Article datant du 8 septembre 2015 dans The Guardian : Why fiction can help us understand the Syrian refugee crisis

The award-winning author of After Tomorrow on how stories invite us to explore what people who happen to be refugees are going through, leaving the places they know and becoming strangers in a strange land

Every night, at the moment, we see pictures of people who have risked their lives escaping terrible dangers. Day after day, reporters interview refugees marching through Hungary or arriving in Germany with nothing except what they can carry.

It might seem frivolous to be talking about stories at a time like this. Shouldn’t we be concentrating on the real world? Isn’t fiction soft and sentimental compared with the terrible news we keep hearing about drowning and suffocation?

No, it’s not. Only bad fiction is soft and sentimental. Good stories help us make sense of the world. They invite us to discover what it’s like being someone completely different. They are explorations - for the writer as well as the reader.

Five or six years ago – before the current crisis began – I spent a lot of time reading about Sudanese refugees in Chad. I had no intention of writing a book about them. I just kept thinking, “Suppose it was me? Would I cope as well as they do?” But I couldn’t really imagine their lives in Chad.

​Then one day, instead of thinking, “Suppose it was me?” I thought, “Suppose it was a boy called Matt? An English boy. How would hecope?” And that was the beginning of After Tomorrow, a novel about two English brothers who become refugees in France.

Pour lire la suite : ​http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/sep/08/fiction-refugee-crisis-gillian-cross