Geoffrey Chaucer gave us, in the 14th century, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale. More than 600 years later, authors including Ali Smith, Chris Cleave and Marina Lewycka have come together to write a modern version of The Canterbury Tales, working with refugees in Britain to tell their stories in a forthcoming anthology.

Out on 23 June from Manchester independent publisher Comma Press, Refugee Tales features stories including Cleave’s The Lorry Driver’s Tale, Smith’s The Detainee’s Tale, Lewycka’s The Dependant’s Tale and Patience Agbabi’s The Refugee’s Tale. It stems from refugee charity the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, which sends volunteers into the two detention centres at Gatwick airport to speak to the hundreds of people who are held there.

How badly we need English / To be made sweet again David Herd

“The visiting is incredibly successful, but what people in detainment repeatedly said to us was that they wanted their stories to be told – that they felt the general population was unaware of what detention is like, including the fact that it’s indefinite,” said the charity’s Anna Pincus. “They don’t feel safe enough to share their stories themselves … but they have a tremendous frustration at being voiceless. So we came up with the idea of using The Canterbury Tales as a model of journeying and showing their stories.”

“This prologue is not a poem / It is an act of welcome / It announces / That people present / Reject the terms / Of a debate that criminalises / Human movement,” the collection opens, in a poem from David Herd. “To make his English sweete. / That’s why Chaucer told his tales. / How badly we need English / To be made sweet again.”

The charity paired writers with refugees, and organised a walk last summer from Dover to Crawley – “essentially from the detainment camp at Dover to the detainment camp at Gatwick”, said Pincus. The writers read their tales at public events every evening, to “packed” halls, with the tales now collected by Comma Press, which said it offers “rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering”.

In The Detainee’s Tale, Smith writes of a man who escaped a life of slavery in Ghana, to then become a victim of human trafficking to the UK. He spends five years working for the traffickers in the UK – “They tell you it’s cost them a great deal of money to bring you here. They say you’ll be working till you’ve paid it all back ... Room, van, warehouse. Warehouse, van, room. Five years. Most weeks all week, 18 hours a day. You sit in silence, now, with me. You hold your head in your hands.”

When he contacts the Home Office, he is put in prison for six months, and then in detention. “On that train home, and all these weeks and months later, I’ll still be thinking of the only flash of anger in the whole of your telling me a little of what’s happened to you in this life so far ... Except for this one moment you’re calm, accepting, even forgiving – but for these six syllables, six words, that carry the weight of a planet, weight of the earth,” Smith writes. “But when I came to this place, when I came to your country, you say. I sit forward. I’m listening. You shake your head. I thought you would help me, you say.”

The walk will be repeated next month, from Canterbury to London, with authors including Jackie Kay and Kamila Shamsie contributing to a fresh round of tales. The pilgrimage will culminate with a series of events in London, including Jeremy Irons’ reading of Shakespeare’s “Thomas More’s appeal for mercy in the treatment of refugees” on the Southbank, and a performance featuring Billy Bragg, Ben Okri, Smith and others at the ICA.

“We hear so many of the wrong words about refugees – ugly, limiting, unimaginative words – that it feels like a gift to find here so many of the right words which allow us to better understand the lives around us, and our own lives too,” said Shamsie of the upcoming Refugee Tales. Shami Chakrabarti, former director of the campaign group Liberty, called it “a wonderful way of rehumanising some of the most vulnerable and demonised people on the planet”.