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Hafan Books is a Swansea Asylum Seekers Support solidarity project – all proceeds go to the charity.

Books are available from Lulu.com and bookshops including Waterstone’s (in most cases) or contact t [dot] cheesman [at] swansea [dot] ac [dot] uk

2026: José Cifuentes – Alejandra and Camila and Other True Stories of Refugees in Wales Now.

2026: Bill Bytheway – *Nothing to be Alarmed About**: A Study of Polio in Britain in 1938*.

ISBN: 9781738404940.

2025: José Cifuentes – Croeso Compañero: A Refugee’s Thank You to Wales.

ISBN: 9781738404926. Buy at Waterstone’s. This is the follow-up to the bestselling memoir of José’s youth, Revolutionary Dreams (2016). He was a supporter of President Allende’s progressive vision of Chile. After the military coup in 1973 he became a hunted enemy of the dictatorship. He was lucky to escape with his life to Wales, along with a few score fellow Chileans, only thanks to international solidarity action.

2025: Alun Burge – The Tenderness of a People: Welsh Solidarity with Chile and the Evolution of an Inter\National Consciousness.

ISBN: 9781738404933. Buy at Waterstone’s.

2025: Martin J. White – The Year of the Tiger. Songs

ISBN: 9781738404919 Buy at Waterstone’s

2024: Maxson Sahr Kpakio – I Want to Be… / Corruption / Police Officers are Friends not Strangers : three schoolbooks for Liberia

2023: Poems and stories by women with tales to tell…

Aruni McShane: Of Monitors and Men. Poems and Stories. ISBN 978-1-9160442-9-6. £6.99. Buy from Lulu.com

Aruni McShane is an educator, rights activist and student of creative writing, who has come from a war-torn country in South Asia.

Jon Gower praises Aruni as “an author who can see an often cruel world for what it is, even as she looks penetratingly into the darknesses of the heart. Often brutally vivid and emotionally impactful, these unsettling stories and poems hold the reader in a metal grip. Once started, they simply will not let you go.”

“I was asked to write a poem / in a language / which my mind couldn’t use to / think what I think / and know what I know. / It ran away…” (from “Empty and Troubled”)

Tarh Martha Ako Mfortem: Unbound: Poems 2022-2023. 978-1-7384049-0-2. £6.99. Buy from Lulu.com

Dr T M A Mfortem is a rights activist, researcher, educator and psychologist from a war-torn country in Africa.

Eric Ngalle Charles praises this “gem of a collection. These poems will slice through your deepest fears and lay them bare. Talk about setting the place on fire. Martha’s poems and their integrity shine throughout, and they catch you from the start, leaving no room for manoeuvre.”

These poems condemn the obsessions of world readers and crusade for peace, but also celebrate the kindness of strangers and the beauties of nature: “I claim this liberty / To listen to my bottle sing / As it empties, its music divine…”

2007: Humberto Gatica – The Sand Garden / El Jardin de Arena. Poems and photgraphs.

2003 – 2017: The Refugees Writing in Wales series: books of short texts by asylum-seekers, refugees, and their allies.

#1 Between a Mountain and a Sea (2003)

#2 Nobody’s Perfect (2004)

#3 Soft Touch (2005)

#4 Gwyl y Blaidd – The Festival of the Wolf (2006)

#5 Fragments from the Dark (2008)

#6 Are You Happy With That? (2013)

#7 My Heart Loves in My Language (2017)

2022: Maxson Sahr Kpakio – My Jealous Visitor.

Max Kpakio works in Swansea (Wales, UK) and Liberia as a journalist, community activist and human rights campaigner. His poems and testimony reflect on struggles for justice and dignity, living with the consequences of polio, and the importance of solidarity. ISBN 9781916044289.

2013: Fragments: Transcribing the Holocaust. Testimony by Holocaust survivors Anka Bergman, Terry Farago and Edith Salter (in Cardiff) – transcribed in poetic form by Frances Rapport.

ISBN 9780956947390. Review in THES, Wales Online,

2021: Joseff Williams. Second Home. Photobook. Words: Amber, Bie and Otis, who came to Swansea as asylum-seekers.

ISBN: 9781916044258. Swansea Bay News feature.

2022: Video animation. No Friends But the Mountains: Walking in the Shoes of Kurdish Refugees

A remarkable video by interpreter and storyteller Shahsavar Rahmani and artist and animator Lucy Donald – now on YouTube

On June 23 2022 we celebrated Refugee Week and present in real life videos and books we published doing lockdown:

2021: More Stories: Swansea People’s Multilingual Storytelling Library. Children’s stories + animations; recordings in 15 languages + translations in English. Pandemic lockdown project.

2021: Alhaji Kamara: Afromantic. Poems of Politics and Love.

ISBN 9781916044265. Alhaji’s third collection laments war and injustice in his beloved Sierra Leone and around the world, but (as Gaskin Sanghor Faa-Suku says in his introduction) “the Phoenix symbolism shows the poet is optimistic that our country will rise from all those vices. And his love poems tickle as the poet’s heart skips a beat to his queen!” — Warning – these poems contain Krio, reggae, rap and dancehall!

2016: Eric Ngalle Charles – Asylum. Docu-drama

ISBN: 9780992656492. Based on harsh true life: bare survival in Cardiff.

2018: Eric Ngalle Charles (ed.) Hiraeth Erzolizoli: Wales–Cameroon Anthology.

ISBN: 9780995496668. 36 of the best and brightest poets from 2 countries Eric belongs to. Buy Waterstones.

2022: Maxson Sahr Kpakio – My Jealous Visitor.

2021: Martin White – The Songs of a Wolf. 45 song texts in search of voice and music

ISBN 9781916044272

2020: Rhea Seren Philips – Grandiloquent Wretches.

ISBN: 9781916044234. The 13th and last in the BOILED STRING chapbooks series: Wales-based experimental poetry, edited by John Goodby, 2011-2020.

GRANDILOQUENT WRETCHES

2018: Ismail Kamara – Smile. Poems

ISBN: 9780995496651. Poems from the Netherlands by a refugee from Sierra Leone. ‘Sometimes / in the twenty-first century / while I was weak and thirsty / I couldn’t speak my own language // I could see but I was blind / roaming the streets / of a green desert city / seeking God’s face…’