Detention centre inspires novel

6:35am Thursday 21st August 2008

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An author who was inspired to write a novel about immigration after working at Campsfield House detention centre in Kidlington has called for it to be closed down.

Chris Cleave, 35, took a holiday job in the canteen at the centre during the early 1990s, when he was a psychology student at Oxford University.

He was disturbed by what he saw at the centre - and more than a decade on has written the novel The Other Hand in a bid to make more people consider immigration issues.

The story focuses on the plight of a 16-year-old asylum seeker from Nigeria called Little Bee and her efforts to remain in the UK.

Although Campsfield House detainees helped to inspire the novel, the detention centre is not featured in it.

Mr Cleave's 2005 novel, Incendiary, about a fictional terrorist attack on London, was an international bestseller, and he is hoping the follow-up will be a similar success.

The father-of-two spoke out as a hunger strike at the centre, which involved 70 detainees over the past 12 days, came to a close. He said: "I think Campsfield should be closed down as part of a much wider look at how to deal with asylum seekers.

"Albert Einstein and Joseph Conrad were asylum seekers - we should think of asylum seekers as people who can help us rather than being a threat. If you were to show most people what conditions were like in Campsfield then they would join me in condemning it and wanting something much more humane. I am not trying to guilt-trip people, but these centres are an aberration and the system must stop."

Mr Cleave said that if the Government decided it needed to detain asylum seekers, then their applications to remain in the country should be processed in a week, instead of months or years.

The writer said detainees should be allowed to live in "humane conditions that resembled a hotel rather than a prison" and criticised the Government for letting private companies run centres.

Before Mr Cleave wrote the novel, he consulted members of the Campaign to Close Campsfield, to ensure the background to his story was accurate. Recalling his time at the centre, he said: "I was serving this inedible food to people who'd come from Somalia, Eritrea, the Congo and the Balkans - they had fled for good reason."

Mr Cleave paid tribute to the campaigners, including spokesman Bob Hughes, and added: "They are there day in, day out, outside the centre, protesting about the conditions inside. They have been doing that for 12 years.

"After this book I will move on to a new subject, but they will still be there tirelessly campaigning."

Mr Hughes said: "Novelists like Dickens achieved a great deal by moving on discussions about the workhouses.

"Chris showed us the draft of his novel as he was writing it and it would be wonderful if the book changed the level of debate about immigration."

In June, detainees broke out of Campsfield House in the fourth major incident at the centre in 16 months.

The Other Hand is published by Sceptre, priced £12.99.