According to the agreement with ICORN, each refuge city has to designate a coordinator responsible for the project. What does this role entail? Jasmina Rihar, coordinator for Ljubljana City of Refuge...
Syrian poet Housam Al-Mosilli was forced to flee Syria in 2012 after having been imprisoned and tortured three times. He lived in exile in Istanbul for four years while waiting to find a refuge. On...
Month after month, the Sudanese musician Abazar Hamid submitted his peace and love songs to the government’s music monitoring committee which mostly censored and rejected them. Songs dealing with...
Text: Nicky Armstrong, Christopher Finnigan
March 10 2016
Sweden got its first refuge musician in 2013 – the controversial rapper Khaled Harara from Gaza. In his lyrics, he discusses the political situation in Palestine from a social and humanitarian...
For Iraqi journalist and writer Nawzat Shamdin, the meaning of the word home has come to be redefined during the two years he has lived in Skien, Norway. For over a decade, through his work as a...
For Somali writer Ahmed Mohamed, being gay and writing about it in a strongly homophobic environment became more and more dangerous. Finally, through ICORN, he managed to leave and become Skellefteå’s...
Cuban poet Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was forced to leave his home country in 2013 after having been denounced as a “traitor” to his country and accused of carrying out “counter-revolutionary” activities...
In the vibrant district of Condesa in Mexico City, you find Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl – a house that combines the work of housing persecuted and threatened writers, translating and publishing writers...
There are today 52 cities of refuge around the world. Helge Lunde, director of ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network), the organization that coordinates the world’s cities of refuge for...
The situation for an increasing number of Russian intellectuals became impossible following the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down in Moscow on February 27, 2015. This...
