Almost a year has passed since UNHCR published its 2016 report Mapping Statelessness in Sweden, which critiqued Sweden for its lack of an official statelessness determination procedure. In the months that have passed since UNHCR published the report the country’s treatment, as well as general awareness of the issue has remained largely unchanged.

Ethnic, national, religious and linguistic minorities make up a disproportionate number of the world’s stateless population. While statelessness may be attributed to state succession, lack of birth registration or migration, in reality discrimination against these communities plays a crucial role in exposing minorities to statelessness. In Europe, one such group is Roma. Thousands are left stateless and struggling to access key services such as education, healthcare and housing.

We all know that some ten million people around the world are stateless. Often they are reduced to statistics, case files and quotes. Art can be a way to give these people faces. Like Greg Constantine and Anoek Steketee do through photographs, writing a literary non-fiction novel was my attempt to highlight the humanity of stateless people. The novel is a description of a single case, although calling it a case is already a mistake. The story I wrote is the story of a man, a human being, just like you and I.

Stateless people in the UK face enormous hurdles in the road to becoming British citizens. One of those barriers is the extraordinarily high cost of acquiring British citizenship.