From the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor, William Atkins's new book is a luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - 

'From the heartrending poems of Ovid, banished to the edge of the Black Sea more than 2,000 years ago, to the fragmented modern-day narrative of Behrouz Boochani, written from an Australian ‘migrant detention centre’, displacement and its fracturing effects continue to be perennial themes in world literature. 

As I write in Exiles, ‘One of the reasons stories of exile move us is that they seem to acknowledge the unhealable ruptures in our own lives – separation and loss, bereavement – even if we, ourselves, have never left the village of our birth.’ – William Atkins

William Atkins’s first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and his second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award and the British Library Eccles Prize. He is guest editor of a special travel-writing edition of Granta, and his journalism and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian and the New York Times.