Sally Hayden’s heart-stopping account of the plight of contemporary refugees is both a compelling epic and an intimate encounter with exact personal experience. She achieves what all great writing hopes to do—the restoration of humanity to those who have been deprived of it. This is a vital book for anyone who wants to feel what it means to be human in the 21st century.” —Fintan O’Toole, author of The Politics of Pain

Your book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, has now won Irish Book of the Year , the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Michel Déon Prize . For those who haven’t read it, can you describe its subject, explain how it came about and where the title comes from? Does it make you see Ireland in a different light?: Yes and no. So many aspects of humanity are the same wherever you go, but of course there is a lot more privilege in Ireland.

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MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Reading Hayden’s book is like descending through the middle bolgias of the Inferno, except that Dante’s hell does not hide behind a gauzy screen of humanitarian concern…” — The Sunday Times Both Sally Hayden and Claire Keegan have, in very different ways, written gripping stories about things that should alarm us: there are awful truths right at the heart of our societies and systems,” Jean Seaton, the director of the Orwell Foundation, said. “However, in their wit, elegance and compassion, these powerful winning books also help us think about the choices we make, and how to make the future better. Orwell would be proud.”

One of the finest non-fiction books I have read in a long time.” — Matthew d’Ancona, Tortoise Media a b Doyle, Martin (7 December 2022). "Sally Hayden wins An Post Irish Book of the Year award for My Fourth Time, We Drowned". The Irish Times.Rape and torture were endemic, the details so appalling that Hayden wonders how we can even “grapple with the horror of it”. Messages spoke of the trauma of watching family members raped, of women watching their husbands murdered; one man counted 29 people he had seen die. “Hell is better.” Alongside drowning and murder, suicide became common. “Please help,” came one message, “today one person self dead by petrol because hopeless from UNHCR.” Twenty-eight year-old Abulaziz from Somalia had burned himself to death. Without proper reporting we know nothing of our circumstances, yet journalism and journalists are now under threat as rarely before. So treasure this great journalism – forensic, decent and beautifully crafted. Hayden’s powerful book relays the harrowing stories migrants have shared with her from their experiences in various Libyan migrant detention centers, from enduring near-starvation conditions to torture and even death…an accessible, critically reported account…” – – The Washington Post What current book, film, TV show and podcast would you recommend?: I recently read So Distant From My Life by Burkinabè writer Monique Ilboudo: a novel about the relationship between Africa and Europe that could be read as a companion piece to Tayeb Salih’s 1960s classic Season of Migration to the North. I read The Pianist while I was also reading The Fourth Time I Drowned. While both were heavy books, I found these were important to read to honor and understand more of each story and setting: one about the Warsaw ghettos in the 1940s and the other about the Mediterranean refugee migration crisis happening today. Both books provided harrowing accounts of hopelessness, desperation, and survival. The horrors described in Warsaw and Libya show truly the worst in humanity, how people can hold such little regard for human life. I read and processed both books together, drawing parallels and noting differences, so I figured I'd write a joint review on these.

Reading this made me grateful for living in a country with a national health service, freedom and peace (relatively). Heartbreaking stories and so necessary to read. Felt even more of a pang when I read the stories that I have already heard first hand from people I work with and for on a daily basis. One Sunday in the summer of 2018, journalist Sally Hayden received a Facebook message: ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help.’ It was the first of thousands of messages that would be sent to her by refugees seeking sanctuary on the world’s deadliest migration route.

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David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman were also awarded a Special Prize for their entry, The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru. Sophia Parker said: For refugees on the epic journey in search of safety – “the road of death” one Eritrean called it; the “Temple Run” they say in Sierra Leone, after the mobile phone game’s exhortation to “use amazing powers to cheat death” – phones are lifelines. Because of her award-winning investigative reporting on Syrian refugees, one of those hidden arteries found its way to Hayden in her sublet room in London. “Sister Sally,” a man WhatsApped her in 2018 from a Libyan detention centre for refugees, “we need your help.” Everyone should read this book. It's so easy to gloss over headlines of suffering elsewhere in the world, assuming the UN will fix things. What happens when the UN and the EU are the problem? Who solves that? (Or the USA or any major Western power?)