Daniel Trilling

On a sound file​ sent to me via WhatsApp, a teenage girl sobs, and an older woman says: ‘Don’t worry, the white people will help you.’ The girl is 17, from a village in Edo state in Nigeria. A family friend came to her house, she says, and asked her parents if they’d like to send their daughter to work in Europe. The friend didn’t say what kind of work she...

Nothing much​ happened on the night bus from Athens to Idomeni. A baby cried, people shuffled in their seats, the driver switched the lights on and told whoever was eating sunflower seeds not to make a mess of his coach. But no one suffocated or drowned; nobody assaulted anybody; no one froze to death or broke down in tears. The ticket agents and the coach owners are entrepreneurs, not people...

Since​ the civil war in Syria began in 2011, more than 12 million people have been displaced by the fighting, 4.1 million of whom have fled the country. The flow of refugees from Syria has been constant, but there have been two great surges in the past four years. The first was in the middle of 2013, when fighting intensified. That was when the Assad regime stepped up its attacks, the Arab...

Roughly​ every other night for the past two months, my phone has rung at around 11 p.m. Most of the time I don’t answer, as I don’t speak any of the caller’s language and he doesn’t speak enough of mine to make the conversation worthwhile. Sometimes, in the morning, there is an answerphone message: a pause, then an Urdu-accented voice saying ‘Hello?’ two...