London charity Accumulate has released an "honest, painful and revelatory" book telling the stories of 18 different people and their experiences of homelessness.
Over 160 pages, The Book of Homelessness incorporates collages, illustrations, comics, poems and prose, all created as part of a three-month course organised by the charity.
Through workshops in everything from creative writing to drawing and sequencing, hosted at Shoreditch's Autograph Gallery, Accumulate aimed to allow people affected by homelessness to take control over telling their own stories, on their own terms.
Author Sue Pickford Cheung wrote and illustrated an introductory piece for the book
"When you are excluded and marginalised from society, control is taken away from you," Accumulate founder Marice Cumber told Dezeen. "If you're homeless and living in a hostel, your breakfast is at a certain time, your dinner is on a rota so you can't even choose what you're eating," she added. "You're living on such a small budget that you can't choose to do anything and you don't have a voice. So it was really important to me that this is their story and they have the right to tell it."
Luke Smith contributed a collage about his experiences of homophobia
The result is what Accumulate describes as "the world's first-ever graphic novel created by people affected by homelessness".
Using a range of different mediums, this serves to reveal the multiplicity of experiences,...