Kate Owen is the author of the children's novel "Not Just a Refugee".
The story follows a Syrian child, Amira, who is forced to leave Aleppo and live in a refugee camp when war breaks out.
Kate Owen, Author
Not Just a Refugee
About the book
The story of Amira started out as a short story that I wrote when I was a teacher at the International School of Nanshan Shenzhen in China. The students were working on a unit on “conflict”. I wrote a short story about a refugee girl, as a model text for a literacy lesson. When I read it to the students, several of them asked me if I could make it into a longer book, as they wanted to read more about Amira. There were lots of questions about what happened to her next and if she overcame her difficulties.
This idea stayed in the back of my mind, but gathered speed in 2020 during the Covid pandemic. During that time, we left China briefly and were then unable to return to our home there, due to covid restrictions and visa policies. Nine months of uncertainty followed, when we didn’t know if we would ever be able to return (we were lucky enough to return in the end, but some of our friends and colleagues were not so lucky) or whether our jobs would be secure. It was a time of stress and our lives were on hold, but every day I reminded myself that I was lucky to be somewhere safe, with my family, and with the things I needed. I constantly thought about the refugees I saw on the news: how would it feel to be displaced from your home because of a war or catastrophic circumstances? Without a safe place to stay? Without the basics? Without any idea how your life was going to shape up? What if, instead of being treated with kindness after such an ordeal, you were treated with hostility?
I also thought a lot about what life would be like for children who are unable to return to their homes, and I was reminded of my short story about Amira in the refugee camp. I was staying in Athens at the time, a place where we had previously lived for a long time, and where I had seen refugees and wondered about their lives. I started to read articles and websites about people who had had to leave their countries because of war and other disasters. I tried to find out more about refugee camps and what the conditions were like. Gradually, I expanded and fleshed out Amira’s story in my mind and built it up into a novel.
Since 2020, the stories of refugees have become ever more frequent, with global conflicts and instability increasing. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the number of forcibly displaced people in the world in May 2024 was over 120 million. Amira’s story is an attempt to imagine how life might be like for just one of these people.
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