Nonfiction

Young Vic Theatre, London, 6 July - 24 August 2013 ‘You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once’. Science fiction writer, Robert A Heinlein, once wrote. And the Young Vic’s production of A Season in the  Congo, brings this sage expression sharply to mind.

Pedro Serrano has published five collections of poems.

This is an edited extract from the text ‘The Heart of the Moment: An Interview with Alberto Blanco’ which was carried out by Kimberly A. Eherenman. It has been published in parts in The Bitter Oleander and in the magazine Fractal.

2013 was quite the year for African/African diaspora literature.

Sergio Téllez-Pon (Mexico City, 1981) is a poet, essayist, literary critic and editor. His work has been published in various publications and newspapers in Mexico and abroad and translated into English, French and Portuguese.

On 17 April, Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez passed away at his home in Mexico City, aged eighty-seven. He has been described as one of literature’s all-time greats — what of the legacy he leaves behind?

Rotimi Babatunde is the author of the short story ‘Bombay’s Republic’, winner of the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Shiva Rahbaran was born in Tehran. She was eight years old when the last Persian monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, left Iran giving way to the foundation of the Islamic Republic.

Louise Kennedy grew up in Holywood Co. Down. She started writing in 2014. In 2015, she won both first place and runner up in Ambit Fiction Contest, and first place in Wasifiri New Writing Competition (Life Writing).

A tale of two bookstores: Nigerian writing and its growth in the Western world … Sola Njoku talks about the amazing resurgence of Nigerian writing over the past decade and some of the reasons for its success.

The 2013 Caine Prize shortlist in making up for what it lacks in diversity (all five stories are by writers from West Africa), features remarkably relatable and topical themes: faith and disappointment, emigration and homecoming, religion and politics.

Wasafiri is delighted to feature a second exclusive extract from the exciting new anthology Safe House: An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction.

In this piece, written to coincide with the centenary of Attia Hosain’s birth, Ritu Menon and Aamer Hussein, co-editors of a new collection of Attia’s fiction drawn from early and previously unpublished archival material, celebrate her enduring influence today.

The enthusiastic first meeting of the New Beacon Book Club took place on a wet March evening in North London. A group of readers met to discuss Foundations, the first volume of poetry by Trinidadian poet and erudite activist John La Rose.

While herself in the Italian countryside, Selma Dabbagh explores the landscapes and locations of Kamila Shamsie's work, with a particular focus on A God in Every Stone.

Quintessential English classics have, before now, been adapted and re-shaped to tell diasporic and subcontinental stories, some more skilfully than others.

In Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo comes close to pulling off the perfect novel.

There is a time in one’s life for memoirs – for looking back, putting the story straight, opening up the prison of the past, letting things go.

In a Guardian review twelve years ago of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, rather than hailing a fresh ‘voice’ in fiction, I doffed my hat as a fellow Londoner-born-and-bred to a thrillingly acute new ear.

Overall winner and regional winner, Asia: Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanka), Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Random House) Regional winner, Africa: Jacques Strauss (South Africa), The Dubious Salvation of Jack V (Jonathan Cape) Regional winner, Canada and Europe:

How should novelists respond to, or engage with the rapid industrial and attendant cultural and social change which India is undergoing? It is hard to imagine the writer, Anita Desai, thinking, ah, a state of the nation novel is what is required.

Reviewed by Michael McMillan Immigration is a politicised discourse in which immigrants tend to be demonised as aliens, different, strange, even dangerous – read ‘terrorist’ – others, rather than people contributing to the national culture and economy through their skills…

Caryl Phillips’ seventh collection of essays, Colour Me English, revisits the author’s chosen territories of ‘displacement, home/homelessness, race and identity’, as defined by Renée Schatteman, editor of Conversations with Caryl Phillips  (2009). It is a volume heaving with insights…

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2002 with his short story ‘Discovering Home’. He resurfaced three years later with his scathing, satirical essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ (Granta, 2005).