SCATTERED, the making and unmaking of a refugee

305pp., paperback, London, 2024

Journalist Aamna Mohdin on her Somali family’s refugee experience in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

Mohdin spent her early years in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, after her family fled Somalia in 1991 during the civil war. Years of displacement followed, before they arrived in the UK when she was seven years old.

"The only way out of the crisis of exclusion sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean is storytelling ... In so luminously recounting the story of her family Mohdin achieves an imaginative breakthrough that everyone should read" Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Yale University

"An exceptional book: a meditation on family; an interrogation of movement and borders; a reflection on how someone can become separated from their own personal history; and an argument that it is never too late to reconnect with what was lost" Sally Hayden, foreign correspondent and author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned

Aamna Mohdin is the Guardian’s first community affairs correspondent, reporting on the social, political and economic experiences of the UK’s diverse communities, with a particular focus on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. She is the winner of the British Journalism Award 2022. She was previously a reporter at Quartz where she led the publication’s coverage of the European refugee crisis. She lives in London.