Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City
Edited by Claire Armitstead, Arcadia Books, £9.99
One of the most powerful sentences I have ever read is written by a young Londoner who regarded English as a prison. ‘Did you know the word hate does not exist in the Kurdish language?’ asked Memed Aksoy at the end of a scorching fable about the danger of denying people the right to speak in their own tongue.
Aksoy was a writer, filmmaker and activist whose Story in Three Languages was one of the reasons I agreed to edit an anthology of writing about London. I had heard him read it as part of a Kurdish medley several years earlier, and among the very first challenges I set myself was to track him down.
