Untitled Book Project

At the Academy, Aikins will work on his book about the global refugee crisis, to be published in 2021 by Harper, based on a journey he made with Afghans. Wars, coups, and crises in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Greece, background the stories of people displaced by conflict and poverty as they follow treacherous routes toward an uncertain welcome in the West. In 2016, one of Aikins’s closest friends in Kabul was rejected by the US Special Immigration Visa program; his paperwork was deemed insufficient, though he had worked as an interpreter for the US Special Forces. Aikins accompanied his friend on a three-month journey from Afghanistan to Europe. The last section of his book takes place in the midst of Europe’s No Borders Movement, a vibrant activist tradition with, Aikins notes, no real parallel in the United States. Aikins plans to explore a number of connections “between America’s war and Europe’s crisis, between literature and policy, and between the stories that together form a common narrative of how we must live together on this earth.”