1 1

Asylum/Ransomed

Asylum/Ransomed

Breaking the Fourth Wall

By Laura Swart

Asylum features interviews with sixteen Canadian refugees from around the world. The interviews are shaped into a five-act play in the likeness of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to address poignant questions about what is true, what is real. Philosophers, artists, and politicians take the stage alongside the refugees to highlight stories of war, displacement, and being other.

Details

Guernica Editions (Essential Prose Series)

9781771833875

290 pages |

$19.00 USD
$19.00 USD
Sale Sold out
Title

Reviews

Asylum is an enlightening read that challenges us to examine our beliefs about those who are other. Laura has worked with refugees and immigrants in Canada, Asia, and the Middle East for over two decades, and in Asylum, she invites us to walk with her through the pain, the challenges, and the joys of working with displaced people.

Stella Harvey

Swart skillfully parallels nature and human nature in Ransomed, a story with lessons and mirrors in the landscape of the Bow Valley quarry. Rife with challenges to assumptions and invitations to transform, rich in biblical allusions and allegory, this tale teaches, as Mary Jo Leddy says in "Why Are We Here" the first step is seeing refugee as person not issue or other.

Kate Marshall Flaherty

Learn More

Awards

View full details

About the author

Laura Swart has taught academic writing to post-secondary students for over twenty years, encouraging them to find and raise their writing voices. As a novelist and playwright, she was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. She lives in Calgary.