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Wasafiri is delighted to be launching our new Special Issue, Writing the Balkans, guest-edited by writer and academic Vesna Goldsworthy. As a little taster of the issue, we’re publishing this extract here from acclaimed writer Igor Štiks (translated by Andrew Wachtel).

Natasha Soobramanien Seldom Seen, by Sarah Ridgard Hutchinson, London, 2012, hbk, 256pp, £14.99, 9780091944124, www.randomhouse.co.uk … Set in Suffolk in the 1980s, this wonderful novel is about how our secrets shape us.

Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude topped the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last twenty-five years, according to a survey of international writers specially commissioned by Wasafiri as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009.

Toby Litt Building Stories, by Chris Ware Jonathan Cape, London, 2012, hbk, 246pp, £30, 9780224078122 www.vintage-books.co.uk … Chris Ware must get fairly bored with being called a genius. But I can’t help it – I get more emotion from a single panel of Ware’s than I do out of many entire novels.

On 3 October 2012, to mark the launch of Wasafiri’s Special Issue, ‘Britain and India:

Maggie Gee Out of It, by Selma Dabbagh Bloomsbury, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9781408821305, www.bloomsbury.com … Selma Dabbagh’s pacy, beautifully written first novel Out of It takes you to the heart of life for the young in Palestine today – as well as making viscerally real young (and old)…

Following on from Marius Kociejowski’s contribution to Wasafiri (an interview with Brian Chikwava in issue 67) we interviewed the writer in a special online feature. Marius Kociejowski is a Cheltenham Prize-winning poet, essayist and travel writer living in London.

Daisy Hasan The Collaborator, by Mirza Waheed Viking, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9780670918959, www.penguin.co.uk … Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator focuses on the story of a young Gujjar boy recruited to collaborate with an official in the Indian army in the Kashmir Valley.

Award-winning Pakistani author, Bina Shah's short story, 'Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan', features in issue 65. Bina talks to Wasafiri's Nisha Obano about her writing, her journalism, the influence of Karachi and the growing tension in Pakistan upon her work … Nisha Obano  Bina…

Jay Bernard came to comics via poetry; their first pamphlet, Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2007), was followed by a graphic poem in City State (2009). In the interim, they produced graphic reviews for culturewars.org.uk and penned a strip entitled Budo.

Moniza Alvi Ten:

When Wasafiri turned 25 in 2009, 25 authors were asked to select an influential book from, or upon, the last 25 years. In addition, Wasafiri asked its own Editorial Team and Board what their suggestions might be.

Wasafiri Editor, Susheila Nasta, selected her top ten books for the Guardian in 2009. 'The tragic-comic creation of a black city of words that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens is a must.