What do people leave behind when they move to another country — and what memories, relationships and experiences travel with them?
Writer and historian Colin Grant comes to Sheffield to discuss What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain, a collection of stories from people who have made Britain their home.
Grant travelled across the country listening to migrants from a wide range of backgrounds, documenting not only the circumstances that brought them to Britain but the emotional histories carried with them.
These are stories about arriving and beginning again, but they are also about what migration can cost.
Grant explores assimilation, identity, belonging, love and loss, asking how people negotiate the relationship between the place they came from and the place in which they now live.
Rather than presenting migration principally through political debate, the book allows migrants to describe their experiences in their own voices.
That approach makes the event especially relevant during Black History Month, when questions about migration, diaspora, citizenship and belonging are central to understanding modern Black British history.
Presented as part of the University of Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival of Words, the conversation offers an opportunity to listen to the individual lives behind one of the defining stories of contemporary Britain.
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