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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. 

The Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships for 2021-2022 were announced on 2 November, with poets Dzifa Benson, Romalyn Ante, and Jamie Hale each receiving £15,000, and a year of mentoring support dedicated to developing their craft.

In this powerful, experimental personal essay, Elizabeth Chakrabarty writes about her decision to leave academia in order write fiction, and how the traditional narrative arc of a crime novel created space for her recovery.

In honour of Caleb Femi's  Poor winning the 2021 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, Wasafiri is proud to share his poem 'Fisher of Men', which was shortlisted for the 2017 Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

L-R: Caleb Femi, alice hiller, Holly Pester, Ralf Webb and Cynthia Miller … Part of the prestigious Forward Prizes for Poetry, the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection rewards ingenuity, skill, and boldness.

We are excited to announce and warmly congratulate the winners of our 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry. ‘I was very mindful of doing this work for Wasafiri,' said novelist and judge Hirsh Sawhney, of judging the prize.

Ahead of her event on 15 October at Cheltenham Festival, 'The Sunday Times Must Reads: Louise Kennedy', Wasafiri talked to author Louise Kennedy, whose collection of short stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Bloomsbury) was released earlier this year to rave reviews.

We are so proud to join in the congratulations for Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wasafiri Advisory Board member, longstanding contributor, editor and friend, who has won the 2021 Nobel Prize for literature.

S J Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South, and is a Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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.

Fifteen writers across three genres have been shortlisted for the prestigious and uniquely international Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, this year judged by  Hirsh Sawhney  (Fiction),  Christie Watson  (Life Writing), and  Tishani Doshi  (Poetry), and chaired by  Andrew Cowan .

  … A weed:

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson is our new Writer-in-Residence for 2021-22. Read an excerpt from her essay in Wasafiri 107: Crisis/Recovery. I have one or two pictures from the winter of 2006. They’re caged in an external hard-drive, carried around between homes; safe, but out of the way.

In this interview with Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Roy looks back on her decades-long career, and reflects on art and protest, the role of the novel, and notions of 'normality' in a post-pandemic world.  

* … Click here to download a screenreader accessible version of this poem. King Llanza (he/they) is from the Philippines. His poems have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Sledgehammer Lit, bind collective, amberflora, Voice & Verse, SAND and Cordite Poetry Review, among others.

It was my fourth birthday and we were moving into the house that would become our home of twenty years. The heat was arid, and the road — the same road where I’d learn to ride a bike, run races with my sister, walk back from exams down, break up with my boyfriend at the kerb of — was glittering.

Lingering on this tropical esplanade    … I watch at low tide    … the restaurant of mud    … that softly feeds the waterbirds.    … The second day of a Queensland winter    … in a humid, rich June    … as the carriage of the pelican    … rests…