27 December 2019
Season's Readings: 35 Years of Wasafiri, 35 Literary Works
To mark the milestone of Wasafiri’s 100th issue, we invited Alastair Niven to cast an eye over the literary output of the past three and a half decades and pick thirty-five outstanding books from the last thirty-five years.
No one could refuse an invitation to pick their favourite books, but I am aware that it is a vanity project like no other. I decided right from the start that I must set certain rules for myself: no author to appear twice, so no second Naipaul or alternative Vikram Seth, even though my choice of a novel by the one and a book of poems by the other could easily have been accompanied by a travelogue and a novel by the same authors. I would leave out a great novel, Narrow Road to the Deep North by the Tasmanian Richard Flanagan, which I helped choose as the Man Booker Prize winner in 2014, in favour of Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others, which was shortlisted for the prize in the same year, because for the purposes of this list the Mukherjee seemed to announce new talent ‘going forward’, as everyone says these days, and because it excited me with its graphic intensity. I also made sure that I included some books from small places, from Gibraltar and Samoa, for example, even though I knew they would be hard for readers to find. I see a place in a list such as this for some influential anthologies, for plays which have hardly been heard of away from the fringe theatre that first staged them, and for critical documentaries which have re-shaped my awareness.
Wasafiri today is a glossy publication, superbly designed and even more meticulously edited than it was at the beginning. It is well administered and constantly aspirational. Recent issues focusing on writing from Hong Kong, Korea and Palestine, on ‘Refuge’, or on queer literature are telling us about a world of multitudinous variegation, and in doing so resist the rise of small-minded populism which threatens us all. I have enjoyed re-visiting my shelves to compile this list of thirty-five, but I have absolutely no doubt that another person, given the same challenge, would produce an entirely different selection. They say that, given infinite time, a monkey with a Scrabble set would replicate the works of Shakespeare. In the same period I expect a typical subscriber to Wasafiri would come up with same thirty-five choices as me, but I wouldn’t hang around waiting. Choose your own – and maybe let the Wasafiri editorial team know what you have selected. You will enjoy doing it and we the readers shall relish disagreeing with you!
– Alastair Niven