The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize Ceremony

Wasafiri will be returning to the Southbank Centre to celebrate our 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize winners in fiction, life writing, and poetry, as part of this year's London Literature Festival.

Join us at London's Southbank Centre on Thursday, 30 October for the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize ceremoney.

This year, we are hosting a two-part event, beginning with a panel discussion between three translators of colour, followed by readings of fiction, life writing, and poetry by trailblazers in each field, and closing with prize-givings in each category. We look forward to celebrating a very special night – one of Wasafiri's most significant annual events – in the heart of our base in London.

The opening panel discussion will highlight key issues within the literary translation industry – to mark the prize being open to entries in translation for the first time this year – and will feature three translators of colour: Anton Hur, Sawad Hussain, and Rahul Soni.

This will be followed by readings by writers from the Wasafiri community, including Dalia Al-Dujaili, Erica Hesketh, and Monika Radojevic. The evening will culminate with the 2025 winners announcement and prize-giving by our stellar judging panel: Chair Romesh Gunesekera, with Anton Hur, Noreen Masud, and Yasmine Seale.

This event is part of the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival. 

When: 7-9.30pm (doors open 6.45pm), Thursday, 30 October, 2025
Where: Weston Roof Pavilion, Southbank Centre, London
Tickets: Full price tickets from £14 + booking fee. A limited number of concession tickets are available.

Purchase your tickets here

Dalia Al-Dujaili is an Iraqi-British writer, editor, and producer based in London. She is the online editor of The British Journal of Photography and the founder of The Road to Nowhere magazine. In 2023 she was the producer of Refugee Week.

Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Phillipines before moving to England in 1971. He is the author of various novels and short stories. After the 1992 appearance of his first novel Monkfish Moon, he went on to publish Reef (1994) which was shortlisted for the Booker and The Sandglass (1998). Both novels have won him several prestigious prizes, including the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing and Literature. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and with novels, The Match and Noontide Toll published in 2006 and 2014.

Erica Hesketh is a poet and editor, originally from Japan and Denmark, now based in London. From 2016 to 2024 she was Director of the Poetry Translation Centre. Her debut collection, In the Lily Room, explores early motherhood.

Anton Hur is a translator and author working in Seoul. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, and raised in British Hong Kong, Ethiopia, and Thailand, but mostly in Korea. Author of Toward Eternity (HarperVia) and No One Told Me Not To (Across Books).

Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work has been recognized by, among others, The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards, and has run translation workshops for Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Her latest co-translation is The Book Censor's Library. A former Co-Chair of the Translator's Association (UK), she is committed to mentoring literary translators and developing the industry in general. 

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards.

Monika Radojevic is a Brazilian-Montenegrin writer and poet who was born and raised in London. Her writing is a continuous exploration of power dynamics, inequality, and freedom and she is the inaugural winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ prize.

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian poet, translator, and critic. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, Apollo, and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as 'an electric new translation', and Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books), a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. She lives between Paris and New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. 

Rahul Soni is a writer, editor, and translator. He has edited Home from a Distance, an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation, and translated Shrikant Verma’s collection of poetry Magadh, Geetanjali Shree’s novel The Roof Beneath Their Feet (forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2026), a selection of Ashok Vajpeyi’s poetry A Name for Every Leaf and Pankaj Kapur’s novella Dopehri.