Ends
In the extraordinarily detailed 'Where the Water Ends', reporter and poet Zoe Holman traces the journey of asylum seekers from the Middle East to Greece, documenting their stories while placing them within the vast history of how states respond to non-citizens seeking entry. Prioritising migrant perspectives, while scrutinising the system which seeks to control and limit their movement, the book is an urgent and humanist testament of the gruelling and ongoing reality of modern day asylum and marginalised communities, beyond the lurid flickers we see on the news. Currently, Greece hosts more than 150,000 asylum seekers.
Roaring Stories BookshopDisplaced: Sydney Writers' Festival
While the climate crisis and pandemic have – in some respects – heightened our sense of the truly international nature of the challenges we face, the human consequences of global instability are too often overlooked, and the horrors faced by displaced people around the world both taken for granted and invisible.
Sydney Writers' Festival