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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.

Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 Poetry Category …   and then i step outside my body the way you leave a house when someone is breaking in   … and in the garden where the gorgons live, the topiary is singing …   and he says…

Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 Fiction Category …  It’s warm in the shop, the window so wide the whole of the street is beside me. But it could be warmer. A dog’s shat, running into the road to the ice cream van and that huddle of school kids and there’s a sleek black car.

By Matthew Lecznar … As societies across the world struggle to adapt to increasingly precarious conditions – conditions produced in part by the polarisation of groups of people along narrow lines…

Reviewed by Leah Cowan 2018 has been a significant year for the visibility of survivors of gender-based violence in the Caribbean.

Where the Weight Catches In the Fat Giraffe shop you find a wooden bucket labelled South China, Antique and you want to laugh: £45 for a night-soil bucket!

Belly Dancer Meets Hilāl as Horseman … Hilāl, you scimitar of fajr-blue spring … above the vast patio … tousled with tendrils thick … as century, as rose-windows raying … a kiss in sujood. Here, arms sprawl … like date palms. Here, I’m falcon than fellahin … serpent than sequined.

On 2 July 2018, Makena Onjerika was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing for her extraordinary story ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’. The short story, which was first published in Issue 89 of Wasafiri, is a gritty tale set in the bustling streets of Nairobi.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who died in 2013, was a prolific writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She was born in Germany in 1927, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer. Prawer Jhabvala fled to England with her parents and brother when she was twelve.

Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian-born writer who is the winner of the prestigious 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. 'The Sweet Sop' is a delightful if harrowing account of the impact death and terminal illness can have on family relations.

Lydia’s new therapist is all corduroy trousers and flat-heeled sandals. Hair pulled back in a ponytail as if it has been slicked with starch. Brown-rimmed glasses that melt into her face. Mousey, as if she doesn’t want to be a distraction to the Healing Process.

From the harbour she looked like a tiny black beetle scurrying up the hill towards the oblivion of the horizon. The sinews in her thighs burned and her fingers were numb from the bags she carried filled with potatoes, yams, breadfruits and acres of cotton muslin.

‘I need to speak with you, meet me at Al Nuaimi Café in 15 minutes’. Helin wiped the sweat from her forehead using the knuckles of her left hand and checked the time on the phone she held in the other.

Parallel to the Learning Centre there was a playing field, lined and oblong and chopped and trimmed with regularity, bordered with hedges and visible through the classroom windows: apart from a patch at the far corner that had a cluster of cottonwood trees.

Illustration by Leyla Reynolds …   I began to drown.   It will not be news to you That the little mermaid is a black girl.   If you’re honest You knew this all along. Who else is made to sell Her tongue for passage?

Nineteen days of rain – unprecedented, they said – and I could hardly tell it was morning. E, my youngest, was screaming and had me up for four hours the previous night, so I switched her off, laid her on the bed and gently closed the door. The silence a soft blanket around me.

Photo by Yusuf Wachira … Peter Kimani is a Kenyan writer of fiction and poetry, whose most recent novel, Dance of the Jakaranda, is now published in the UK.