Read

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:

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.

Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour was founded in 2015 by Rachel Long in response to the lack of inclusion in UK poetry and the academy. It has gone on to foster some of the most talented poets in Britain. Based at the Southbank Centre in London, the collective has read at venues from Tate Modern to Latitude Festival, led workshops at The Poetry School and The Serpentine Galleries, and been featured in The Guardian and on the BBC’s World Service.

Dr James Bradley – an Environmental Scientist at Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on the climate crisis and responds to Robbie Arnott's 'Warmer Waters', published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatches initiative, an essay series of exchanges and conversations between creative writers and academics.

Armed with a BSc (Hons) in Economics from the London School of Economics, and a MA in Global Cinemas from the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), Asim Abbasi is a British-Pakistani film director, screenwriter, and producer.

Wasafiri is excited to announce that we have expanded our global team of editors by recruiting five Editors at Large based in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Aotearoa New Zealand.

In this piece for Global Dispatches, writer Robbie Arnott looks at the continued problem of emissions even during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Watch Jennifer Wong read her poem 'Houhai' on our YouTube channel.

My father chose the flattest stones,   … skimming them out to sea,   … and taught me never   … to walk on a beach   … without filling my pockets   … with pebbles. When was  it   … that he learnt to skim? And who taught him?   … I know small things   … about that boy.

Our winter 2020 issue – Wasafiri 104: Human Rights Cultures – makes space for South-South connections and conversations, focusing on four post-conflict countries – Kenya, Rwanda, Colombia, Argentina – bringing together the literatures that follow in the wake of war.

There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim. ‘Two thousand four hundred ninety-three metres,’ points out Sister Lydwine, our geography teacher.

t here’s  an art to arranging    … bones, laying them together     … by way of size, shape, density,   … to form a human  body;   … y ou need to be careful where the    … sternum crosses the chest or   … the rib cage cloisters sit…

Representing more of the globe than any other prize of its kind, the Queen Mary  Wasafiri  New Writing Prize is opening its doors for 2021 and welcoming work in fiction, poetry, and life writing from unpublished writers around the world.  The prize will remain open from 1 February to 31 May 2021 .

Urfi , I never came to stay. It’s just that it’s no longer as  simple as it was .   Then ,  the plan was straightforward: I was a visitor, just pass ing  through , embracing this land  of dreams  for a year.

L-R: Theresa Lola, Momtaza Mehri, Cecilia Knapp, Caleb Femi … Now in its fifth year, the Young People’s Laureate (YPL) for London is UK poetry’s third most prominent ‘office’, after the Poet Laureate and the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

2020   … We’ve lived in separate boxes in Hackney all this time.   … I pull off the mask that conceals my nose and my mouth. I’m among the trees now, looking for you. Are you on the towpath? I check my phone. No messages.