Royal Festival Hall Riverside Terrace © India Roper-Evans
The 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize Ceremony
Join Wasafiri – the UK’s leading magazine of international contemporary writing since 1984 – as we celebrate the 17th edition of the prestigious Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
This two-part event will open with a panel discussion on change and activism within the publishing industry, including questions on the impact of AI, freedom of speech, writers' rights, the current translation boom, and more. Titled 'Publishing Against Power' and chaired by Wasafiri Associate Editor, So Mayer, the panel will feature writer and interdisciplinary artist, Tice Cin, English PEN’s Head of Literature Programmes, Will Forrester, and artist, researcher, and producer, Heather Marks.
This discussion will be followed by readings by writers from the Wasafiri community – Farah Ahamed, Gaël Le Cornec, and Cara Thompson – each representing the three strands of the prize: Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry respectively. The evening will culminate with the announcement of the 2026 winners and a prize-giving by the judging panel; Chair Ellah Wakatama, Santanu Bhattacharya, Jen Calleja, and Mona Kareem. Copies of a range of Wasafiri issues will be available for sale.
This event is part of the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival.
When: Saturday, 31 October, 5-8pm (doors open 4.45pm)
Where: Weston Roof Pavilion, Southbank Centre, London
Tickets: Full price tickets from £18 + booking fee. A limited number of concession tickets are available.
Farah Ahamed’s writing has been published in Ploughshares, White Review, LA Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, and Markaz Review. She is the editor of Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia, Pan Macmillan India (periodmattersbook.com), described as ‘an essential book about the female body that dispels misconceptions’, by Book Riot. You can read her work at farahahamed.com.
Tice Cin is a Turkish Cypriot writer and interdisciplinary artist from North London. Her debut novel Keeping the House (2021) received a Somerset Maugham Award and a London Writers Award, was a Guardian Book of the Year in 2021, and was shortlisted for a British Book Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize among other accolades, with its accompanying mixtape having her named as one of Notion Magazine's Ones to Watch. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary How Much Can You Say? (2024) won an Audio Production Award. Her essays and poetry have been published and commissioned by Granta Magazine, London Magazine, Somerset House, Montblanc, Cartier, and more. Her practice currently traces outsiderness, secret intimacies, and loss. Cin’s sophomore novel SAFE SPACES was published by Granta in September 2026.
Will Forrester is Head of Literature Programmes at English PEN. He edited All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation, led the editorial team for My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women, and has been a judge for the TA First Translation Prize and the US National Translation Award. He is also a Director of Untold Narratives, a Trustee of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and a Trustee of the Poetry Translation Centre. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, London Magazine, and elsewhere.
Gaël Le Cornec is the recipient of the Summerhall Guimarães Rosa Award with her show Amazons and of an Arts Council’s DYCP to develop her writing. The year 2025 saw her judging for Friction Magazine’s short stories competition. In 2023, she was a finalist for the BBC and BFI scriptwriting competition, ‘Hot House Climate Spring’. Her current projects include a short story collection on overlooked Latin American women in history.
Heather Marks is an artist, researcher, and producer working across archives, visual arts, and literature. Her decolonial practice works with and against the archive, attending to histories and lives that have been obscured and fragmented. This year she has been artist in residence at the National Portrait Gallery, responding to portraits of 16th–19th century Global Majority sitters, and at The Box, Plymouth, researching unseen collections in the South West Film & Television Archive. Her moving image Fugitives in the Archive, which meditates on the lives of undocumented freedom-seekers, past and present, has screened at Spike Island, Autograph ABP, and Bristol Beacon. With a background in independent publishing and bookselling, Heather has produced arts programmes across the UK and internationally, with the likes of Whitechapel Gallery, Words of Colour, the Southbank Centre, Glasgow Film Theatre, Kiraathane, and the Irish Writers Centre. She serves on the advisory board of Arawelo Studio.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser, and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their speculative collection Truth and Dare (Cipher Press, 2023) was longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and their book-length essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula Press, 2022) inspired the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can’t See. They co-edited The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin and the Locus Award-winning collection Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin with Sarah Shin for Silver Press, and Unreal Sex with Adam Zmith for Cipher Press. So works with Burley Fisher Books, queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and Outburst Arts in Belfast, as editor of catflap magazine.
Cara Thompson is a writer, performer, and artivist based in Nottingham, UK, and Nottingham's first Nature Poet Laureate. A proud descendant of Jamaican migrants who came to Britain as part of the pioneering 'Windrush generation', Cara's work explores the richness and complexities of her Caribbean-British heritage while inviting audiences to unpack our shared histories and humanity. Cara's poetry has been featured and commissioned by Penguin Random House, Huffpost, Oxfam, the NHS Leadership Academy, UNESCO, Simon and Schuster, and more. In 2021, Cara won UNESCO Cities of Literature's international slam poetry competition Slamovision with her poem 'Island Screams (Where Are You From)'. Outside of poetry, Cara is also a musician, facilitator, programmer, and an active member of Nottingham's creative community.