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Amid rising fascism and anti-Muslim sentiment in India, this essay by Anu Khosla examines three recent books – Quarterlife by Devika Rege, Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal, and Zara Chowdhary's The Lucky Ones – and their depictions of the seeping, violent ideologies of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. This is an extract from our Spring 2026 issue, Wasafiri 125.

Indian novelist Santanu Bhattacharya is the Fiction judge for the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. In this essay, he shares his guidance on staying true to the global majority story you want to tell, based off his own experiences and reflections as a published author in an industry that continues to greedily capitalise on 'diversity'.

Read an extract from Mieko Kawakami's latest book Sisters in Yellow – translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio – a noir novel set in 1990s Tokyo. The story follows a young teenager, Hana, as she leaves a rough home, opens a bar with three other women, and falls into the city's criminal underbelly. 

This World Poetry Day, we are sharing poems by Fatimah Asghar that speak to multiple communities, geographies, and crises in our world — where solidarities flower in beauty salons, ICE trucks cluster, grandmothers pray, empires collapse, and fists pulse. The poems thread rhythmically through equally horrifying and tender, grandiose and soft everyday images, nurturing resonances between our varied personal, communal, and political experiences. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe.

Nigerian Hausa writer and artist Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi offers three formally inventive poems that yearn for a deeper sense of spirituality and security through ancestral connection, maternal figures, and cultural traditions and crafts.

Palestinian writer Malak N Hijazi's life writing piece reflects on growing up in Gaza — the realities of white phosphorus raining down on your school, watching the weight fall rapidly off your body, losing a childhood friend, noting the olive-coloured eyes of a soldier. Existing here means existing 'in disappearance', amid the systematic extermination of your people. This piece was Highly Commended for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Read an exclusive extract from Wilderness of Mirrors, the forthcoming debut by Caine Prize-winning author Olufemi Terry. The novel follows Emil, a young, wealthy Creole who pauses his medical studies to move to the fictional Stadmutter, South Africa. There, he experiences the whirlwinds of young adulthood within a post-apartheid, multiracial city with shifting class and cultural hierarchies.

Read a conversation between writers Jay Bernard, Dante Micheaux, and Oluwaseun Olayiwola on Transfigurations: Collected Poems, a landmark volume containing all eight major poetry works by the legendary Black American poet, playwright, and polymath, Jay Wright. Together, they trace critical, audience, and reader perceptions of Wright's work over time, as well as why Wright has been historically overlooked in the global literary sphere in comparison to contemporaries like Wole Soyinka. The conversation is interspersed with two of Wright's poems from the volume, as well as several other excerpts and fragments.

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.