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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.

Sasha Debevec-McKenney shares two new poems – 'I'M NOT WRITING BECAUSE I'M FINALLY IN LOVE' and 'Apartment' – that flicker across mundanities, introspections, and desires.

Kate Hawkes – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction – explores the grief and 'river' of memory within a relationship transformed by illness.

We spoke to anthropologist Laure Assaf and writer Deepak Unnikrishnan about editing Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue, which aims to move away from monolithic representations of the region. They discuss their personal histories with the country, surveillance, family, transience, gaze, theorising the UAE in real-time, and more.

In the first extract from Wasafiri 122: The UAE Issue, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil remembers watching the Berlin Wall fall on his television in Abu Dhabi's Madinat Zayed township — a place he spent several years of his childhood in, following his father's immigration from Kerala.

In this poem, Juleus Ghunta – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – juxtaposes the ordinary lives of his peers with his sister's suicidal ideation. The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

Winner of the 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize, Ashley Barr talks about discovering the subject of their winning essay, British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil, private space, books they're reading right now, and whether academic writing should be niche or for the masses.  The 2025 Essay Prize is open for entries until 30 June.

Wasafiri Associate Editor Thomas Glave pens a letter in tribute and grief for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938-2025).

Both a novelist and translator, Anton Hur – Fiction judge for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize – discusses the varied experiences between writing and translating fiction, and how each role is treated in a book's production process.

In tribute to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-2025), Wasafiri has lifted the paywall on a range of articles, stories, and interviews from our 41-year-old archive. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been a long-standing supporter of Wasafiri, serving on its Advisory Board. Florian Stadtler, Deputy Chair and Trustee of Wasafiri, introduces the following works by the eminent Kenyan scholar and writer, now free to access for all.

In this candid, comprehensive essay drawing on her own career experiences, our outgoing 2024 Translator-in-Residence Sawad Hussain discusses the particularities – both the perks and drawbacks – of translating between Arabic and English, and the larger inequities between language pairs in the translation industry.

'This is the problem with anecdotes: they are so ambiguously weighted. They might say nothing or they might say everything' — Life Writing judge for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Noreen Masud, talks about the value of the anecdote when writing about one's life.

Read an extract from Heuijung Hur's forthcoming short story collection Failed Summer Vacation, translated from Korean by Paige Aniyah Morris. 'Imperfect Pitch' centres an enigmatic mystery at the heart of a band's fan club. 

Ark Ramsay's Life Writing piece – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize –  immerses itself in a knotty quest to 'outpace gender'.

Mo Ogrodnik's debut novel Gulf traces the lives of five women from very different origins colliding in the Arabian Gulf. This extract follows Zeinah, a Syrian woman in the first days of her marriage to a jihadist. Alone and constantly reevaluating, Zeinah must consider her position in this new world. 

Jack Joslin – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Fiction – mixes white lies with white ghosts in a sharply-paced schoolboy story.

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 121, writer and geologist Elizabeth Wong's ecofiction explores privilege and passing, climate degradation, and the tenuous status of not 'refugees' or 'migrants', but the 'landless' — all against the backdrop of an elite hotel in Monte Carlo.

Zainab Imran – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – examines the UK's rejection of Shamima Begum as a citizen, its repercussions reverberating through the narrator's life.