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We are honoured to publish Leila Aboulela's full acceptance speech for the PEN Pinter Prize 2025. Leila is a long-time friend of Wasafiri, having judged the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2023. She named Stella Gaitano as Writer of Courage 2025.

We're delighted to share an exclusive extract from the forthcoming collection, We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities, edited by Rachel Kuo, Jaimee A. Swift, and TD Tso. This extract is from an interview by Swift with Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie – founding members of the socialist and activist group, Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent – on the joys and difficulties of political organising across race, class, and gender.

In this extract from our autumn issue, Wasafiri 123, Christina Sharpe speaks to Guy Gunaratne about the origins behind her most recent work – Ordinary Notes – and the ways in which she draws from historical archives and visual art in her writing.

Read an extract from 'Why Does the Cat?', a short story from Bora Chung's latest collection, The Midnight Timetable, translated by Anton Hur, where a man is haunted by the ghost of his murder victim.

Read an extract from Ning Ken's forthcoming novel Tibetan Sky – translated by Thomas Moran – a philosophical work of fiction about a disillusioned academic and the complex history of Tibet.

Read an extract from Sara Ahmed's forthcoming book, No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining – on the various ways in which we can engage in complaint, refusal, and resistance with our dignity – including whistle-blowing, song, language, protest, and more.

Wasafiri Deputy Editor and writer, Vamika Sinha, spoke with 2025 International Booker Prize winners Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi (Wasafiri's inaugural International Translator in Residence) at a live event at Waterstones Islington, London. Read their wide-ranging conversation, where they explored what went into writing, compiling, and producing their winning collection, Heart Lamp.

Using the term 'amuk' as her starting point, Khairani Barokka roots out the violences in colonial mistranslation, weaving in disability justice and personal experience in this extract from Wasafiri 123.

In this photo essay, multimedia artist Myriam Louise Taleb elaborates on her evolving relationship to photography through memories of family photo albums, shooting in the UAE's private vs public spaces, and trying to find a sense of belonging in the country's creative scene.

In this exclusive extract, Yoko Tawada – translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda – considers the place of categorisation in literature. Her own writing is housed variously under ’Japanese Literature‘, ’Women's Literature‘, and ’Literature of Colour‘, among others. Here, Tawada breaks down these artificial boundaries to see the words beneath.  

Khaled Esguerra, Juan Gonzales, and Carlos Páez González came to the UAE at different ages. They hail from different backgrounds and engage in various forms of visual and performance arts. In Part 2 of their interview published in Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue – on how their practice generates conversations, and weaves collectives and audiences across different segments of UAE society – they elaborate further on these ideas while discussing what community building even means.

The first piece in our new Writing the Self, Writing Berlin series – led by our CHASE intern Divya Ghelani – is a personal essay by Divya, reflecting on her entwined experiences of producing both a novel and a baby via IVF while living in Berlin. She explores how this time transformed her ideas of anxiety, perseverance, and the act of creation.

This melancholic short story by Fatima AlJarman – commissioned in tandem with Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue – traces a daughter and father redefining their relationship in the aftermath of a loss. With an image by UAE-based photographer Adele Bea Cipste.

In the sterile surroundings of a VFS visa application centre in Dubai, an unnamed narrator reflects on her failed marriage, familial and societal expectations, and what freedom means to her. Written by Bhoomika Ghaghada and extracted from Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue.

Dalia Al-Dujaili writes about the inspiration and research behind her debut, Babylon, Albion, a nature-memoir exploring identity through the land-based mythologies of Britain and Iraq and family memories of migration.

It is impossible to explore the UAE’s literary scene without probing its publishing landscape. Three bookmakers in conversation, Ahmad Makia, Zoe Patterson, and Vamika Sinha, are located at seemingly different ends of this spectrum. In Part 2 of their interview published in Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue – on engaging place, a text’s lifetime, and the necessity, or lack thereof, of an archive – they expand on these ideas while examining the wider UAE publishing landscape, its history, and their roles within it.

In this wide-ranging interview – on the humour of maps, immigration officers, pilfering through a father's library, and more – Safa Khatib speaks to poet and translator Mona Kareem about their collection I Will Not Unfold These Maps and the evolution of their poetics and practice amid Arabic and American publishing industries. This piece is published in tandem with Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue, where Mona is a contributor.

This exclusive extract from Ana Paula Maia's forthcoming novel, On Earth As It Is Beneath – translated by Padma Viswanathan – enters the world of an unusual penal colony in the wilderness with only male inmates.

Read an extract from Saima Begum's forthcoming debut, The First Jasmines. The novel centres two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, who – around the dawn of Bangladesh as a nation – are captured by Pakistani soldiers and forced to waste their days in a makeshift prison. 

Extracted from the lead feature in Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue, this personal essay by Nadeen Dakkak charts her familiy's movements across the Gulf and beyond, reflecting on the ambiguity, silences, longing, nostalgia, and practicalities of serially migrating.

In this life writing piece shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Sarah Anjum Bari explores matrilineal relationships, patriarchal expectations, obedience, and rebellion for South Asian girls — and how hair can be at the root of it all.

Awarded Highly Commended in the 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize for her paper on Selma Dabbagh's short fiction, Simar Bhasin speaks to us about her scholarship, championing Palestinian literature, love and desire as anticolonial forces, and more.

In April 2025, Wasafiri Editor and Publishing Director Sana Goyal spoke with author Gurnaik Johal at an event at Queen Mary, University of London, about the place of short stories within publishing, literary prize culture, the defiance of untranslated language, and more.  

Simon Peter Eggertsen was shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry for a poem imagining the experiences of a nineteenth-century slave.