I met Julia, an Australian, in my local café in Montmatre. She was taking some pictures, and we got to chatting. On our first date, she was 2 hours late because she had got off at the wrong station. But I waited for her. Her plan was to travel on to Barcelona, but she...
My father was executed when I was 9. I remember visiting him in jail, walking down this dark corridor and he was at the end of it. He had made me and my brothers necklaces from date seeds. After he was executed, they didn’t give us a gravestone or anything. I remember...
Our whole family came to Australia by boat. Sometimes in Iran, the government ‘disappears’ people and nobody knows where they have gone. Our father had already been harassed a few times, and we were very worried about what might happen next, so we made the decision to...
The part of London that I grew up in was expensive, not great to raise kids in, and of course the weather was terrible. There was also a rise in knife crime and gangs. We had a 5 year old son, and wanted him to have a better life. We decided on Adelaide, because we...
My mother always discouraged me from studying. She said, ‘We are not the ruling class, we are working people, why are you studying? They are never going to give you a job even if you are educated.’ She even burnt my books a few times. She had been married at the...