Kuir Mayem Atem (28), who lives at the Mingkaman refugee camp in South Sudan, as captured by Kieran Doherty for Oxfam
Click here for full Writing.ie article
In anticipation of the upcoming event in which I’ll be participating on Culture Night, 18 September 2015, I’ve written a piece for Writing.ie which discusses the idea of fiction that is inspired by reality, or in this particular case, by a photograph.
The photograph I received was a moving portrait of a South Sudanese refugee taken by conflict and field photographer Kieran Doherty, who was named earlier this year by TIME Magazine as “one of nine Irish photographers to look out for”.
Kuir Mayem Atem, who lives in a shelter in the Mingkaman refugee camp with her husband, their five childen her mother and other siblings, said, “Here we feel safe but it’s tough living like this.”
Since the outbreak of civil war in December 2013, Sudan remains one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises. Over 2 million people have fled their homes, of which over half a million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. To read the article, click here; for coverage in The Irish Times, click here; information on the event itself, you can read my previous blog post here.
Most of all – don’t forget to donate to Oxfam if you can, to actively support refugees like Kuir.
