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On the occasion of the publication of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise on 12 July, our writer-in-residence, Nick Makoha sat down to speak with the author about the book, his working methods and his views on poetry.  … Robinson first published in Wasafiri Special Issue 74 : 'Brighter Suns:

The mind is a warped thing. When I still lived in Uganda, before any prize came my way, before I was published and I wrote in darkness, I looked at the phenomenon of literary prizes in a somewhat peculiar way.

Ever wondered what your favourite writer’s first drafts look like? Or which book they love that nobody’s heard of?

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.

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?

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.

This article is published alongside the publication of Wasafiri Special Issue 98: Queer Worlds/Global Queer.

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.

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.

Ever wondered what your favourite author’s first drafts look like?

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. … ‘Thaba-Bosiu, the Mountain of the Night, has a reputation that it grows higher during the night.’ — Antjie Krog…

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…