Meditations

Esther King finds kinship in Argentine British poet Leo Boix's Southernmost: Sonnets about the experiences of migration and living between multiple cultures and languages. She reflects on the 'push and pull of belonging to different places' and how that has shaped her understandings of home, geography, partnership, family, and grief.

In the final entry in our Writing the Self, Writing Berlin series (conceived by Divya Ghelani), Berlin-based journalist Gouri Sharma reflects on Aria Aber's Good Girl (Bloomsbury, 2025), a cathartic bildungsroman of a young Afghan woman living in Berlin. As a reporter and a South Asian immigrant herself – 'a racialised woman caught between worlds' – Gouri explores the book's impact on her own understanding of grief, sexuality, pain, and politics.

In this Meditations piece, our current CHASE intern Sophia Arnold reflects on her relationship with rivers and water bodies, and the wider environmental humanities, from Cambridge, UK. Woven in is her reading of the 2024 anthology By the River: Essays from the Water’s Edge (Daunt Books), inciting important conversations on how we can better care for our climate.

In this Meditations piece, Anahit Ghazaryan contemplates what motivates people to learn Armenian — and how language itself is lost, reshaped, hidden, questioned. Translated from the Eastern Armenian by Ani Jilavyan, this piece has been commissioned to celebrate Wasafiri 120: Armenia(n)s – Elevation.

Wasafiri’s ‘Meditations’ is a 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.

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.

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.