Fiction

Read an excerpt from Chapter One of Shady Lewis's third novel, A Brief History of Creation and Eastern Cairo (Dar Elain, 2021), translated by Katharine Halls. The novel is set in a modest middle-class neighbourhood of the titular city, and its story unfolds over the course of a single day, against the backdrop of real-life events that took place in the 1980s. In this chapter, the narrator introduces us to his home and family members.  

In this short story by Safia El Aaddam – translated from Spanish by Ian Farnes and Layla Benitez-James – a chance encounter with an old friend in a waiting room sets off a chain of memories for the protagonist. To protect themselves from being ridiculed in school, the two girls once concocted new fictional identities for themselves in their childhood — hiding the truth of their migrant and economic hardships. This is an extract from Wasafiri 126: Impossible Returns — The Spain Issue.

In this short story by Emma Oldham, the Australian sun is its own overbearing, brutal character, beating down especially on poorer and Aboriginal communities. The story follows the narrator's relationship to the heat and her complicated, uneven entanglement with a richer white man, who offers both 'pleasure and climactic relief' in his air-conditioned home. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this excerpt from Lee Langvad's novel My Interpreter – translated from Danish by Hazel Evans – an adoptee narrator who lives in Denmark goes for a meal at her biological family's home in South Korea. During the visit, an interpreter must translate between her and her parents. The resulting (mis)understandings, beats, and silences manifest physically in the text's form.

Read an extract from the forthcoming novel Bait by Eugenia Ladra, translated from Spanish by Miriam Tobin. In the small fictional village of Paso Chico, based on the author's own childhood experiences in northwest Uruguay, two protagonists – a thirteen-year-old named Marga and a man named Recio – form a complex relationship that both reveals and unsettles how forms of violence are normalised within small towns across the country, indeed across many other Latin American nations  —'every day without fuss, inconvenience, or even complaint.' This extract is accompanied by a special author introduction.

Read an extract from Meena Kandasamy's new novel, Fieldwork as a Sex Object, where protagonist Amy/Amrita's world begins to reel when a deepfake porno of hers goes viral. As the online world nastily careens into the offline, she reckons with a culture of violent algorithms, digital warfare, rising Hindu supremacy, quick cancellations, and barbed patriarchal structures.

Read an extract from My Own Dear People, the forthcoming novel by Jamaican writer Dwight Thompson, accompanied by a special introduction from the author. The story follows a young man named Nyjah Messado upon his return to Montego Bay — a city that is a vitrine for foreign tourists, yet pockmarked with danger for its local residents. Nyjah is haunted by the memory of witnessing an immense act of cruelty at the elite boys' school he once attended. In MoBay, he meets a young woman named Andrene and is forced to reckon with his own masculinity and actions in a society frequently hostile to women and queer communities. 

In this piece of short historical fiction, Rajiv Ramkhalawan narrates the journey of an unnamed Indian man arriving in Trinidad, where he is forced into becoming an indentured labourer on a sugarcane plantation, subject to vile abuse and violence from 'de white man'. Through the course of the story, we glimpse a portrait of how the approximately 150,000 Indian workers who arrived on the island from 1845-1917 led their everyday lives. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

This short story by Farah Ahamed is set in Uganda in 2005, against the backdrop of a national debate on Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues — a 'foreign', 'feminist' text poised to enter the country, yet already infiltrating its people's politics. The story is written through the point of view of an unnamed Ugandan woman who, influenced by the roiling discourse around the play, reckons with the abusive reality of her relationship and her rights as an African woman.

In this moving short story by Jaden Morton, a young person grows up in rural Norfolk with their family, slowly casting off the alienating binds of boyhood towards a different gender and identity, the eroding coastline an ever-present part of their narrative. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Read an extract from Mieko Kawakami's latest book Sisters in Yellow – translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio – a noir novel set in 1990s Tokyo. The story follows a young teenager, Hana, as she leaves a rough home, opens a bar with three other women, and falls into the city's criminal underbelly. 

Read an exclusive extract from Wilderness of Mirrors, the forthcoming debut by Caine Prize-winning author Olufemi Terry. The novel follows Emil, a young, wealthy Creole who pauses his medical studies to move to the fictional Stadmutter, South Africa. There, he experiences the whirlwinds of young adulthood within a post-apartheid, multiracial city with shifting class and cultural hierarchies.

Bulgarian writer Kamelia Panayotova's vivid, sensuous novel excerpt 'Ánne' – translated by Dilyana Kodjamanova – steeps in sunlit village summers, girlhood, and the complicated yearning for a mother figure. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur – translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh – is a magical realist novel exploring the lives of five Iranian women across different social classes as they try to navigate and shirk oppressive patriarchal constraints. The book was banned in Iran shortly after its initial release, then later adapted into a 2009 film directed by Shirin Neshat. Read the novel's opening here.

In this moving fiction by Ariel Florencia Richards, a young woman reflects on the 'cumulative' silence surrounding her transition, and its cold, creeping impact on her relationship with her mother. While contained in the liminal space of an aeroplane above the Andes, the protagonist's mind drifts from the alienation of her Christian childhood to the present. Translated from Chilean Spanish by Beth Hickling-Moore.

This short, heart-wrenching story by Luiza Sauma centres two brothers, Antônio and José — 'a tall, white madman, and a short, dark índio'. The glorious setting of a Brazilian beach in the sunshine belies the pair's hurting pasts.

Read an exclusive extract from the newly-published anthology, Palestine - 1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba, a collection of Palestinian writing using literary devices typically associated with the horror genre, edited by Basma Ghalayini. Titled 'I Swear, This All Happened', this magical realist short story by Liana Badr is set in a girls' boarding school in Jerusalem. It is translated by Maisa Almanasreh.

Franklyn Usouwa's acerbic short story from Wasafiri 123 is a satire set in an unnamed African country. Through a fictional character named Bobo, Usouwa critiques systems of censorship, repression, unbridled technological growth, and more.

Read an extract from 'Why Does the Cat?', a short story from Bora Chung's latest collection, The Midnight Timetable, translated by Anton Hur, where a man is haunted by the ghost of his murder victim.

Read an extract from Ning Ken's forthcoming novel Tibetan Sky – translated by Thomas Moran – a philosophical work of fiction about a disillusioned academic and the complex history of Tibet.

This melancholic short story by Fatima AlJarman – commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue – traces a daughter and father redefining their relationship in the aftermath of a loss. With an image by UAE-based photographer Adele Bea Cipste.

In the sterile surroundings of a VFS visa application centre in Dubai, an unnamed narrator reflects on her failed marriage, familial and societal expectations, and what freedom means to her. Written by Bhoomika Ghaghada and extracted from Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue.

This exclusive extract from Ana Paula Maia's forthcoming novel, On Earth As It Is Beneath – translated by Padma Viswanathan – enters the world of an unusual penal colony in the wilderness with only male inmates.

Read an extract from Saima Begum's forthcoming debut, The First Jasmines. The novel centres two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, who – around the dawn of Bangladesh as a nation – are captured by Pakistani soldiers and forced to waste their days in a makeshift prison.