Announcing the Winner and Highly Commended for the 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize

The 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize has been awarded to Ashley Barr for their in-depth and innovative essay, ‘“Avert the Icy Feeling”: Bhanu Kapil & Performing Poetry in White Spaces’. Barr’s essay impressed our judging panel with its refreshing interdisciplinary focus, tying together how Kapil’s texts and performances work in tandem, while displaying a comprehensive and considered analysis of how contemporary poetry is racialised as a space. Their winning essay will be published in our forthcoming autumn issue, Wasafiri 123, alongside our usual mix of articles, interviews, creative pieces, art, and reviews. 

As a first in Wasafiri Essay Prize history, the judges have also decided to award an additional entry as Highly Commended. Simar Bhasin receives this accolade for her essay, ‘A Qissa of Resistance: Desire & Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’. Our judging panel appreciated its timely and essential engagement with Palestinian subjectivity and lauded its interrogation of diasporic and transnational writing as a category. Bhasin’s essay will also be published in Wasafiri 123. 

Of the winning and highly commended works, Wasafiri’s Deputy Editor Vamika Sinha said: ‘In a historic first for Wasafiri’s Essay Prize, there are two awardees this year. Both Ashley Barr and Simar Bhasin’s essays engage in elegant and compelling close readings of contemporary writers of colour in order to interrogate the very categories we use to approach and analyse such writers’ works. Their work pushes against terms often taken for granted in contemporary literary scholarship — including ‘conceptual writing’, ‘migrant fiction’, and ‘transnational literature’. That we have chosen to award a Highly Commended essay alongside the winner this year serves as a testament not only to the high-quality work being produced by contemporary early-career researchers but also highlights how they are pushing to reshape the field of literary studies. Warmest congratulations to both Ashley and Simar.’ 

The Wasafiri Essay Prize aims to discover, encourage, and award innovative critical essays and articles of an exemplary standard, which constitute the most exciting academic work happening today from anywhere in the world and across international contemporary literature.  

About the awardees: 

Ashley Barr is a poet and researcher from Boise, Idaho who currently teaches rhetoric in Zhejiang, China. They recently completed a creative-critical PhD, titled ‘Scripting in the Shower: Locating the Politics of Procedural and Conceptual Anglo-American Poetry 1990-2021’ at the University of Sussex. They have an MFA in poetry from Boise State University and an MA in sexual dissidence from The University of Sussex. Their creative writing has been published in Fruit Journal, PermeableBarrier, and as the micro chapbook ‘How To Access Spreading Pleasure’ in Ghost City Press’ 2021 Summer Series. Their essay ‘Re-scripting in the Shower: A Theory of the Shower and Creative Practice’ won BACLS’s 2022 Postgraduate Essay Prize. 

Simar Bhasin is a PhD scholar in English at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (Delhi-NCR). Her PhD project is centred on an analysis of contemporary Anglophone short fiction by first- and second-generation non-white immigrant authors publishing from the US and UK. She is particularly interested in how these writers challenge western aesthetic assumptions about fiction on migration. In addition to her MA and MPhil degrees from the University of Delhi, Simar also holds a diploma in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism (Chennai). She has served as an Assistant Professor in colleges of the University of Delhi and has over nine years of experience as a literary critic with essays, review articles, and author interviews published in several national media houses including The Indian Express and Hindustan Times.   

On winning the prize, Barr said: ‘I’m totally overwhelmed and honoured to win Wasafiri’s 2024 Essay Prize. At risk of sounding dramatic or like an Oscars acceptance speech, this essay feels like the culmination of about ten years of work. Reading it, I remember the influences of so many teachers, friends, texts, and places. I’m grateful to all of them, and to Wasafiri and the reviewers who have allowed me to return to this essay, and for helping it to find a final shape and a home.’  

On being awarded Highly Commended, Bhasin shared: ‘I am extremely grateful to the judges and to the Wasafiri team for this recognition. Writers and academics featured by the platform have been inspiring figures who have helped shape my own research journey. It is truly an honour to have received the Highly Commended award for my paper.’ 

Barr is awarded a £250 cash prize. Both Barr and Bhasin will receive a mentoring conversation with a member of Wasafiri’s editorial board, a print subscription, and publication in the magazine.

Submissions for the 2025 Prize are open until Monday, 30 June, 2025.  

Manuscripts can be submitted here; please tick the relevant box for Essay Prize consideration. 

To read Ashley Barr and Simar Bhasin’s winning essays in Wasafiri 123, subscribe to the magazine here.