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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.

When writing about identity, the obvious choice is to take the first person point of view: I am. I remember. I come from. I will be. This is my voice, my story. … But there’s nothing obvious about identity, she thinks.

Often in Young Adult (YA) novels, both physical and mental health issues can be written in a high-school or teenage-centric universe, full of boyfriend-girlfriend issues, dysfunctional or problem-ridden parent-child relationships, broken homes, and sexual abuse.

The Heavens Also Weep I call it the day the heavens wept. I’d arrived home unexpectedly and there was my father battering my mother on the kitchen floor. Beyond a sensation of heaviness in the pit of my stomach, three things will ever remain clear about that afternoon.

We walk on wet gravel, following the silver hearse up the hill. In front of me, my eldest cousin. He rests his hand on the boot of the car, his face scrunched with tears. ‘Bentong!’ he shouts. ‘Go back to Bentong!’ In the heat, the car’s fumes curl dark and toxic.

Sunday afternoon sweltered hot and rainless.  On the cul-de-sac next to the alligator canal, the humidity shimmered off the black tarmac, giving the neatly-trimmed hedges, palms, and ficus trees a fluid, iridescent sheen.  In his computer room in the white three-bedroomed ranch house…

In That Dream I Became A Stain In My Own House I dreamt that I was bitten by venomous snakes The first was a cottonmouth, In my living room The second a black mamba, In my parents’ bedroom In that dream I became a stain in my own house…

That Summer   We’re lucky we’re not stuck in sweaty New York City like the fathers in their summer suits are every day and the Fresh Air Fund kids in their giveway t-shirts who come down in buses and never get to stay.

An earlier version of this chapter, September 1939, was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2016. - Chapter 4: A Country at War We were tired and hungry, my sister Hannah and I, as we stood waiting in Littleport Village Hall, waiting to be chosen by someone, anyone.

Ah, Maman! There are your alligator and crocodile shoes, lined up outside the wardrobe. Once in a while, when my mother was in the mood, she showed me the difference in skins, running her expert finger over the striations of black and brown…

'Daw' In The Snow.   A bird fell to earth. Black crack in the snow. Moving sharp. Moving slow. Beating out a sky torn track.   It is still, like cold air. Coddled under a tree, hiding in a shallow scrape, of its own making.   Black folds white, folds back. Pressed to the earth. Waiting.

Prior to opening Bandi’s The Accusation, I was already filled with immense curiosity and presentiment, the weight of the author’s precarious position pressing heavily upon me.

‘I bought you something,’ Duncan said, ‘but you can’t love it.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘That’s the rule,’ he said, and he lifted a blanket off his surprise for me, a little mechanical dog. Its tail and ears were furry but the legs were metallic and its torso was smooth white plastic.

In the film Flying Blind, a white woman, Frankie, who works as an aeronautical engineer designing drones for the Ministry of Defence begins an affair with a much younger Algerian refugee.

We asked Wasafiri readers to suggest books to add to the English Literature curriculum. Here are the 40 suggestions we received in the order that they were submitted: Closure:

Fritz told me once,  ‘ Be the sea so that you may receive their polluted streams but not become impure.’ … At Elysians, a secure psychiatric unit for adolescents, our days began by lining up for a tiny paper cup.