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If you ask me about water, this is the water I think about. The glow of myriad colours on the lake at night. Rickshaw drivers practising their English consonants and vowels with tourists as they pedal past the hutongs, earning five yuan each time—not even a pound.

My father chose the flattest stones,   … skimming them out to sea,   … and taught me never   … to walk on a beach   … without filling my pockets   … with pebbles. When was  it   … that he learnt to skim? And who taught him?   … I know small things   … about that boy.

Our winter 2020 issue – Wasafiri 104: Human Rights Cultures – makes space for South-South connections and conversations, focusing on four post-conflict countries – Kenya, Rwanda, Colombia, Argentina – bringing together the literatures that follow in the wake of war.

There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim. ‘Two thousand four hundred ninety-three metres,’ points out Sister Lydwine, our geography teacher.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had an effect on us all, and we all have stories to share of our experiences within it. These are stories that only we can tell, in our own words.

t here’s  an art to arranging    … bones, laying them together     … by way of size, shape, density,   … to form a human  body;   … y ou need to be careful where the    … sternum crosses the chest or   … the rib cage cloisters sit…

Representing more of the globe than any other prize of its kind, the Queen Mary  Wasafiri  New Writing Prize is opening its doors for 2021 and welcoming work in fiction, poetry, and life writing from unpublished writers around the world.  The prize will remain open from 1 February to 31 May 2021 .

Urfi , I never came to stay. It’s just that it’s no longer as  simple as it was .   Then ,  the plan was straightforward: I was a visitor, just pass ing  through , embracing this land  of dreams  for a year.

L-R: Theresa Lola, Momtaza Mehri, Cecilia Knapp, Caleb Femi … Now in its fifth year, the Young People’s Laureate (YPL) for London is UK poetry’s third most prominent ‘office’, after the Poet Laureate and the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

2020   … We’ve lived in separate boxes in Hackney all this time.   … I pull off the mask that conceals my nose and my mouth. I’m among the trees now, looking for you. Are you on the towpath? I check my phone. No messages.

Wasafiri  is excited to announce a series of online writing workshops tutored by our Writer-in-Residence Jennifer Wong, and  our  Associate Editor Thomas  Glave .  … Jennifer Wong's series of writing workshops will focus on poetry, human geography and writing across and between languages…

Applications for the 2021 Editor at Large programme are now closed. You can get to know more about our Editors at Large here.

Penny Green – Professor of Law and Globalisation, Head of the School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on borders…

Codex 10  … Rumi said Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely … is made for the eye of one who sees.  In 1973, the same year … my mother met my father, Steven Speilberg had just wrapped  … on American Graffiti.

My sister’s sister-in-law’s name was Rocío and she was pregnant. She went to church to light a candle to Saint Ana for having granted her the miracle. Her man – short, brown-skinned, stout – went with her, satisfied at having fulfilled his mandate by insufflating his part of the mix.

We spoke to Billy Kahora and Zoe Norridge – our guest editors – about curating, compiling and commissioning  Wasafiri 104 , our special issue on Human Rights Cultures. You can read their print editorial, 'What Is Seen and What Is Said' , and other free access materials, here . Wasafiri :

Ever wondered which book your favourite translator would secretly love to translate? Or a book in translation that may have slipped under your radar?  Wasafiri Wonders is a series that asks these questions for you.

What a year. As November shifts into December, and the eyes of the world turn backward – reviewing the last eleven months, and turn forward – looking ahead to what many of us hope will be something better, it's almost impossible not to fall into what are becoming 2020's analytical clichés:

Kiera Vaclavik – Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of London – reflects on child-centred research during and post-pandemic and responds to Avni Doshi's 'Unfamiliar Creatures'—published as part of the Queen Mary Wasafiri Global Dispatche s initiative…

The doctor’s voice is muffled by his mask. He says I need to be careful, more careful than the average person. So much about Covid-19 is unknown, particularly the effects on a fetus. I ask him if I should be isolating from my husband and my toddler for the duration of this pregnancy.

We're delighted to announce the appointment of our new Writer-in-Residence, the poet, writer, and translator Jennifer Wong.

9 February 1940, John Maxwell Coetzee, Mowbray Nursing Home, Cape Town … He enters the world on his mother Vera’s own birthday. It is just weeks before the first of many moves. With their infant son, Vera and Jack return to the still small town of Victoria West in the Great Karoo.

For over three decades Wasafiri has created a dynamic platform for mapping new landscapes in contemporary international writing featuring a diverse range of voices from across the UK and beyond.

‘It was so interesting, considering everything that’s happening in the world, to be in that privileged position of seeing where people’s minds are at, what people are writing,’ said poet Raymond Antrobus of judging the 2020 Queen Mary  Wasafiri  New Writing Prize.