A panel from Manchester University and the London School of Economics has found that fiction and poetry can be just as good “if not better” than “fact-based” research at helping people understand global issues like poverty and migration, according to a story by Stephen Adams in the Daily Telegraph. Dr. Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute tells the paper that novels should be required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does.” The report — “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge” — cited examples such as Brick Lane by by Monica Ali, which describes the imigrant experience in London, saying it “has arguably “contributed to wider public understandings of global development issues in ways that no academic writing ever has.”