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In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, author Irenosen Okojie writes about the initiative that Africans are showing as they fight for community health and survival during the climate crisis. With activists of colour often overlooked in mainstream media, Okojie links her longing for home with an admiration and fierce pride at the innovation of African artists and entrepreneurs working for a better future. Read more Global Dispatches – including Swati Arora on protest, Robbie Arnott on climate, and Margarita García Robayo on Covid-19 and racism – here.

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, essays, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled new writers from all over the globe.

In these two poems from Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe's Dylan Thomas Prize-shortlisted collection Auguries of a Minor God, the poet explores her own writing process, and the complex construction of her verse. Together, these extracts and accompanying commentary provide both a unique understanding of the rich meaning that these poems carry, and an insight into her poetic craft. 

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, life writing pieces, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled new writers from all over the globe.

In celebration of Ramadan, read Sanah Ahsan's evocative and rhythmic poem 'ramadan's greeting'.

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 109, Nat Raha, Sabah Choudrey, C N Lester, and Roz Kaveney discuss how in the face of racial capitalism, literature and community can act as a lifeline of connection and creative expression for trans and non binary people.

In this conversation between Wasafiri Writer-in-Residence Jessica Gaitán Johannesson and novelist Daisy Hildyard, both writers reflect on their upcoming books The Nerves and Their Endings and Emergency, and on the way that the climate emergency has affected and shaped their work.

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, essays, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled emerging writers from all over the globe.

Wasafiri is proud to publish the shortlisted works of the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. These poems, essays, and short stories detail a range of emotions and experiences, produced by skilled emerging writers from all over the globe.

In the latest of Wasafiri's Global Dispatches series, Dr Swati Arora reflects on CA Davids's essay, answering with a piece that examines India's growing Hindu supremacy, the communal language of protest, and how the state's rhetoric around the Covid-19 pandemic can shore up systems of oppression. 

Wekker reminds us that the struggle for decolonisation is never a short-term, technocratic, or superficial exercise; rather, it goes deeper, as a reckoning with the different ways in which four hundred years of colonialism continue to shape the present. 

To celebrate the launch of Wasafiri 109, read an extract from Monica Ali's  Love Marriage (2021, Virago Books), a warm and tender novel that examines the ways in which class, race, and culture intersect in contemporary Britain.

Ever wondered what your favourite author’s first drafts look like? Or which book they love that nobody’s heard of? Wasafiri Wonders is a series that asks these questions for you. We spoke with Lola Olufemi, a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London.

Sabba Khan – author of graphic memoir, The Roles We Play – talks to Wasafiri's Sana Goyal about the good and bad days, moving between scales, and flipping things on their head, and her ‘continuous battle to not fall into the representation game’.

Andrés N Ordorica delivers an electric reading of 'In the Name of the Joto, Mariposa, y Maricón' — a joyful prayer and blessing to queer Latinx identity, freedom, and culture.

In this warm and engaging personal essay, writer Divya Ghelani reflects on the strength and confidence she found by starting a reading group for contemporary novels by BIPOC authors.

Download the full text of ‘Representing Anything Limits You, Makes You Smaller' for free until the end of January, or read it in Wasafiri 10 8:

One of the most international prizes of its kind, the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is now open until 30 June 2022. Writers from around the world who have yet to publish a book are invited to submit in the genres of fiction, life writing, and poetry.

Download the full text of 'The Book Smuggler' for free until the end of January, or read it in Wasafiri 10 8: House of Wisdom … When I was a young boy, my grandfather taught me the difference between stars and planets.

[caption id="attachment_22623" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Gulls Flee Sheerwater[/caption] FOREST   … He claimed to have invented the night. This was not Romanticism, which was mainly a question … of translation. Yet she was often mute during their carriage rides.

over        head     billowing …      headscarf       white as surf …                        like    a hug  … billowing like a curtain  …                   or a flag    hanging    like  …             a noose        a mask    like  …        a blanket     a sheet …                   billowing …      …

In the latest of Wasafiri’s Global Dispatches series, author and academic Barbara Taylor responds to Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s work ‘strangers, dreaming’.

Over the last year, Wasafiri’s Publishing Director, Malachi McIntosh (with support by members of the Wasafiri team) has been hard at work designing and recording Craft – a literary podcast featuring a range of international writers, including Daniel Mella, Chen Chen, Bernardine Evaristo…

In the latest instalment of the Queen Mary and Wasafiri essay series, Global Dispatches, novelist Katherine Agyemaa Agard writes on dreams, solitude, and touch – both physical and imagined. As lockdowns and safety protocols continue to change the fabric of how we interact with each other – perhaps forever – Katherine examines proximity and distance, and the ways in which the two blur and intersect.