Read

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.

I was in standard six, twelve years old, as thin as an acacia sapling and just as rough. I joined the queue of bloomer-clad girls and waited my turn. The test for making it to our school’s Physical Education team would be a perfect handspring:

I woke up at 4:12am on 27 December and it was gone. It stayed for Christmas and Boxing Day and then just disappeared. It’s not that I don’t know where to find my table, it’s that I don’t know how to find it, and I’ve got to find it because … I can’t quite touch the future without it.

Poet, editor, translator, and art scholar Khairani Barokka speaks to us about translating life, texts that inspire her, and more.

If you've ever read Emily St John Mandel's novel Station Eleven, you may have spent a lot of time recently thinking about Emily St John Mandel's novel Station Eleven. Namely, could it be, is it possible—will it get that bad? If the book is new to you, a brief plot summary from the back cover:

Ellah P Wakatama OBE is Editor at Large, Canongate Books Ltd.; Senior Research Fellow at Manchester University (Centre for New Writing) and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing.

My father hid in the basement … painting uniforms on metal soldiers, his finger tips … rough as bark. I climbed to the top of the cherry tree … to spy on the neighbors while I chewed on pits. Painting uniforms on metal soldiers, his finger tips … cracked from the paint thinner.

Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their novel We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019) was shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and is currently shortlisted for this year's Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Kamau Brathwaite, who passed away on February 4th 2020, is one of the Caribbean’s most influential and original poetic voices.

Our school Debating Society had a lot going for it. For a start, it was a handy refuge during wet weather; once a week we had access to the Lecture Theatre in the warm, dry heart of the school which was otherwise out of bounds during the lunch break.

Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr writes a love poem in praise of the 'confetti endearment': 'habibi'.

James Young is a Northern Irish writer, translator and journalist. His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, and as a journalist he has written for several leading newspapers and websites.

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, published her second collection of poems, Tigress, with Nine Arches Press late last year.

They said history was over. I wanted them … to be wrong. I wanted things to turn. I wanted a world I could find … beautiful on its own, without any … particular good news. I’d never had … a truth that could hold me.

To mark the milestone of Wasafiri’s 100th issue, we invited Alastair Niven to cast an eye over the literary output of the past three and a half decades and pick thirty-five outstanding books from the last thirty-five years. 

They have walked all night … through the desert, this couple: José y Maria … and the baby. duermete mi niño … duermete por favor. Por favor. Their English isn’t great – they’ve got a bit. Yes sir. No sir. Thank you sir. They’ve got that down pat.

Comma Press’s ‘Reading the City’ series has been traversing the globe since 2006, sourcing a selection of ten authors from specific cities to collate ten short stories that depict the social, historical or political essence of their contemporary city.

‘Picong’ is a Trinidadian word for taunting, and this poem addresses the experiences of colourism and cruelty that are so insidious and ubiquitous, not only culturally but within families.