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Bulgarian writer Kamelia Panayotova's vivid, sensuous novel excerpt 'Ánne' – translated by Dilyana Kodjamanova – steeps in sunlit village summers, girlhood, and the complicated yearning for a mother figure. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur – translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh – is a magical realist novel exploring the lives of five Iranian women across different social classes as they try to navigate and shirk oppressive patriarchal constraints. The book was banned in Iran shortly after its initial release, then later adapted into a 2009 film directed by Shirin Neshat. Read the novel's opening here.

The prolific fiction writer Madeleine Thien speaks to Jeremy Tiang about her latest novel, The Book of Records, where a young girl takes refuge in a structure called the Sea — resembling the Kowloon Walled City if it were 'adrift in time and space'. There, her life melds with three characters analogous to Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt. The interview further explores Thien's earlier books, her relationships to her characters and stories, grief, and the impact of genocide – in both Cambodia and Palestine – on her thinking and practice. This is an extract from our Spring 2026 issue, Wasafiri 125.

Esther King finds kinship in Argentine British poet Leo Boix's Southernmost: Sonnets about the experiences of migration and living between multiple cultures and languages. She reflects on the 'push and pull of belonging to different places' and how that has shaped her understandings of home, geography, partnership, family, and grief.

Naomi Madlock's poem brings a body with disabilities to a riverbank, where nature's streams of unexpected ruins and treasures – 'a flap of algae', 'domestic waste', 'sunlight/seeping through a porcelain shard' – assemble a sense of wholeness and peace. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Yessica Klein's poems, 'I'd Like You To Meet The Brazilian Sun' and '1989', explore different aspects of Brazilianness with humour, nostalgia, pain, and frustration at once — where the 'Sun always has a joint', but fair governance can feel unreachable.

In Raluca David's life writing piece, colonies of mould settle into her family's various apartments – from the UK to Germany – mirroring a growingly hostile, anti-immigrant atmosphere. This piece was shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Moving between cities, memories, basements, and screens, Kareena Gianani's life writing piece explores what long-distance love can look like in a globalised world — where migration becomes a constant, smartphones shape relationships, and rooms gather meaning the more that they change. Through her own personal narrative, Kareena imagines alternative templates for the ways in which women are allowed to move, work, love, marry, and be. 

Can a group of grassroots campaigners collaborate with a 140-year-old trade union that is resistant to change? In this essay, Martin Reed and Noreen Masud identify the tensions between grassroots activism and established union structures, discussing the challenges to labour activism in the creative industries. They specifically examine the Society of Authors, one of the UK’s largest trade unions for creators, from their perspectives as members of the bookworkers collective, Fossil Free Books. 

Liliana A Romero, a visual artist and DJ from Colombia, speaks to lecturer Amber Lascelles in this extract from Wasafiri 124 on centring Black women in her art, navigating the art world as a Black Latinx woman, the role of activism in her practice, and more. Liliana is also the cover artist for our landmark British Latinx issue.

In this moving fiction by Ariel Florencia Richards, a young woman reflects on the 'cumulative' silence surrounding her transition, and its cold, creeping impact on her relationship with her mother. While contained in the liminal space of an aeroplane above the Andes, the protagonist's mind drifts from the alienation of her Christian childhood to the present. Translated from Chilean Spanish by Beth Hickling-Moore.

In the final entry in our Writing the Self, Writing Berlin series (conceived by Divya Ghelani), Berlin-based journalist Gouri Sharma reflects on Aria Aber's Good Girl (Bloomsbury, 2025), a cathartic bildungsroman of a young Afghan woman living in Berlin. As a reporter and a South Asian immigrant herself – 'a racialised woman caught between worlds' – Gouri explores the book's impact on her own understanding of grief, sexuality, pain, and politics.

We spoke to writer and lecturer Karina Lickorish Quinn and poet Leo Boix about guest co-editing Wasafiri 124: Presencia y Resistencia — British Latinx Writing & Art, which critically explores the vibrancy and creativity of the British Latin American and Latinx communities. They discuss their editorial process, the importance of foregrounding Indigenous languages, structural flaws in the British publishing industry, discovering new writers and hidden gems, plus more.

The AWETHU School of Organising is the first programme of its kind in the UK teaching young people effective methods for political and community organising, while centring Climate Justice and Black Liberation. In this piece, Jess Mally – who co-founded the organisation with Mikaela Loach in 2022 – dives into AWETHU’s origins, methods, and mission, as well as their own journey as an organiser, asserting that our hope and actions must be interconnected as much as our struggles are.

In June 2025, we held a live conversation with R T Samuel and Ruby Hembrom – editor and founder-director from Blaft Publications and adivaani, respectively – two indie publishers championing some of the most exciting and radical work in India's literary scene. The discussion was facilitated by Ananya Mishra and Prerana Kumar, and explored India's contemporary publishing industry, anti-caste expression, science fiction, and promoting Adivasi-Indigenous literary cultures.

This short, heart-wrenching story by Luiza Sauma centres two brothers, Antônio and José — 'a tall, white madman, and a short, dark índio'. The glorious setting of a Brazilian beach in the sunshine belies the pair's hurting pasts.

Read two poems in both Spanish and English from acclaimed Mexican writer Jeannette L. Clariond, translated by Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander from the forthcoming collection Even Time Bleeds.

In this moving tribute – with an accompanying visual travelogue spanning South Africa and Scotland – Kai Easton explores the legacy of late South African writer, Zoë Wicomb, reflecting especially on her relationship to photography.

As part of our Writing the Self, Writing Berlin series, editorial intern Divya Ghelani spoke with Siddhartha Lokanandi, who runs Hopscotch Reading Room, a Berlin-based English-language bookshop he founded in 2017. A haven for the intellectual – and political – bibliophile, Hopscotch is regarded as ‘an outlier of a bookstore’ in both its home city and beyond, for its intentional centring of non-Western, anti-racist, Global South, and anti-colonial perspectives, as well as minor literatures.

Illustrated with her own personal experiences, Nathalie Teitler draws on the work of British Latinx writers Juana Adcock, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Patrizia Longhitano, and Marina Sánchez to explore the physicality of women's writing, migration, (dis)embodiment, pain, and more. This is an extract from the Lead Feature essay in Wasafiri 124: Presencia y Resistencia – British Latinx Writing & Art.  

Wasafiri's Deputy Editor, Vamika Sinha, spoke to Botswana-based writer Lauri Kubuitsile about her novel, The Scattering — a work of historical fiction set against the backdrop of the Herero and Nama genocide and Second Anglo-Boer War in southern Africa. They discussed women's realities during war, Botswana's literary scene, and southern African writing more widely.

We are honoured to publish two new poems – 'Bird' and 'Just A Simple Life' – by Haia Mohammed, a 23-year-old poet from Khan Younis in Gaza, reflecting some of her experiences, pains, and dreams living through occupation and genocide. Haia is part of the first group of scholars to be successfully evacuated from Gaza to the UK. Her debut poetry pamphlet, The Age of Olive Trees, is out now.

Read an exclusive extract from the newly-published anthology, Palestine - 1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba, a collection of Palestinian writing using literary devices typically associated with the horror genre, edited by Basma Ghalayini. Titled 'I Swear, This All Happened', this magical realist short story by Liana Badr is set in a girls' boarding school in Jerusalem. It is translated by Maisa Almanasreh.

Selina Nwulu unpacks the impetus behind her debut essay collection, Black Climates – 'an exploration of climate breakdown through the lens of the Black experience' – where mainstream discourse has inadequately addressed how marginalised peoples are affected by the climate crisis.