My Fourth Time, We Drowned
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.
This book follows the experiences of refugees, telling a range of shocking and eye-opening human stories. But it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations. The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU’s bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn’t it being widely reported?
At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises.
Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, won the 2022 Orwell Prize, Michel Deon Prize, Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford.
She is currently the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times, and has also worked with VICE News, CNN International, the Financial Times, TIME, BBC, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Channel 4 News, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera and Newsweek, among others.
A law graduate with an MSc in international politics, she has twice sat on the committee deciding the winner of Transparency International's Anti-Corruption Award. In 2019, she was included on the Forbes '30 Under 30' list of media in Europe.