Nonfiction

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.

When writing about identity, the obvious choice is to take the first person point of view: I am. I remember. I come from. I will be. This is my voice, my story. … But there’s nothing obvious about identity, she thinks.

Often in Young Adult (YA) novels, both physical and mental health issues can be written in a high-school or teenage-centric universe, full of boyfriend-girlfriend issues, dysfunctional or problem-ridden parent-child relationships, broken homes, and sexual abuse.

We walk on wet gravel, following the silver hearse up the hill. In front of me, my eldest cousin. He rests his hand on the boot of the car, his face scrunched with tears. ‘Bentong!’ he shouts. ‘Go back to Bentong!’ In the heat, the car’s fumes curl dark and toxic.

An earlier version of this chapter, September 1939, was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2016. - Chapter 4: A Country at War We were tired and hungry, my sister Hannah and I, as we stood waiting in Littleport Village Hall, waiting to be chosen by someone, anyone.

Ah, Maman! There are your alligator and crocodile shoes, lined up outside the wardrobe. Once in a while, when my mother was in the mood, she showed me the difference in skins, running her expert finger over the striations of black and brown…

Prior to opening Bandi’s The Accusation, I was already filled with immense curiosity and presentiment, the weight of the author’s precarious position pressing heavily upon me.

In the film Flying Blind, a white woman, Frankie, who works as an aeronautical engineer designing drones for the Ministry of Defence begins an affair with a much younger Algerian refugee.

We asked Wasafiri readers to suggest books to add to the English Literature curriculum. Here are the 40 suggestions we received in the order that they were submitted: Closure:

The Return of Postcolonialism and the Dead: Postcolonial Gothic Literature and Hong Kong by Calvin Fung … Writing and artwork in the recently published Wasafiri special issue, ‘Writing Hong Kong’, capture the tense political climate that Hong Kong is experiencing.

It was 3.30pm on a winter’s day. I heard a scream and pushed open the door. The floral curtains were wide open in our bay window. If Dad had been home, the curtains would have been drawn, he didn’t like people to stare in.

Know Your Place is a collection of essays on working class experiences by 22 writers including Kit de Waal, Durre Shahwar Mughal and Catherine O’Flynn.

Bare Lit Anthology reviewed by Dzifa Benson … On the one hand, it’s a shame that a book such as the Bare Lit anthology is necessary.

Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and educated in the UK. She is the author of six books, five novels and a memoir. Three of her novels are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean region.

Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indo-Pakistani writer, playwright, and author considered among the greatest writers of short stories in South Asian history. Here we reproduce one of his letters (translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan) to Uncle Sam i.e. the USA, by kind permission of the Universal Poetries website. 

I’ve known Neel Mukherjee for about eight years. A mutual friend introduced us in Bombay a couple of years after his first novel, Past Continuous, was published in India and had gone on to win the Crossword Book Award for Fiction. When Neel and I met, I was working for ELLE in Bombay.

Olivia Laing is a British writer and cultural critic. She is the author of three books: To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her tale 'The Abandoned Person's Tale' appears in Refugee Tales: Volume II, which is out now from Comma Press.

A review of Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. 

In 2011 I interviewed novelist Anna Lawrence at Pow Wow Festival of Writing. Soon after, she invited me and two other Birmingham writers, Elisabeth Charis and Kit de Waal, to get together to write, as Natalie Goldberg says, ‘with a rounded belly’; WRB was born and we’ve been meeting ever since.

Having been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her novels All the Blood Is Red and Orange Laughter, critically acclaimed author and lecturer Leone Ross returns with Come Let Us Sing Anyway, a raucous, vibrant collection of short stories that rattles along, genre hopping with chameleon-like gusto.