Escaping Quote by Hisham Matar

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent.…

— Hisham Matar

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.

— Tea Obreht

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

— Alek Wek

Six months after I was born, we moved to Ghana. The first five years of my life were there. In 1982, when there was…

— Bozoma Saint John

I left Cameroon when I was 13 years old, and I've lived more in Europe than Africa.

— Samuel Eto'o

We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn't return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom…

— Mona Eltahawy

I left Zimbabwe when I was 16.

— Dereck Chisora

I lived in Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon when I was very young, until my mother divorced my father.

— Patrick Cox

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

— Sam Esmail

I'm a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United…

— Rana el Kaliouby

I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.

— Yannick Noah

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital…

— Alek Wek