Read

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi landed on the literary landscape with her ‘great Ugandan novel’, Kintu, which won the Kwani?

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.  … Describe your first drafts in one sentence.   … A start. Tell us about your writing rituals.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a poet and writer. His first poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus, was published in 2016 in his native Indonesia. Norman was approached by writer and translator Tiffany Tsao, and the pair then spent three years working together on Sergius Seeks Bacchus (2019), an English translation of the Indonesian collection which went on to win a PEN Translates Award. Norman and Tiffany are working together on translating Tiffany’s English-language novel, Under Your Wings, into Indonesian, and have developed a close, collaborative working friendship. They corresponded by email with Wasafiri’s Emily Mercer.

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.  … Describe your first drafts in one sentence.

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. Electric. Tell us about your writing rituals.

This article is published alongside the publication of Wasafiri Special Issue 98: Queer Worlds/Global Queer. Available to pre-order now.

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. Messy, curious, intuitive, and filled with footnotes.

Ever wondered what your favourite writer’s first drafts look like? Or which book your favourite translator would secretly love to translate? Wasafiri Wonders is a series that asks these questions for you. Describe your first drafts in one sentence. Curious.

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.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … It can’t be. But there it is – my friend Kester’s Throne of Weapons, soldered together from rusting AK-47s. It stands alone on a plinth in a beautifully lit glass case in the African gallery of the British Museum.

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.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … Dear Keith: I'm on Craigslist again. I am angry, ten years ago. And this is Hollywood.

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. Sparse with a sprinkle of amnesia.   … Tell us about your writing rituals.

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.

Image credit: Douglas Perkins … The ramen reminded Tabeko of the cove in which she grew up. She held the sides of the  earthenware bowl and imagined they were the sheer mountains that encircled the bay her family home overlooked, a thousand kilometres away from her apartment in Tokyo.

‘People are trifling, their lives meagre and fleeting. But this, Nana, thinks, is also what makes them loveable.’ … Nana is the central figure in a tightly woven triptych formed in childhood, completed by her older sister, Sora, and former neighbour Naghi.

Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … I’m having a drink on my balcony. The lights from Zürich and surrounding villages coruscate a prism of dreamy colors on the lake. The air is still and there’s no wind.

Image via USFWS … 'Babes in the Wood' was commended in the 2018 Wasafiri New Writing Prize 'Poetry' category. Babes in the Wood … They have almost forgotten their own names, brother clutching sister’s hand. Birds devoured … their trail of crumbs.

Image via APAL on flickr … 'Mountain of the Night' was shortlisted for the 2018 Wasafiri New Writing Prize 'Life Writing' category.

We are living through a super-age of storytelling. Films and TV series, all available to watching online with the tap of a finger, are being produced and released with such proliferation that we don’t have enough hours to watch them all. That should be great news, shouldn’t it?

Over the past six months, as I’ve been the inaugural writer in residence at Wasafiri, I’ve run a series of ‘ask me anything’ sessions with emergent writers seeking to professionalise their work…

Image via State Library of Queensland … 'The Window' was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 'Fiction' category. The morning after election night, she was Big News. The Metro had selected a small photo of her, taken from her Facebook page, smiling with her best smile.

Rain soaks the pages of these two collections, Monsoon on the Fingers of God by Sasenarine Persaud (Mawenzi House: 2018), and Imtiaz Dharker’s Luck is the Hook (Bloodaxe Books: 2018).

Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 in the Life Writing category, Len Lukowski finds solace in the sea while he deals with interruptions from the outside world.