Nicola Kelly ANYWHERE BUT HERE

Anywhere But Here

Each year tens of thousands of people risk their lives to cross the Channel in small boats hoping to find safety in Britain. Yet the very system designed to protect them has all but collapsed.
With unique and unparalleled access, award-winning journalist and former Home Office insider Nicola Kelly takes us behind the scenes of the small boats crisis for the first time.
We follow the under-resourced coastguard overseeing search and rescue operations in the Channel. The decision-makers hired from McDonald’s and Aldi to conduct ‘life and death’ asylum interviews. The immigration barristers securing last-minute reprieves for deportees who narrowly escaped death. And we step inside the Home Office corridors as ministers and advisors respond to emerging crises and scandals, from Windrush to the Rwanda plan.
At its heart are the stories of war-torn arrivals, lone teenagers and trafficked women attempting to settle in cities, towns and villages across the UK. We travel to meet them, exploring where they have fled from and why, and the response of local communities to their new neighbours.
Situated on the beaches and the ports, in the hotels, the courtrooms and the detention centres where the futures of those affected unfold, this is a searing investigation into one of the most urgent issues and shocking injustices of our time.

Nicola Kelly

Nicola Kelly is an award-winning journalist and writer focused on UK immigration and asylum.

Her reporting regularly appears in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, New Statesman, Byline Times and elsewhere.

Before moving into journalism, she was a diplomat, posted to Brussels and Istanbul, with stints in Beirut and Rome and secondments to the No 10 Press Office and the Home Office.

Her reporting has been referenced in several legal challenges against Conservative Home Secretaries, as well as submissions and human rights reports. In October 2023, she gave evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the government’s failed Afghan resettlement schemes, which was drawn upon in the Afghanistan Withdrawal Inquiry and in questioning to Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad.

In 2024 Nicola won the News Media Award at the Scottish Media Awards and she received a special mention at the One World Media Awards for International Journalist of the Year. She also won Best News Story and Best Feature at the Freelance Journalism Awards the same year. In 2022, she was highly commended for Campaigning Journalist of the Year and shortlisted for Freelance Journalist of the Year at the Society of Editors Media Freedom Awards.

Nicola regularly features on the BBC, LBC and elsewhere as a media commentator on UK asylum issues, as well as panel discussions, podcasts, journalism conferences and guest lectures at universities across the UK. She is a mentor at the Refugee Journalism Project, a Fellow of the International Women’s Media Foundation and the European Journalism Fund and a member of both the Frontline Freelance Register and the NUJ.

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