E21: Across Mountains, Land And Sea - Mir Rahimi And Determination - Tawseef Khan - Richmond Town Hall

Presenting his memoire, Across Mountains, Land and Sea, Mir Rahimi describes an extraordinary and true story of hope, courage and survival, of one boys journey across the world to find safety.

Mir was born in Afghanistan and came to Britain in 2001 at the age of 14 years. He entered secondary school for the first time that year with very limited English and a decade later graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His is a truly remarkable story.

In Tawseef Khan's Determination, a fictional work describing another side of the immigrant experience, Jamila Shah is twenty-nine and exhausted. An immigration solicitor tasked with running the precious family law firm, Jamila is prone to being woken in the middle of the night by frantic phone calls from clients on the cusp of deportation. Working under the shadow of the Governments hostile environment, she constantly prays and hopes that their determinations will result in her clients being allowed to stay. In this assured and character-driven debut, we meet the staff of Shah & Co Solicitors, who themselves arrived in the UK not too long ago, and their clients, more recent arrivals all trying to achieve some semblance of normality.

Tawseef is a qualified immigration solicitor and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Liverpool, where he examined the fairness of the British asylum system. He is also a prize-winning graduate of the Creative Writing Programme at the University of East Anglia.