Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos, Paperback/Steven Heighton

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION "Combining his poetic sensibilities and storytelling skills with a documentarian's eye, Heighton] has created a wrenching narrative."--2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury "Searing ... the kind of book you won't forget."-- Kirkus Reviews In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY--a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton--alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers--found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified. From the brief reprieves of volunteer-refugee soccer matches to the riots of Camp Moria, Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind. About author(s): Steven Heighton 's most recent books are The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep , a novel that has just been optioned for film, and The Waking Comes Late , which received the 2016 Governor General's Award for Poetry. His work has received four gold National Magazine Awards and has appeared in Granta , Tin House , Zoetrope , London Review of Books , Best American Mystery Stories , Best American Poetry , TLR , and five editions of Best Canadian Stories . His novel Afterlands was cited on year-end lists in the USA, the UK, and Canada, and is in pre-production for film. In 2020 he will publish two books, a nonfiction account of the Middle Eastern refugee influx on Lesvos, Greece, and a children's book drawing on the same events. Heighton is also a translator, an occasional teacher, and a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review .