Have you always been interested in other people’s stories? What about them interests you?

AP: I always listened much, much more than I talked because I always felt I don’t have anything interesting to say and because usually I don’t have the need to talk. When I truly listen to someone telling me a story, I feel warmth, and the person who’s narrating is my god. I prefer to set up my temples in the margins because that’s where I feel comfortable and I can be myself.

My gods are usually people who are frowned upon, they are gods with scars, they are sinners, they can be unjust, they use ungodly words, but, if you listen, and listen again without judgment, you’ll find their truths, who they really are. The journey of understanding, through stories, men and women who are misunderstood is wonderful, I feel cleansed and more human when the journey comes to an end. For me, listening to people’s stories is an adventure under hard shells of misfortunes and bad luck.

What initially drew you to working with refugees?

AP: The poems of Nikos Kavvadias. Kavvadias didn’t write about refugees, he was a sailor and wrote about the life in the ships and the places he visited, and the people in his poems were strange sailors from all over the world. His poems drew me into wanting to get to know people from different cultures and admire their beauty. Kavvadias’s poems first led me into exploring the lives of the Egyptian men who worked as fishermen in Greece, and later, when I moved to the UK, this exploration led me to working with refugees.

How has your work as lead writer for the Sanctuary project influenced your direction as a writer?

AP: That project influenced the direction of my life. After the project I became a volunteer at a refugee centre, I worked for a refugee festival, then I worked for a charity and lived for two years in a house with young unaccompanied asylum seekers – my job was being their father.

Most of my friends are refugees now, many of whom were participants in that project. I had never thought I would do these things. And then I created this literary magazine, the other side of hope, which is a wonderful journey so far. If that initial project with WEM will influence my direction as a writer, it will depend on whether one day I will stop being lazy and write about all these experiences.

What was your fondest memory from the project?

AP: When we were invited to a poetry evening, an open mic event, and these people with limited English, with trembling hands and tremors in their voices, walked up there, one by one, and stood in front of the audience and read their poems. And their smiles afterwards, the wonderful smiles of people who have done something that they thought they would never be able to do.

the other side of hope is edited by refugees and immigrants with the aim to serve those communities through words. Why do you feel it is important that these communities can shape their own representations?

AP: I don’t like the idea that only the immigrant should write about the immigrant, only black people must write about black people, and so on. Writing is about freedom, and everyone should be able to write whatever they want to write.

One of the reasons that the entire team consists of immigrants and refugees is because we want to prove that we can do things well. We lack opportunities and this magazine gives opportunities: refugees and immigrants learn the editorial side of things, and migrant writing is being published and showcased.

Because we as editors are also writers who write in our second language, I think we are good at understanding writing that comes from people like us, I think we are good at seeing beyond a piece of writing, at what the writer intended to write, and sometimes we can work with them to bring that intention to the foreground.

Being immigrant editors, we also have more understanding in some writers’ need to criticise their own culture. A piece that to you might seem politically incorrect, to us might simply be a writer’s truth and their need to express it.