My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Irish Book of the Year, Winner of the Orwell Prize and Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022

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This audiobook highlights why, in certain circumstances, nothing can replace the power of the spoken word. Aoife McMahon’s narration is extraordinary, as are the first-person accounts she presents of the lives of refugees in Libyan detention camps and their efforts to escape seemingly unfathomable conditions. McMahon’s delivery is precise and in many ways as haunting as the stories that author Sally Hayden recounts.” — AudioFile Kafka retold… Read this great book shedding light on a monstrous crime.” — John Sweeney, author of ‘Hunting Ghislaine’

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 A book to make me laugh?: They aren’t exactly comedy, but when I’ve travelled to various cities lately, like Accra, Lagos and Nairobi, I’ve read the associated book from the Akashic Noir series. They are collections of crime stories by writers set in their own country and some do contain wry humour.Refugees from across Africa and the Middle East were bought and sold, exploited and abused, and now Europe paid to have them intercepted and detained David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman were also awarded a Special Prize for their entry, The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru. Sophia Parker said:

Your most treasured possession?: My laptop and camera, and various gifts from people I’ve met across the world. 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.

Claire Keegan accepts the 2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in Irish literature, worth €20,000, last month at Listowel Writers' Week My Fourth Time, We Drowned is compassionate, brave, enraging, beautifully written and incredibly well-researched. Hayden exposes the truth about years of grotesque abuse committed against some of the world’s most vulnerable people in all of our names. After this, none of us can say we didn’t know.” —Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland

My Fourth Time, We Drowned is compassionate, brave, enraging, beautifully written and incredibly well researched. Hayden exposes the truth about years of grotesque abuse committed against some of the world’s most vulnerable people in all of our names. After this, none of us can say we didn’t know.” — Oliver Bullough, author of ‘Moneyland’ A wrenching account of what people will endure in search of a better life.” - The Washington Independent Review of Books Sally Hayden (28 September 2017). From Our Own Correspondent (radio). BBC Radio 4 . Retrieved 22 April 2022. My Fourth Time, We Drowned casts light on a dark world that would be only too visible if we cared to look. These are stories that should be heard by everyone.An incredible, heart-wrenching, journalistic look at migration from North Africa to Europe, sparing none of the pain of these people's stories. Hayden's straightforward prose hides nothing, from the awful conditions to the ineffectiveness (to put it kindly) of the UN's aid organizations. Be prepared for everything awful that can happen to a person including torture, rape, and death. Generously sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2022 was judged by Sophia Parker (chair), Director of Emerging Futures and founder and former-CEO of Little Village, Annabel Deas, investigative journalist at BBC Radio 4 and winner of The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2021, Jo Swinson, Director of Partners for a New Economy and former Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Kirsty McNeill, Executive Director for Policy, Advocacy, and Campaigns at Save the Children, and Sophia Moreau, a multi-award winning campaigner and Head of Advocacy at Little Village. Sophia Parker said of Ed Thomas’s winning entry, The Cost of Covid – Burnley Crisis: Good news: We must KNOW what is going on! This is a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa. Investigative journalism at its best. Winner of Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022 and Winner of the Irish Book of the year 2022. 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? This is a brilliant book, powerful and emotional – Sally Hayden is a superb journalist and through her incredible courage and eyewitness testimonies, paints a compelling picture of the poignant and horrific lives endured by so many refugees and migrants. A must read for anyone with a conscience”. — Miriam O’Callaghan, presenter RTE Prime Time

Het is geen verhaal om vrolijk van te worden en het toont nog maar eens aan hoe complex en quasi onoplosbaar dit probleem is. Who do you admire the most?: The older I get the more respect I have for my parents for a myriad of reasons. Further south, refugees from other wars and famines still arrive in Libya at the gates of Fortress Europe, where thousands remain in detention. “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil,” wrote one detained Eritrean refugee, “but by those who watch them without doing anything.” 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. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?: When I was about 16 my mom took me to Top Withins, which is said to be the inspiration for the Wuthering Heights farmhouse. By then, I had read many books by the Brontë sisters.Probably the most important and touching book I’ve read this year… It’s horrific and nobody comes out looking good, least of all us citizens of Europe, who have allowed terrible things to go on in our name.” — Five Books The UN agencies had allowed themselves to be used by the EU, effectively whitewashing a brutal system of violence and torture The treatment of refugees has become one of the most devastating human rights disasters in our history. In this book, award-winning journalist Sally Hayden unfolds a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. My Fourth Time, We Drowned’ is brilliant, hugely important reportage on an ongoing situation many of us try to tune out.” — Marian Keyes