Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022
Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022
Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022
A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022
The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to
cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.
Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a
message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The
sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in
a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with
hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a
scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck,
defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had
inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic
proportions.
From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant
crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative
journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside
Libyan detention centers, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with
hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found
themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions
in 2017.
It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a
condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of
international standards will echo throughout history. But most
importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the
resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years
fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry
out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that
wants them to be silent and disappear.
