‘I know the adrenaline of escaping’: Henry Cockburn on turning his time on the run into a refugee rap epic
His Costa-shortlisted first book examined his own schizophrenia, from hospital breakouts to hiding from the police. Now the writer has fed this into Tale of Ahmed, a story in rap verse about a boy fleeing Afghanistan for Britain
Asylum. It is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, either “the protection granted by a state to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” or “an institution for the care of the mentally ill”. Both definitions play their part in the remarkable and original Tale of Ahmed, written in verse and illustrated by Henry Cockburn. Tale of Ahmed is a fictional account of how a 14-year-old Afghan boy sets out from Kabul, after his father has been killed by a warlord, aiming to seek asylum in Britain. By land and sea, through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France, Ahmed and an ever-changing crew of fellow refugees experience all the dangers and disappointments of the road, but also the highs of optimism and comradeship.
Cockburn has had his own very personal experience of being on the run, of being uncertain what might next befall him and where his journey would take him. His previous book – co-written with his father, the journalist Patrick Cockburn – was Henry’s Demons: Living With Schizophrenia. It catalogued what happened in the years after February 2002, when, as a 20-year-old “urged on by brambles, trees and wild animals”, Cockburn plunged fully clothed into a freezing estuary outside Brighton.