Nonfiction

The shortlist of the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2019 has been announced, with five shortlisted writers each in the categories of Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry. The winners will be announced on 9 November 2019 at the British Library as part of our 35th birthday celebrations:

Deirdre Shanahan's debut novel Caravan of The Lost and Left Behind (Bluemoose Books) tells several untold stories of individuals who live in but at the fringes of mainstream British society — those on the roads…

The essay by Amrita Sharma and Peerzada Raouf, and extracted from issue 99 of Wasafiri, is second in a series of ethnographic writings documenting events and practices that make the Kashmiri people’s resistance today.

The 2018 Wasafiri New Writing Prize Winners and Judges. (L to R):

Libita Clayton, ‘BS2-RESIST & REVOLT BLACK HISTORY, LIVE TRANSMISSION’. Image courtesy of artist.

Ashley Hickson-Lovence's debut novel, The 392, is set almost entirely on a London bus over just 36 minutes, and was released in April 2019 (OWN IT!).

On the occasion of the publication of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise on 12 July, our writer-in-residence, Nick Makoha sat down to speak with the author about the book, his working methods and his views on poetry.  … Robinson first published in Wasafiri Special Issue 74 : 'Brighter Suns:

The mind is a warped thing. When I still lived in Uganda, before any prize came my way, before I was published and I wrote in darkness, I looked at the phenomenon of literary prizes in a somewhat peculiar way.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a poet and writer. His first poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus, was published in 2016 in his native Indonesia. Norman was approached by writer and translator Tiffany Tsao, and the pair then spent three years working together on Sergius Seeks Bacchus (2019), an English translation of the Indonesian collection which went on to win a PEN Translates Award. Norman and Tiffany are working together on translating Tiffany’s English-language novel, Under Your Wings, into Indonesian, and have developed a close, collaborative working friendship. They corresponded by email with Wasafiri’s Emily Mercer.

This article is published alongside the publication of Wasafiri Special Issue 98: Queer Worlds/Global Queer. Available to pre-order now.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … It can’t be. But there it is – my friend Kester’s Throne of Weapons, soldered together from rusting AK-47s. It stands alone on a plinth in a beautifully lit glass case in the African gallery of the British Museum.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … Dear Keith: I'm on Craigslist again. I am angry, ten years ago. And this is Hollywood.

‘People are trifling, their lives meagre and fleeting. But this, Nana, thinks, is also what makes them loveable.’ … Nana is the central figure in a tightly woven triptych formed in childhood, completed by her older sister, Sora, and former neighbour Naghi.

Image via APAL on flickr … 'Mountain of the Night' was shortlisted for the 2018 Wasafiri New Writing Prize 'Life Writing' category.

We are living through a super-age of storytelling. Films and TV series, all available to watching online with the tap of a finger, are being produced and released with such proliferation that we don’t have enough hours to watch them all. That should be great news, shouldn’t it?

Over the past six months, as I’ve been the inaugural writer in residence at Wasafiri, I’ve run a series of ‘ask me anything’ sessions with emergent writers seeking to professionalise their work…

Rain soaks the pages of these two collections, Monsoon on the Fingers of God by Sasenarine Persaud (Mawenzi House: 2018), and Imtiaz Dharker’s Luck is the Hook (Bloodaxe Books: 2018).

Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 in the Life Writing category, Len Lukowski finds solace in the sea while he deals with interruptions from the outside world.

By Matthew Lecznar … As societies across the world struggle to adapt to increasingly precarious conditions – conditions produced in part by the polarisation of groups of people along narrow lines…

Reviewed by Leah Cowan 2018 has been a significant year for the visibility of survivors of gender-based violence in the Caribbean.

On 2 July 2018, Makena Onjerika was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing for her extraordinary story ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’. The short story, which was first published in Issue 89 of Wasafiri, is a gritty tale set in the bustling streets of Nairobi.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who died in 2013, was a prolific writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She was born in Germany in 1927, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer. Prawer Jhabvala fled to England with her parents and brother when she was twelve.

Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian-born writer who is the winner of the prestigious 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. 'The Sweet Sop' is a delightful if harrowing account of the impact death and terminal illness can have on family relations.

Photo by Yusuf Wachira … Peter Kimani is a Kenyan writer of fiction and poetry, whose most recent novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, is now published in the UK.