The Keys of Babylon

Author shortlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times Short Story Award 2012.

In Albania, Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales, the US, London… people are on the move. Migration and immigration are key issues of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The Keys of Babylon is a collection of 15 linked stories by award-winning poet and author Robert Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe.

These stories of migration reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion. Finally, the stories of each of the main characters come together in the closing narrative, surveying their circumstances on one particular day.

Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952, and now lives in Porthcawl, south Wales. He has twice won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem, as well as the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 2006 for his collections of essays Watching the Fire Eater (Seren, 1995) and To Babel and Back (Seren, 2005). His first novel, Sea Holly (Seren, 2007), was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.