“OUR native soil never allows us to forget,” wrote the Roman poet Ovid when he was in exile by the Black Sea. For Salman Rushdie, exile is “an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back,” while Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said that although he had two languages, “I forget which of them I dream in.”

If the 21st century is characterised by exile, emigration and violent displacement, what are the implications for poets who must leave their native languages behind? And what language do they dream in?  

Jennifer Langer, the editor of Resistance: Voices of Exiled Writers (Palewell Press, £9.99) brings together in English the voices of 80 writers who have known imprisonment, war, persecution, emigration, refuge and exile in the first two decades of this century.