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* … Click here to download a screenreader friendly version of this poem. alice hiller’s Forward Prize shortlisted debut, bird of winter , responds to being groomed and sexually abused in childhood, and finding healing beyond this crime.

Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, her first book, is a collection of remembrances of a girlhood spent growing up in Gaza. Hayek pairs each vignette with a song from a playlist — an artistic choice that echoes the care with which Hayek writes about her memories, which are multi-layered and dreamlike, tender and brutal. In this extract from the book, faded photographs and old wounds drift to the surface of memory as the writer asks what it really means to leave a place behind. 

Earlier this year, Wasafiri was joined by five new Editors at Large based in Southeast Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In the coming months, as part of our new Wasafiri at Large series, each Editor at Large will shed light on their local literary scene. William Tham Wai Liang, based in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, was formerly Senior Editor at Vancouver’s Ricepaper magazine.

In this piece, coinciding with Wasafiri's Water issue, Hana Pera Aoake writes vividly about the many interconnected bodies of water that make up their ancestry, their body, and their future.

In the next essay in our Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches series, novelist CA Davids – writing from Cape Town – tracks the slow, surreal rhythm of days spent indoors watching the world outside unravel. As small violences play out in the news, ‘justice, and the application of justice, does not feel fixed, but shifting.’ A year on, as South Africa enters another fourteen-day lockdown and the same injustices repeat themselves on-screen, Davids brings the hazy patterns of pandemic time, and of injustice, into sharp focus.

Writer and poet Jennifer Wong took up the position of Wasafiri's Writer-in-Residence in November 2020. Six months on, as her residency comes to an end, she looks back on her popular programme of writing workshops that took place earlier this year…

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. Describe your first drafts in one sentence.

in the far-spread ocean solitudes   …     … Hinemoana hides herself so perfectly   … in the fold of the tide   …     … she thinks she would prefer to stay untethered   … so moves from place to place   …     … Hinemoana is a blue hallway   … with no adornments   …     … she is a backlit expanse   …

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.

Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, attended a conference of the Standing Committee on Humanities and Social Sciences (SC-HASS) of the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) in Ushuaia…

For many days it did not snow; the skies were clear and the valley was still. Then it snowed for weeks, a gentle but persistent snow that buried the earth. At first, the snow settled lightly on the land, making the fields shine out in a white brilliance.

‘A raincoat?’ Ettie Pebble’s puffy fingers fumbled with the buttons of the coat. She was talking to herself as she looked at the large white plastic discs looped through their button holes. She was perplexed. Simple actions had become hard. How did that happen? The raincoat was bright yellow.

They were calling it disaster communism. At the meetings they encouraged people to orientate themselves toward ‘the common good’, recognising disaster as an ongoing state of emergency, as the very fabric of the old way. Aude struggled to make sense of the coming days, let alone months and years.

Dimuth’s father had lost his job. He was an accountant, CIMA-qualified, still a few years from retirement; the family had outstanding medical bills and loan repayments on the land in Ragama. Dimuth didn’t know what to do.    … Dimuth told Meena this in the middle of the quad .

After Sabrina Benaim … My house is falling down. It is falling down, but  … slowly.

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.  … Describe your first drafts in one sentence. Surprising, even to myself.

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.  … Describe your first drafts in one sentence.  … I write messy, kind of corny first drafts.

We're excited to announce a new series of free digital events, Transformative Testimonies: Writing and Human Rights, taking place 17 - 23 May, 2021. All events are free to attend. In December 2020, Wasafiri launched issue 104: Human Rights Cultures.

Black is tired. Black would like to make a statement: Black is tired Black’s eyes vacant, arms leaden, tongue can’t taste shit stomach cannot compress death. Black would like to state:

The history of migration in the UK is also a history of food. And the history of British food is also a history of its cities.

‘ I need you, Simi, please call . ’   …   … I message back.  ‘ Working   til  two. Then I’ m all yours . ’   …   … But a t two,  I’m  h ungry .    …   … ‘ I need you. ’     …   … I  ignore  it .    …   … ‘ G ot to be at the doctors before  three.

Writer and curator Kadija Sesay writes about co-curating Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe for The British Library, reflecting on spirituality and storytelling in British-Gambian culture, art as resistance, and bonds between mothers and daughters.

Do you want to submit to the 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry, but you're not sure what 'life writing' looks like? Let Shivanee Ramlochan show you. I began writing poems not because I was inspired, but because I was compelled.

  i. Muladhara If we could reconstruct the temple of our bodies, we all know what we’d change first. A little demolition work in the zone of belly, some gutting around hips and bum, a coat of paint after weather-stripping the face.