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What changes when activist artists are hosted by other activists, rather than by a conventional art institution in the Global North? In this essay, Marco Baravalle approaches this question through solidarity, a term that recurs throughout the work of Taring Padi, an Indonesian underground art collective formed in 1998 after the fall of the dictator Suharto. The group primarily makes large painted banners for public space. Baravalle examines their continued focus on intersectional solidarity – particularly along lines of class and shared anti-colonial struggles – analysing their previous exhibitions in Venice, Kassel, and beyond.      

Yana Suchikova is the Vice-Rector for Research at a displaced Ukrainian university. In this piece of life writing from our latest Solidarities issue, she writes on the emotional and corporeal experiences of sustaining university teaching during war and occupation in Ukraine — with and without internet, in makeshift shelters, in simultaneous isolation and fragmented togetherness, while displaced and dispersed. Drawing on Boris Vian’s text L’Écume des jours and the 'foam' of their everydays – 'light, sparkling, but short-lived' – Suchikova considers the various 'bubbles' of locality, care, reprieve, freedom, and solidarity she and the students and members of their university create. 

In these two short stories by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem, things are not quite as they seem. In 'Nashwa', a woman wakes up in the aftermath of a street protest with no recollection of her actions. In 'The Old Woman and the Poppies', Nada learns why the poppies surrounding her home are so significant and what they represent for her people and land. Translated from Arabic by Mayada Ibrahim, this fiction is simultaneously disconcerting and grounding — unfolding in medias res, with scenes and imagery that linger long in the reader's mind.

In this short story by Ghadeer Abusneineh, set in a Central American context, the isolation of two neighbours is juxtaposed with the lively happenings of a new bar across the road. Later, we are shown various vignettes of women in the neighbourhood as they go about their daily lives, often intersecting with local men in ways that feel compromising. The story is accompanied by a translator's note from Ibrahim Fawzy, who has translated the story from Arabic. With an accompanying illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.

Saira Ansari anchors this essay in Pakistani artist Ali Kazim's recent Urdu Worlds exhibition and an accompanying publication called the Urdu Qaida/Alphabet Book, which explores the qaida as historically a cultural, social, religious, and political object, beyond its intended function as a pedagogical tool. Along the way, Saira reflects on her own relationship to and memories of learning and speaking Urdu while bringing Kazim's work into conversation with the artist Zarina. She further considers what it meant for each artist to turn to the book form as a way of holding onto a linguistic world.

In this essay, Allison Young examines questions of archival assertion and absence in the art world following 7 October 2023, emphasising the importance of recording, witnessing, and testifying to an ongoing genocide that is simultaneously hypervisible and invisible: livestreamed from social media, yet just as quickly erased at an institutional level. She particularly engages with the work of artists Gabrielle Goliath, Nan Goldin, Mary Hazboun, Ahmed Hmeedat, and Emily Jacir, among others, while reflecting on her positionality as an American of South African and Jewish descent, as well as historic solidaristic action between the global South African and Palestinian anti-apartheid movements.    

Sunnah Khan weaves in her reading of Hajar Press' first anthology in their Elements series, Rage, with her conversations this summer with political prisoner Kamran Ahmed, who is one of the 'longest hunger strikers in UK history'. Ahmed's trial began in September 2026 alongside his fellow hunger strikers, Heba Muraisi and Qesser Zuhrah, and comrades Zahra Farooque and Liam Mullany from the Filton 25 (follow the case here). As Sunnah's fragmented text progresses, it often splinters and soars into poetry. 

Read an extract from Korean writer Kim Bohyun's forthcoming novel Mothersucker (Dead Ink Books), translated by Archana Madhavan — a chilling tale about a grieving mother whose need for revenge transforms the trajectory of her life, along with the detective on her trail. Switching between various female perspectives, the novel offers dynamic, cutting insights into power and bigotry.

Read the winning story from this year's Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, a piece of fiction set in Nigeria and written by Uduak-Abasi Ekong. One day, a mysterious man arrives at a family's door, claiming to be their father returning after long years of absence. But there is great unease about him in the mind of one of his children.

Founder of the experimental Kurdish literature publisher Henar Press, Aryan Omar Hassan, and researcher Hannah Fox are taking on the monumental task of building a database of Kurdish literature in English. Along the way, they have encountered difficulties of classification: where national borders become irrelevant, linguicide lingers, and the way writers identify themselves is complex and varied. In this essay, they outline how they approach building a robust archive and its importance, while wrestling with larger questions of responsibility, identity, and representation.

These new poems by Berlin-based writer Tracy Fuad evoke an overall feeling of entrapment: there is talk of borders, bodies encased within mirrors, rooms the size of a person. Told colloquially, as if recounting events to a friend, these two poems and a triptych are striking in the way they juxtapose banality with evil. 

Poet and Mizna editor George Abraham speaks with queer Arab writers Tareq Baconi and Saleem Haddad on their latest books – Baconi's memoir Fire in Every Direction and Haddad's new novel Floodlines – in this warm, generous interview from our latest issue, Wasafiri 127: Solidarities. Together, they discuss and explore narrative form, memory and archives, writing beyond a Western ethnographic gaze, imperial violence, art as a means of survival, and much more. 

Addressed to the speaker's father, this tender sonnet sequence by George Abraham speaks of forgiveness, regret, longing, and legacy. Comparing their similarities – like 'a mirror that can't be held' – the speaker brings himself into his father's image while also looking beyond, at a relationship with a man who sees him for who he is. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.  

Read an extract from the forthcoming feminist gothic novel, Night of a Thousand Hells, by Intan Paramaditha. Translated by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao, and blending Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism, horror, and political reckoning, this is the first book translated from Indonesian that has been longlisted for a National Book Award. Set across Indonesia, the US, and Australia, the novel follows three sisters, the youngest of whom becomes a suicide bomber. The surviving sisters must then face hidden truths in their family history.  

What will it feel like on the day Palestine is liberated? Our New Writing Prize judge for poetry this year, Mona Kareem, imagines the ecstatic, utopian feeling of experiencing Palestine's liberation at last. At once breathless, hysterical, and raw, the story is both speculative and fantastical, as well as an evocatively mapped future for Palestinian freedom. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe. 

Reflecting on the insufficiencies of public and media attention on what has been termed 'the forgotten war' in her home country Sudan, our International Writer in Residence Safia Elhillo examines how a poet can make themselves genuinely useful to a cause, developing a craft and poetics that is utilitarian and refuses the 'unbearable'. 'Pity', Elhillo argues, is simply 'not a productive, long-term strategy'; the work of 'doing language' requires solidarity that 'calls for imagination and improvisation.'

Upon the release of his seventh collection, Exhibit G, the prolific Palestinian American poet and translator Fady Joudah speaks to Egyptian author and translator Abdelrahman ElGendy – both longlisted for the National Book Awards this year – about the collection’s porous formal boundaries, the politics of the image in Gaza, practising versus performing solidarity, what it means to inherit land and language while both are in the midst of being incinerated, and much more in this rich, extensive interview.  

In December 2025, writer and artist Jay Bernard spoke to the experimental vocalist, composer, and movement artist Elaine Mitchener at the University of Cambridge, following a thirty-minute performance by Mitchener. Accompanied by an introductory note from Bernard, read their discussion on the multidisciplinary nature of Elaine's work, the evolution of grassroots activism, her influences ranging from Jamaican music to 1970s-80s American poetry and rap, sound and improvisation across music and poetics, the ubiquity of the 'archive', and much more. This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

London-based photographer Zeashan Ashraf has been documenting the solidarity movement for Palestine since October 2023, photographing thousands of people across the UK who have come together, again and again, to reclaim public spaces and imperial sites in order to call for an end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine and the British government's involvement in it. In this photo essay, Ashraf shares images he has taken of various protest sites, encampments, and acts of solidarity across the country, while reflecting on his experiences of witnessing and recording these vital historical moments that are still underreported and maligned in mainstream media.  This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

Read an excerpt from Catherine Liu's forthcoming book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, where she explores and challenges how trauma has become a weapon in the culture wars – amid the collapse of liberal politics, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Accompanied by a brief introductory note from Catherine, this extract – from the chapter 'Oprah or the Work of Trauma in the Age of Televisual Reproduction’ – analyses the career of media mogul Oprah Winfrey in light of the trauma script. 

In this essay, Shatha Abd El Latif examines four works of Palestinian life writing: Suad Amiry’s Nothing to Lose but Your Life (2010), Raja Shehadeh’s Occupation Diaries (2013) and Palestinian Walks (2007), and Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (2000). Through her analysis of these texts between the diary and memoir forms, Abd El Latif argues that 'Palestinian life writing offers a critical archive through which the checkpoint can be understood not merely as a geographical site of restriction, but as a temporal and narrative structure that reorganises everyday experience.' This piece is commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

Read an exclusive extract from Laleh Khadivi's new novel Female Life on Planet Earth, in which a woman named Heti's life is upended after her mother's death and an unexpected delivery: a package containing photos of Heti's mother as a veiled young woman in Iran. She is inexplicably shown pointing a machine gun at a group of crying young women. In this excerpted chapter, titled ERUPTIONS, Heti is a silent companion to her cousin Mina's monologue about marriage, immigrant identity, and the comfort of large discount supermarkets.

There is a visceral quality to these three poems by writer and 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, Suji Kwock Kim. They can each be read separately but, together, the images build: dirt, loss, abandonment, poverty, parenting. This drawing together of themes across disparate works demonstrates Kwock Kim's extraordinary talent, particularly as 'Stones' and 'Self-Portrait' are, in fact, loose translations of works by two Korean poets, Hwang Donggyu and Seo Jeong-ju. Read as well an accompanying author's note on Kwock Kim's process.

Weaving in conversations with Vietnamese author Nguyen Binh Phương and publisher Kim Tràn of Major Books, Laura O'Connor does a deep dive into Phương's novel Những đứa trẻ chết già, which has recently been released in English by Major Books as The Young Die Old, translated by Khai Q Nguyễn. O'Connor explores why it takes so long for major homegrown Vietnamese literary titles to reach the Anglosphere, the necessity of incorporating myths and traditions specific to Vietnam in storytelling, and wider orientalisation of Vietnamese-language literature in global publishing.