Centring Justice by Sunny Singh

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 121, Professor Sunny Singh speaks about her experiences in navigating three adjacent spaces in the literary industry: creative writing, pedagogy, and publishing.

You can download this full piece for free during the month of April 2025, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 121, available to order now.

This keynote speech was delivered by Professor Sunny Singh FRSL at the Educating Susan: Decolonisation and Inclusivity in Creative Writing Pedagogy and Publishing conference, held at City, University of London, in September 2024. Curated by Dr Deepa Anappara and Farhana Shaikh, this one-day, in-person event brought together writers, academics, researchers, and publishing professionals who spoke about their approaches to decolonisation within creative writing and the broader literary and publishing industry. Through a series of presentations, panels, and talks, the conference highlighted the idea that decolonisation is an ongoing process of power reclamation, one that demands shifting our perspectives rather than simply creating space for marginalised voices within existing colonial frameworks — a practice often mistaken for decolonisation. The latter creates a false sense of achievement, where the inclusion of underrepresented voices is framed as progress, while the underlying structures of power remain untouched. Co-founder of the Jhalak Prize, Singh’s speech drew upon her decades-long work within academia, writing, and the publishing industry. It called for a dismantling of existing creative writing and publishing practices by questioning what we are taught about writing, storytelling, and approaches that favour certain modes of storytelling while marginalising others. Most importantly, it reminded us that decolonisation is not a fixed point, but instead, an ongoing, ever-changing process — one that demands constant reflection and a willingness to challenge and reshape the systems that define our creative and cultural landscapes.

My praxis as an anti-colonial writer and scholar involves something quite simple: every aspect of my work focuses on overturning and undoing as many of the structures we have inherited as possible. A keynote – by its very definition – positions me in a spot of authority. And while it’s a very flattering place to be, it is also a hierarchical and a colonial form of structuring an exchange of knowledge. Instead, I will share some ideas with you, and afterwards we can have an open discussion, because we cannot continue to perpetuate this kind of colonial transmission of knowledge, where a putative expert speaks to a passive audience who must take in what is said and never be able to challenge it. Challenging each other is how we learn and grow, and I believe that it is good anti-colonial practice.

The title of my talk is ‘Centring Justice: Reimagining the Future of Creative Writing, Pedagogy, and Publishing’. During the initial planning for this session, we added publishing to the title because it gives us the space to also mention something else, something very important — that writing is not only a creative act, but also an act of cultural production. This means that I can talk about the ideas that permeate and impact all three spaces: creative writing, pedagogy, and publishing.

My personal journey as a writer and academic informs the evolution of my thinking and praxis and one cannot be separated from the other. When I was twenty-one, I volunteered as an undergraduate student journalist for our university magazine. In my final year, I interviewed a very celebrated author who also headed a major Creative Writing MFA in the United States at the time. This was still in the relatively early days of the MFA. I was just about to graduate and honestly had no idea what I would do next. So, after the interview, I took the opportunity to seek some advice: ‘I really want to become a writer. Should I apply to your programme?’ The writer considered the question, and asked, ‘What do you want to write?’. I replied, ‘I haven’t yet figured it out. But, you know, I will.' She smiled, patted my hand gently, and said something to me for which I’m grateful for every day. She said, ‘Don’t apply to any creative writing MFAs. They will teach you not only how to write, but what to write. Go live. The writing will happen.’

So, I did. I moved countries the day after graduation, worked on three continents, and lived life as fully as I could imagine and manage. In the next fifteen years, I wrote and published three books, numerous newspaper and magazine articles, essays, and even some scholarly work. In 2005, I ended up getting hired as the course leader for a Creative Writing degree in London. At the time, I was living in Barcelona, and I thought of that advice about MFAs from so long ago. Still, I took the job, moved to Britain, and decided that there had to be a better way to teach creative writing; to teach the hows of storytelling without determining what stories could be told.

That is when my journey of building an anti-colonial pedagogy for creative writing began. I walked into the course having never taught or learned creative writing before, but I had a clear sense of what had – and had not – worked for me. And of course, I began by looking for teaching materials. Much of the material I found was focused on style and technique, or how to create characters. There were lots of exercises about developing your craft, along with, a major emphasis on finding your voice. And almost all of it had been written by white Global North experts.

I very quickly understood the words that had remained unspoken – by a fellow woman writer of colour – from that conversation about creative writing when I was twenty-one years old. She had been warning me in the gentlest possible way about what too many creative writing programmes were – and are still – doing. Obviously, this is not true for all programmes, and not every individual within these programmes. However, it became clear quickly that the basic and quite explicit purpose of the MFA is to build and function as a pipeline into publishing. By their very nature, structure, and positioning within the wider academic, literary, publishing, and cultural apparatus, they are pipelines into ensuring hegemonic narratives can be replicated over and over again. Unless we take a clear-eyed and explicit stance, creative writing programmes and pedagogy are ultimately another aspect of the colonial cultural apparatus.

Read the full piece here, free to access and download for the month of April 2025 only.

Image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Girl Reading, 1890. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX, US.