Contributors

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955, and moved to London in 1970. He reviews regularly for The Independent, and is Professorial Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed books, Remnants of Partition and In the Language of Remembering, that explore the human history and generational impact of the 1947 Partition.

Abeera Khan is Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality at the Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London. Her knowledge production and pedagogy are concerned with the interrelatedness between empire, gender, race, and sexuality.

Akila Richards is an award winning poet, writer and spoken word artist, performing and collaborating in the UK and internationally. Her work features in collaboration with artists and genres for theatre, film, visual arts and digital platforms.

Alvin Pang, PhD, is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans three decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English and the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Swedish, Croatian, Macedonian, Chinese, Malay and French.

Andrea is a writer of many things; articles, op-eds, speeches, corporate brochures, and short author bios in third person. The person she identifies with most is Sisyphus, but instead of rolling an immense stone boulder up a hill, her eternity project is writing the novel that keeps slipping away from under her fingers. (She’ll get it one day.) Andrea lives, works and writes in the Middle East.

Angelique Golding is a LAHP Collaborative Doctoral student working with Wasafiri on our 40th Anniversary projects with a focus on the Wasafiri archive, which forms the basis of her research.

Annie Paul (1956, Kerala, India) is editor-in-chief of the online magazine of Caribbean writing, PREE (preelit.com). She is on the board of the National Gallery of Jamaica and has published extensively on art and culture, including a biography of Stuart Hall (2020). Her blog Active Voice is at anniepaul.net and her twitter is @anniepaul.

Annie Zaidi is a multi-genre writer and winner of the Nine Dots Prize (2019) for innovative thinking. Her published work includes Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation, Prelude to a Riot, and Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women's Writing.

Anton Hur is a translator and author working in Seoul. He is the author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books). He was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and raised in British Hong Kong, Ethiopia, and Thailand, but mostly in Korea.

C N Lester is a multi-genre musician, author of the critically acclaimed book Trans Like Me, artistic director of Transpose, and trans feminist researcher, educator, and activist. Words and music at BBC Radio 3 and 4, SBS, The Guardian, and at the Sydney Opera House.

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Claudia Piñeiro has won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A crack in the wall).

Diana Evans is the author of the novels A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a, which was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers.

Durre Shahwar is a writer and Deputy Editor of Wasafiri. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Cardiff University on autofiction and marginalised identities. She is the co-editor of Gathering, an essay anthology of nature writing by women of colour (2024, 404 Ink). Her work has appeared in Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (2017, Dead Ink Books), We Shall Fight Until We Win (2018, 404 Ink), Welsh (Plural) (2021, Repeater Books) and others. Durre is working on her first book of narrative non-fiction, a sample of which was shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize. Durre was formerly a Writer-in-Residence at Wasafiri. Read her story, ‘The Golden Books’, first published in Wasafiri 112: Reimagining Education, which is available to purchase in the Wasafiri shop.

Dushi Rasiah is a Tamil fiction editor and writer from London. Her writing explores cross-cultural relationships, inter-generational family dynamics and diasporic experiences. Her short stories have previously been longlisted for the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award and published by Dear Damsels.

Erin Brady is a self-employed translator who has spent her life moving between places.

Eve Newstead is a writer from Newcastle Upon Tyne, with fiction twice-shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and published in Aayo Magazine. Typically, her writing explores northern identity, class, female mental health and sexual assault. Eve’s shortlisted piece is an extract from her first novel, for which she is seeking publication.

Farhaana Arefin is an editor and organiser based in London. She is a co-founder and co-publisher of Hajar Press and a consulting editor at Hurst Publishers.

Foday Mannah hails from Sierra Leone and currently lives in Scotland, where he is employed as a teacher of English. He holds an MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation from the University of Stirling and an MA with Distinction in Professional Writing from Falmouth University.

Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo.

Franklin Nelson is a writer and editor at the Financial Times. A graduate of the University of Oxford, his work has been published by the TLS and WritersMosaic in the UK, and by Diário de Notícias and the Jornal de Letras in Portugal, among others.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is a writer and teacher living in London. Their recent books include, We, The Heartbroken (Hajar Press) and The Futures of Racial Capitalism (Polity Press). They are working on a book about sex and death.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, journalist, broadcaster and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is an editorial board member of The Nation, a Type Media Fellow and formerly editor-at-large for the Guardian.

Gloria Blizzard is a writer with deep interests in music, dance, science, race, culture, language and spirituality. She brings these perspectives to essays, poetry and reviews of music, dance and film.

Haiyan Xie is an associate professor at Central China Normal University. She received her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Alberta. She has published several essays on Yan Lianke and is now working on her book project, tentatively titled “Mythorealism as Method: Form and Ideology in Yan Lianke’s Fiction.”

Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College.

Haniya Habib was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared previously in Litro and Behenchara Magazine. She currently teaches comparative literature at Habib University in Karachi.

Heewon Chung is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the Institute for Urban Humanities, University of Seoul. Her research interests take up comparative literature and urban culture from the eighteenth century to the contemporary. She has published essays on Samuel Richardson, D A François de Sade, Virginia Woolf, Agnès Varda, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and others.

Henghameh Saroukhani is Assistant Professor in Black British Literature at Durham University. She has published widely on contemporary black British and black Atlantic literatures and is co-editor of a recent special issue on the late Andrea Levy (ARIEL, 2022).

Hilal Chouman is a Lebanese novelist and writer born in Beirut. He has written five novels in Arabic:

Ilya Katrinnada is an educator, researcher, and writer with a geeky interest in the intersections of creativity, community, and culture. Her written works have been published by National Heritage Board (Singapore), National Library Board (Singapore), and Kitaab International, among others.

Ira Mathur is an Indian born Trinidadian journalist and columnist.

A self-taught photographer and a fisherman from the indigenous Orang Seletar community residing in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, Jefree Salim uses photography to document the lives of his people, as well as their ever-changing environmental and cultural landscapes.

Jen Calleja is the author of Vehicle (Prototype, 2023), Dust Sucker (Makina Books, 2023) and the forthcoming critical memoir Goblinhood: goblin as a mode (Rough Trade Books, 2024).

Jess Thayil’s work has appeared in Magma Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Wales, The Seventh Quarry, Black Bough Poetry, PoetryNI, Poetry Ireland Review, The Tangerine Magazine, The Stinging Fly, AbstractMagazineTV, Whale Road Review and Potomac Review with more forthcoming elsewhere. She/They are of South Indian origins.

Born in Manila, Jim Pascual Agustin moved to Cape Town in 1994 and married the Canadian-South African woman he met while travelling in the Philippine North.

Jimin Kang is a Seoul-born, Hong Kong-raised, and England-based writer and journalist now studying environmental theory at the University of Oxford. Her work has previously been published in The New York Times, Asymptote , Off Assignment and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, among other outlets.

José Buera is a Caribbean and Latinx poet from the Dominican Republic. His poetry has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Konch, Magma, Wet Grain, and elsewhere.

Juleus Ghunta is a Chevening Scholar, poet and children’s writer. His poems have appeared in 30 journals. He is the co-editor of two issues of Interviewing the Caribbean journal (The UWI Press), focused on children’s literature and childhood trauma. His picture book Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows was published by CaribbeanReads in 2021.   Photo by Jason Tuinstra on Unsplash

Kaliane Bradley is the author of The Ministry of Time, which was an Observer Best of 2024 debut and has sold in 20 languages to date. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Karthik Shankar is a PhD student in English at the University of Virginia. His PhD project focuses on queer theory and environmental humanities across South Asia and the Middle East. 

Kayte Ferris has been writing on the internet since 2016. In her creative non-fiction she is interested in desire, knowing and emotional experience, exploring fundamental, and unanswerable, personal questions.

Khairani Barokka is a translator, editor, writer and artist from Jakarta, with over two decades of professional translation experience. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards.

Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is a co-convener of the Revolutionary Papers project and author of Crossroads: I Live Where I Like.

Laura Jane Lee is a Hong Kong-born, Singapore-based poet. She is a winner of the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize and various international poetry competitions. Her work has been featured in The Straits Times, Tatler Asia, Poetry London, Ambit, QLRS, and the 52nd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. Laura Jane also works with the Asia Creative Writing Programme, and is Poetry Editor at SPLOOSH. She is also part of the poetry.sg team. Her most recent pamphlet flinch & air was published with Out-Spoken Press in 2021.

Laura Lynes is a writer living in London. Her writing has appeared in publications including Litro Magazine, SAND Journal and Stillpoint Magazine. She has been shortlisted for the London Magazine's Short Story Prize and received honourable mentions in the 2022 Berlin Writing Prize and the 2022 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition. 

Layan Kayed is a Palestinian activist currently pursuing a master's degree in sociology at Birzeit University.

Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), her novels include Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards.

Louis James is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury. In the 1960s he taught at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and published widely in the fields of Victorian, Modern and Caribbean literature.

Madeleine Ballard is a mixed-race writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World, and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is author of three monographs on contemporary African literatures and leads a project funded by the European Research Council on the contours of literary activism on the African continent.

Mahvish Ahmad works on political organising and documentary practices in sites of disappearance, tracing circulating techniques of imperial and sovereign violence, as well as the material legacies of anti-colonial and left movements.

Mailé Nguyen is an academic and Vietnamese-American adoptee based in Chicago. They are pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS University of London. Their research interests are in queer Korean literature, adoptee media, and transcultural consumption of gendered aesthetics.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica.

Marral Shamshiri is a PhD candidate in international history at LSE. She is a co-editor of the book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World (Pluto, 2023).

Maya Jaggi was formerly Literary Editor of Third World Quarterly. She is a well known and highly respected feature writer and lead reviewer on international literature for The Guardian.

Mica Montana Gray, a trainee psychologist and writer, passionately explores life’s diverse stories. Her writing can be found in ‘Postscript’, ‘The Color of madness’ anthology and her poetry collection ‘When Daisies Talk’ which explores her personal experiences of mental health. Presently, she curates a newsletter exploring faith, culture, and wellbeing.

Michael McMillan is a playwright, writer and curator/artist.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her third book of poems is of sirens,  body &  faultiness, (Boiler House Press, 2018). Her creative and critical writing has recently appeared in MAP Magazine, Transgender Marxism, and We Want It All:

Nneoma Kenure is a Nigerian writer interested in the intersections of gender, media and culture. She is currently editing a collection of short stories on everyday epiphanies that change the course of lives.

Nuraliah Norasid is a writer and educator, with a PhD in Creative Writing from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she currently teaches writing and inquiry.

Princess Arinola Adegbite is a poet, performance artist, Author of Soft Tortures, Factory International, Youth Music, and MOBO Help Musicians funded musician and filmmaker from Manchester. Bitez is also a member of Young Identity and The Writing Squad.

Reece Williams is a towering presence on the UK’s northern spoken word and poetry scene. He joined poetry collective Young Identity in 2007, performing across the UK and internationally with the likes of Saul Williams, Kae Tempest, The Last Poets and the late Amiri Baraka.

Roba AlSalibi is a Palestinian researcher at the University of Oxford.

Roz Kaveney is a novelist and poet. Her novel Tiny Pieces of Skull won a Lambda Literary Award in 2016. Her Selected Poems 2009-2020 appeared in 2021.

Sabah Choudrey is a reluctant activist on most things queer, brown, and hairy. Proud trans youth worker since 2014, public speaker, writer, and psychotherapist in training. Interested in the fluidity of sexuality, gender, and faith. Interests also include fostering cats and talking to houseplants.

Sadia Khatri is a writer. Her fiction and nonfiction is often about cities, dreams, gender; walking and poetry; grief and God. She is a filmmaker and translator for Amrit Pyala, a project archiving Sufi and Bhakti poetry in Pakistan. Sadia lives in Karachi, and is writing her first book. Author photo courtesy of the author

Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

Dr Sanah Ahsan is a poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, centering compassion and embracing each other's madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, embodiment and poetics as life-affirming practices.

Saraid de Silva (she/her) is Sri Lankan/ Pākehā and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Among other things, Saraid has been an actor, bartender, theatre-maker, fairy light installer, voiceover artist, and nanny. She currently works as a TV writer. Amma is her first novel.

Shalvi Jaxay Shah is a writer, translator, and critic. Born and raised in Gujarat, India, she now divides her time between New York City and Ahmedabad.

Shere Ross is writer based in the United Kingdom. Her work includes short stories and other works of fiction, which have been shortlisted for several prizes including the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is a winner of BlackInk Writing Prize.

Silvia Rothlisberger is a Colombian journalist and writer based in London. Her work has been published in The White Review, Latin American Bureau, Minor Literature[s], Firmament Magazine, and others. She works in editorial at The Guardian.

SJ Kim is the author of This Part Is Silent (W.W. Norton, 2024). Born in Korea and raised in the American South, she resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Sohini Basak’s first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. In 2017, she received a Toto Funds the Arts award. Based in Barrackpore India, she works as an editor.

Susie Thornberry is a writer, producer, and artistic director. Her creative work has been presented with Battersea Arts Centre, WOMAD, BBC Radio 6 Music, and many others.

Sylvia Angelique Alajaji is a Professor of Music at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile, recently published in Turkish translation. In the spring of 2021, she was the Dumanian Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago. 

Tatevik Ayvazyan is a London-based writer and producer with Rebel Republic Films and the former director of the Armenian Institute. She is the producer of the award-winning poetry film, Taniel, and is currently adapting Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl.

Theodora Danek lives in Vienna. Previously a project manager and managing editor at English PEN, Tilted Axis, and The White Review, she now writes, edits, and solves publishing problems on demand.

Tiffany Tsao is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel The Majesties (originally published in Australia as Under Your Wings) and the Oddfits fantasy trilogy (so far, The Oddfits and The More Known World).

Y-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង) was a deeply loved mother, researcher, writer, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, explored the enduring impact of war, genocide and displacement. She co-directed the short film Easter Epic and organized the exhibition Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later at Phnom Penh's Bophana Center. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 42.

Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.

Zillah Bowes is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies including Wasafiri, Mslexia, The North and Poetry Wales. She has won the Wordsworth Trust Prize and Poems on the Buses Competition, and was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize/AONB Best Poem of Landscape, Manchester Poetry Prize and Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She has received the Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellowship and a RSL Literature Matters Award. Zillah was a Hay Festival Writer at Work and received a Literature Wales Bursary and Creative Wales Award in poetry. She also works with spoken and written poetry as an artist including her film work Allowed, which was listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize and won Zealous Amplify: Environment, and her digital work Gwawr / Dawn, which won Honorable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Visual Art Prize. She was awarded the Future Wales Fellowship 2023-2025.