Aidan Szabo-Hall • 13th January 2026

"The uncertainty of so many moving parts made it difficult to cope" | The unique pressures facing asylum-seeking students

Fleeing from conflict, persecution or human rights abuses, young asylum seekers face endless hurdles in their attempts to forge new livelihoods.

Aidan Szabo-Hall • 10th October 2025

What are conditions in asylum accommodations really like?

The Daily Mail, GB News, TalkTV, The Telegraph and The Sun have spent the summer pursuing a hysterical anti-asylum seeker campaign, decrying the long list of ‘asylum freebies’ — including haircuts, PlayStations, iPads and IPhones — granted to those seeking humanitarian protection in the UK. These misleading narratives, which claim that asylum seekers are provided with luxurious, taxpayer-funded accommodations and lifestyles, have garnered significant traction.They have helped fuel the rising lev...

Aidan’s Substack • 27th April 2025

Black Mirror review : Season 7 offers nostalgic reprieve from our dystopian reality

The unsettling, dystopian near-future Black Mirror once inhabited is already upon us. Perhaps that's why this season - arguably the show's most hopeful - looks to the past.

Epigram • 2nd July 2024

Scrutinising UoB’s ‘Reparative Futures’ programme and the decision not to re-name buildings with links to the transatlantic slave trade

Epigram interviewed Vice-Chancellor Evelyn Welch, Dr Marie-Annick Gournet and Alvin Birdi to discuss the university's 'Reparative Futures' programme and the decision not to rename buildings with links to the transatlantic slave trade.

Epigram • 8th June 2024

‘We want to redefine what it means to be state-educated in the UK’ | Sophie Pender on the future of the 93% club, her time at UoB and the reality of the state/private school divide

The 93% club has grown from a single stool at the University of Bristol’s Freshers Fair to become one of the UK’s biggest social mobility organisations. Epigram spoke to its founder and CEO, Sophie Pender, to discuss the future of the charity, her experience at Bristol and much more.

Epigram • 13th April 2024

Spotlight | Mazí Housing Project : The charity helping to rebuild asylum seeker’s lives

Aidan Szabo-Hall learns about the work of Mazí Housing Project, the housing charity helping to establish a sense of stability in the lives of displaced individuals.

Epigram • 14th July 2023

‘I don’t know how they can treat individuals like this’ | Students express fury at delays to degree results

A pandemic, hybrid learning, a cost-of-living crisis and strikes: the 2020-23 cohort of students have had a uniquely diminished university experience. On the 11th of July – the day they were expecting to receive their final results – around 10 per cent of this group were told by the university that their final degree results had been delayed

Epigram • 22nd April 2023

'There's never really a down moment' : The fight against food poverty in Bristol

A record number of UK households are now dependent on food banks, with more people than ever before resorting to their services for the first time. This is a reality that would have once seemed inconceivable for the nurses, teachers, youth workers and shop assistants who are among the 320,000 new first-time users.

Epigram • 1st November 2022

Inside 'Enough is Enough': The opposition to the cost of living crisis

An estimated two-thousand people gathered at Temple Meads on the first of October to voice their opposition to the cost-of-living crisis. Occurring across 45 other locations on the day, a wave of protests - the likes of which have been unseen in the UK since the political and economic volatility of the 1970s - swept the country.

Epigram • 20th September 2022

The cost-of-living crisis is threatening to worsen student wealth disparities

As once-distant fears about the financial impact of the pandemic become tangible, the current economic catastrophe threatens to place students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in a vulnerable position.