Read

She won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017, then the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Now, Ingrid Persaud brings her most expansive, ambitious work yet. Love After Love has already generated international headlines.

That night I snuck out of the house and walked for half an hour to Ramlet AlBayda. It was the only public sandy shore left in Beirut, courtesy of the warlords who ran the country after the end of the civil war.

Read an exclusive extract from Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, which explores the lives of working class women in contemporary Japan.

Room (n.) … A space that can be occupied or where something can be done. … The first conversation took place in the university Council Chamber seven years ago. A Professor of Literature, the author of many books, was being honoured, although I wasn’t sure exactly why.

Ever wondered what your favourite writer’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.

Here, take my brain, each last lobe … one hundred billion empty neurons … firing, its shocks so blunt, my thoughts disrobed; … bruises and wounds unhidden.

In July 2018, I completed my Master’s degree frustrated that I never located enough material to sustain further study on British-Iranian literature. I found myself reaching over the Atlantic — to North America, where American-Iranian voices were vibrantly circulating in comparison to the UK.

Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian novelist, poet, educator, and former director of the George Town Literary Festival. She has published seven books of poetry and prose:

We spoke to Elizabeth Chappell, Hiromitsu Koiso and Yasuhiko Ogawa – our three guest editors – about curating, compiling and commissioning Wasafiri 102, our special issue on Japan. Wasafiri :

Mieko Kawakami, born in Osaka in 1976, made her literary debut in 2006. She has published nearly thirty volumes of novels, short stories, poems, and essays.

Ever wondered which book your favourite translator would secretly love to translate?

On 7 June 2020, the city of Bristol burst into the international spotlight in a single moment of visual poetry, as protestors armed with ropes and determination did in a matter of minutes what the city had long failed to manage:

It is hard to review a book of such gravitas and importance; a text that refuses the boundaries we were meant to exist within. How to honour the soft liquid rigour, the sharp vast tenderness, of a writer like Saidiya Hartman?

‘BLM organisers call off London event [13th June] to avoid clashes with far right’, the Guardian headline reads on the very evening I’m writing this…

Anasuya lies between the crumpled bedding. Even the slightest touch of the chenille blanket irks her. The cooler spews warm air into the bedroom of their top floor apartment in Bangalore. The walls seem to glow with heat like a tandoor. She kicks the blanket into a ball, pushing it into a corner.

London is now three roundabouts. Each connected, each the same. All roads only lead to or from these roundabouts. No escape. But they’re big. Really big. London is now England and maybe even Europe. No one has settled anywhere, we all just keep driving, searching for somewhere else.

The Onorevole Gaetano Costa, the highest of high-court judges, domiciled in the city of Palermo, was a heavy smoker. His wife Rita did what she could to discourage the habit.

Hina-chan has such beautiful skin, I think as I wash her. Using a linen washcloth I’ve specially ordered to avoid irritating her delicate skin cells, I start from her toes, working slowly up the length of her body stretched out supine in the water.

The last twelve months have been a terrible time for Nigerian literature. First, in March 2019, came the death of Pius Adesanmi in the Ethiopian Airways crash.

When you are interviewed for BBC documentaries in your palace, they will want to know how you met. Cast your eyes downward and tell them how you were a shy and hardworking secretary in the State House typing pool. Omit to mention that you were married. Lie that you were divorced and not looking.

High praise – ‘Dickensian’, ‘A worthy heir to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – and a prize considered a literary rite of passage – the Caine Prize for African Writing, or ‘Africa’s Booker’ – preceded the arrival of Zambian writer Namwali Serpell’s doorstopper debut…

1.1.1 cousin wants the whakapapa … 1.1.2 cousin played reps back in the day … 1.1.3 cousin bringing the leftovers … 1.2.1 cousin baby four on the way … 1.2.2 cousin going up to the tangi … 1.2.3 cousin three jobs pretty busy … 1.2.4 cousin another month of curfew … 1.2.

In a series of brilliant essays written in the 1980s and 1990s, subsequently re-published as Postcolonial Studies. A Materialist Critique (2004), Benita Parry invigorated literary-theoretical debates about the cultures of (neo-)colonialism with her sophisticated Marxist analysis.

My grandfather, or Nana Bhai as we used to call him, always took great pains to make it clear that he was asked to come to Britain in the late 1950s. Post-war Britain needed the workforce – in factories and mills across the country – and it called upon the former colonies for help.