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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…

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.