Nonfiction

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, essays, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled new writers from all over the globe.

In this piece, Wasafiri’s Writer-in-Residence, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, interrogates the books that have – and haven’t – shaped her.

Twenty-four years after the publication of The Fire People – the 1998 seminal collection curated by Lemn Sissay – comes More Fiya , an anthology of Black British poetry curated by poet and scholar Kayo Chingonyi.

In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, author Irenosen Okojie writes about the initiative that Africans are showing as they fight for community health and survival during the climate crisis. With activists of colour often overlooked in mainstream media, Okojie links her longing for home with an admiration and fierce pride at the innovation of African artists and entrepreneurs working for a better future. Read more Global Dispatches – including Swati Arora on protest, Robbie Arnott on climate, and Margarita García Robayo on Covid-19 and racism – here.

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, life writing pieces, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled new writers from all over the globe.

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 109, Nat Raha, Sabah Choudrey, C N Lester, and Roz Kaveney discuss how in the face of racial capitalism, literature and community can act as a lifeline of connection and creative expression for trans and non binary people.

In the latest of Wasafiri's Global Dispatches series, Dr Swati Arora reflects on CA Davids's essay, answering with a piece that examines India's growing Hindu supremacy, the communal language of protest, and how the state's rhetoric around the Covid-19 pandemic can shore up systems of oppression. 

Wekker reminds us that the struggle for decolonisation is never a short-term, technocratic, or superficial exercise; rather, it goes deeper, as a reckoning with the different ways in which four hundred years of colonialism continue to shape the present. 

In this warm and engaging personal essay, writer Divya Ghelani reflects on the strength and confidence she found by starting a reading group for contemporary novels by BIPOC authors.

In the latest of Wasafiri’s Global Dispatches series, author and academic Barbara Taylor responds to Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s work ‘strangers, dreaming’.

In the latest instalment of the Queen Mary and Wasafiri essay series, Global Dispatches, novelist Katherine Agyemaa Agard writes on dreams, solitude, and touch – both physical and imagined. As lockdowns and safety protocols continue to change the fabric of how we interact with each other – perhaps forever – Katherine examines proximity and distance, and the ways in which the two blur and intersect. 

In this powerful, experimental personal essay, Elizabeth Chakrabarty writes about her decision to leave academia in order write fiction, and how the traditional narrative arc of a crime novel created space for her recovery.

We are excited to announce and warmly congratulate the winners of our 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry. ‘I was very mindful of doing this work for Wasafiri,' said novelist and judge Hirsh Sawhney, of judging the prize.

We are so proud to join in the congratulations for Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wasafiri Advisory Board member, longstanding contributor, editor and friend, who has won the 2021 Nobel Prize for literature.

S J Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South, and is a Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Fifteen writers across three genres have been shortlisted for the prestigious and uniquely international Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, this year judged by  Hirsh Sawhney  (Fiction),  Christie Watson  (Life Writing), and  Tishani Doshi  (Poetry), and chaired by  Andrew Cowan .

Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, her first book, is a collection of remembrances of a girlhood spent growing up in Gaza. Hayek pairs each vignette with a song from a playlist — an artistic choice that echoes the care with which Hayek writes about her memories, which are multi-layered and dreamlike, tender and brutal. In this extract from the book, faded photographs and old wounds drift to the surface of memory as the writer asks what it really means to leave a place behind. 

Earlier this year, Wasafiri was joined by five new Editors at Large based in Southeast Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In the coming months, as part of our new Wasafiri at Large series, each Editor at Large will shed light on their local literary scene. William Tham Wai Liang, based in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, was formerly Senior Editor at Vancouver’s Ricepaper magazine.

In this piece, coinciding with Wasafiri's Water issue, Hana Pera Aoake writes vividly about the many interconnected bodies of water that make up their ancestry, their body, and their future.

Wasafiri’s ‘Meditations’ is a new series that features creative and personal responses to new literature, asking writers to seek connections with themselves, their own work, and the text they’re reading.

Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, attended a conference of the Standing Committee on Humanities and Social Sciences (SC-HASS) of the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) in Ushuaia…

Do you want to submit to the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry, but you're not sure what 'life writing' looks like? Let Shivanee Ramlochan show you. I began writing poems not because I was inspired, but because I was compelled.

Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour was founded in 2015 by Rachel Long in response to the lack of inclusion in UK poetry and the academy. It has gone on to foster some of the most talented poets in Britain. Based at the Southbank Centre in London, the collective has read at venues from Tate Modern to Latitude Festival, led workshops at The Poetry School and The Serpentine Galleries, and been featured in The Guardian and on the BBC’s World Service.

Dr James Bradley – an Environmental Scientist at Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on the climate crisis and responds to Robbie Arnott's 'Warmer Waters', published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches initiative, an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics.