News & Events

On Thursday 13 April 2017 we held readings and a panel discussion with Amaal Said, Ayisha Malik and Sabrina Mahfouz, which was chaired by Wasafiri Deputy Editor Arifa Akbar. Here are some highlights from the panel discussion. [embed]https://youtu.be/mE2EuEAieQA[/embed]

View the video on Facebook … David Dabydeen, the celebrated Guyanese poet, novelist, and scholar talks to Susheila Nasta about his career spanning genres and continents, and how contemporary Guyanese writing tackles the intricacies of the country’s troubled past.

To celebrate the launch of The Things I Would Tell You (Saqi Books) we have an exclusive extract from the short play 'Battleface' by Sabrina Mahfouz. Sabrina Mahfouz is a British Egyptian playwright, poet and screenwriter.

Shiraz, a silent-era Indian film which features an early on-screen kiss, is set to be restored by the British Film Institute with a score composed and performed live by Anoushka Shankar.

The winners of the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize have been announced! Our congratulations go to the three winners of the NWP 2016: Niamh MacCabe for Nobody Knows the Shivering Stars (Fiction) Danielle Boodoo-Fortune for Portrait of my father as a grouper (Poetry) Shiva Rahbaran for Massoumeh:

The most compelling literatures are tragic – a life at its end, an opportunity taken away, a precious thing stolen. And it is this that links the winning entries, over the last four years, in the Life Writing category of Wasafiri’s New Writing Prize.

Alice Curham lives by the sea in Kent with her partner and son and three goldfish. She has had poetry published in Dream Catcher and Red Pepper magazines and been shortlisted in the Gladstone’s Library Short Story competition and longlisted for the Plough Prize.

Nigeria’s Tope Folarin Wins 2013 Caine Prize … By Sola Njoku … Nigeria’s Tope Folarin has been awarded the 14th Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story, 'Miracle'. The announcement was made yesterday, July 8, at a ceremony held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK.

Gillian Best is a writer whose debut novel will be published by Freight Books in Spring 2017. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2013) and published in her native Canada and the UK.

Royston Emmanuel is a teacher trainer at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, St.

The light was gone, sucked back into the black wires that hung off the roof and stretched across the expressway, leaving the kitchen a study in blurs. Ogugua popped open the plastic crate of eggs and felt around for the matches, his pupils widening to inhale the grey air.

Richard Georges is a writer, editor and lecturer in the British Virgin Islands. His poetry has appeared in Smartish Pace, sx salon, Barrelhouse, The Caribbean Writer, Wasafiri and elsewhere. In 2016, he won the Marvin E Williams Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer.

Sarala Estruch was born in London in 1983 to a French mother and Indian father.

Ayanna Gillian Lloyd  is a fiction and life writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She has been published in The Caribbean Writer and was shortlisted for Wasafiri’s New Writing Prize and the Smallaxe Literary Competition in 2014. She is an alumna of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop…

AKaiser’s poems have recently appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Temenos Journal and Coldnoon: Travel Poetics. This past spring, she was a resident at JIWAR, Spain.

Ovarn Brown was born in Black River, Jamaica. Beth Thompson was born in Melbourne, Australia. ‘The Kitchen Duppy’ is the first story they have written together. -- The night jasmine flowers once the sun sets.

Robin Ganderton has already outlived John Keats and is on course to do the same with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Last year he won the Terry Hetherington Award for Welsh Writers Under Thirty and has just been selected to receive a Literature Wales bursary to work on his novel in progress.

Mark Fiddes is a London poet whose first collection, The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre, was published by Templar Poetry in March 2015. It has since been  shortlisted in the 2015 Saboteur Awards.

Jill Germanacos has lived outside the UK for the past twenty years, moving from Paris to Kazakhstan to Romania with her husband’s work before settling in Greece in 2001. Despite Greece’s current woes…

Paola Trimarco is a writer and linguist. Her short stories and essays have appeared in several literary magazines and her stage plays have been performed at London’s King’s Head Theatre and Arts Theatre Cambridge Studio. She has recently authored Digital Textuality published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Anne Vines is based in Melbourne, Australia. She was shortlisted in the Henry Handel Richardson Short Story Award, The Age Short Story Award and the Alan Marshall Short Story Award and commended in the Varuna Harper-Collins Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

Glen Wilson lives in Portadown, Co. Armagh with his wife Rhonda and children Sian and Cain. He has been published in Iota, A New Ulster and The Interpreters House. In 2014 he won the Poetry Space competition and was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.