People

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955, and moved to London in 1970. He reviews regularly for The Independent, and is Professorial Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed books, Remnants of Partition and In the Language of Remembering, that explore the human history and generational impact of the 1947 Partition.

Abdoo Taj is a Yemeni writer who has been published in online magazines such as Cinema Meem and Jeem.

Abdulrazak Gurnah has contributed to the development of Wasafiri from the beginning, working as a contributing editor since 1987. Born in Zanzibar, he left in the late 1960s and migrated to Britain. His first novel Memory of Departure, was published in 1987 and was quickly followed by Pilgrim’s Way (1988) and Dottie (1990).

Dr. Abeera Khan is a scholar of transnational feminist and queer of colour critique. Her research and work focus on empire's mobilisations of gender and sexuality and the queer feminist movements that emerge in confrontation and response.

Abu Leila is a Barbican Young Poet, and one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards. They are currently writing their first novel, an extract from which won the Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2022. They hope to see the fall of capitalism and imperialism in their lifetime.

Adalber Salas Hernández is a Venezuelan poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of several books of poems, most recently Salvoconducto (XXXVI Arcipreste de Hita Prize), and La ciencia de las despedidas (translated by Robin Myers as The Science of Departures). His poetry collections also include Crania (translated by Robin Myers as well; published by Letra Muerta Inc), mínimos (translated by Robin Myers as minuscules and published by Alliteration in 2024), Isolario (also translated by Robin Myers as Islarium and published by Peepal Tree Press in 2025), and El sermón de las cosas mudas.

Adele Bea Cipste is a Latvian-born visual artist, and a long-term resident of the UAE. Her practice explores how the notions of presence and absence, permanence and transience, loss and attachment function in rapidly changing physical environments.

Adrija Dey is an academic and activist with the 1752 group. Her research is titled Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) in Indian Universities: A Study of Campus Life, Student Activism, an dInstitutional Responses. She has been a vocal campaigner against SGBV, and part of campaigns such as Account for This.

Ahmad Makia is a geographer, author, and bookmaker. His work spans the fields of spatial studies and human geography, gender and identity, Arab and Islamic history and material philosophy.

Akila Richards is an award winning poet, writer and spoken word artist, performing and collaborating in the UK and internationally. Her work features in collaboration with artists and genres for theatre, film, visual arts and digital platforms.

Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo/Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria, Akwaeke holds two degrees, including an MPA from New York University.

Alastair Niven OBE is Principal of Cumberland Lodge, Windsor and was President of English PEN from 2003 to 2007. He was former director of literature at the Arts Council of Great Britain (latterly the Arts Council of England) and the British Council.

Alex Mormoris works in the library at the Open University. While writing doesn’t come naturally to him, time at the page always feels like time well spent. He particularly enjoys gifting stories to friends and family for whom bookshelves offer no reflection.

Alex Tickell  is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK, and is the Director of the OU’s Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group. He specialises in the Anglophone literary histories of South Asia and Southeast Asia and conjunctions of literature and politics.

Ali May was born in Iran and his childhood was consumed by the eight-year war with Iraq. War, as a result, is one of the focal points in his writing. Having grown up amidst stifling repression, the concepts of liberty, choice and individualism shaped his intellectual framework.

Alice Harry is an artist, writer, and PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. Informed by black, queer, feminist scholarship, her research asks how citation might speak with and speak back; questioning how/whose knowledge is signalled and summoned across texts through time.

Alison Donnell is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of School of Literature, Creative Writing and Drama at the University of East Anglia.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), from the southern Philippines, authored three books of lyric essays and prose-poems including M of the Southern Downpours (2024).

Alvin Pang, PhD, is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans three decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English and the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Swedish, Croatian, Macedonian, Chinese, Malay and French.

Amal Sewtohul is an author and Mauritian diplomat, currently based in Dubai. He was born in Quatre Bornes, Mauritius, in 1971. He is the author of four novels.

Amber Lascelles is a Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her interests include contemporary fiction of the African diaspora and her current research focuses on embodied solidarities in contemporary Black feminist fiction. She is a director and editor of Feminist … Review.

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta and has published several prize winning novels as well as works of literary criticism.His work frequently appears in well known journals across the globe. His most recent publications include a collection of essays, Clearing A Space:

Novelist An Yu grew up in Beijing, and has lived and worked in New York and Paris. Her first novel, Braised Pork – reviewed in Wasafiri 105 – was published last year. It traces the story of Jia Jia, a young woman who finds her husband dead in her apartment, and follows her through nocturnal Beijing to the plains of Tibet. A finalist for Glamour Train's Short Story Award for New Writers and Dogwood's Annual Contest, An Yu is also the co-founder of YU, a jade jewellery brand.

Ana Paula Maia (Nova Iguaçu, Brazil, 1977) is an author and scriptwriter who has published several novels, including O habitante das falhas subterráneas (2003), and the 'Saga of Brutes' trilogy which comprises Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos (2009), O trabalho sujo dos outros (2009), and Carvão animal (2011). 

Anahit Ghazaryan is a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist. She has co-authored two books, Border-play | The Armenian and the Armenian and Dark Matter: Notes on War (Yerevan, self-published, 2022).

Anamik Saha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests are in race and the media, with a particular focus on cultural production and the cultural industries, including issues of ‘diversity’.

Ananya Mishra is a writer and educator based in London.

Andrea is a writer of many things; articles, op-eds, speeches, corporate brochures, and short author bios in third person. The person she identifies with most is Sisyphus, but instead of rolling an immense stone boulder up a hill, her eternity project is writing the novel that keeps slipping away from under her fingers. (She’ll get it one day.) Andrea lives, works and writes in the Middle East.

Angelique Golding is a LAHP Collaborative Doctoral student working with Wasafiri on our 40th Anniversary projects with a focus on the Wasafiri archive, which forms the basis of her research.

Ani Jilayvan has an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Ani was a co-editor of Exchanges Journal and co-translator of A Call for Lasting Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh:

Anita Barton-Williams is a PhD researcher and translator working in French and English. Her research specialises in the translation of Black literature, informed by Black feminist theory, with a focus on Caribbean writing, language, and identity.

Anjali Ramachandran is a Director at Storythings, an audience research and content production company that works with clients like ADP, Global Payroll Association, Pearson, Tate, Francis Crick Institute, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Shakespeare Folger Library. 

Anna Davtyan is the author of a collection of poems, Book of Gratitude (Actual Art, 2012), and a multigenre anthology, Bouquet (Metro, 2023). Her first novel, Khanna (Metro, 2020), focuses on women’s issues in present-day Armenia. Her second novel, Zora, has just been published (Metro, 2024).

Anna Knox is a writer and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has lived and worked in the US, Middle East and Scandinavia and currently lives in Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with her family. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

Annie Paul (1956, Kerala, India) is editor-in-chief of the online magazine of Caribbean writing, PREE (preelit.com). She is on the board of the National Gallery of Jamaica and has published extensively on art and culture, including a biography of Stuart Hall (2020).

Annie Zaidi is a multi-genre writer and winner of the Nine Dots Prize (2019) for innovative thinking. Her published work includes Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation, Prelude to a Riot, and Unbound: 2,000 Years of Indian Women's Writing.

Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician who has been referred to as ‘the leader of the black avant garde in Britain.’ He is the author of four poetry collections, as well as Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon (2018), which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and The Frequency of Magic (2019), his latest novel. He is a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellow for 2019/20.

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

Antony Huen is a Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, researching contemporary poetry and poetics, digital humanities, and Hong Kong literature in English. He is published in The Dark Horse, Early Popular Visual Culture, Hong Kong Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Poetry Wales, and is writing a poetry chapbook. He tweets @antonyhuen. Antony Huen's winning essay, ‘The “old Hong Kong” and “a Gold-sifting Bird”: Hong Kong and Chinese Ekphrasis in Contemporary British Poetry’ was published in Wasafiri 109.

Anu Khosla is an emerging writer based in San Francisco. Her writing has received support from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tin House, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Aoko Matsuda is an award-winning Japanese writer and literary translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story 'The Woman Dies', was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Ariel Florencia Richards is a writer and researcher. A cultural editor for numerous imprints and collaborator for Artishock, Richards is the author of two novels, Las olas son las mismas (2016, republished in 2021) and Inacabada (2023), as well as a non-fiction book on Gordon Matta-Clark (2024).

ariel rosé is a poet, essayist, illustrator, author of the books morze nocą jest mięśniem serca (the sea at night is a muscle of the heart; PIW, 2022) ...

Ariel Saramandi is a Mauritian writer. Her essay collection, Portrait of an Island on Fire, was published in 2025 by Fitzcarraldo Editions. She is represented by Angelique Tran Van Sang at Felicity Bryan Associates. 

Ark Ramsay (Bridgetown, 1994) is a non-binary writer based in Barbados. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The A-Line: Journal of Progressive Thought, Small Axe, Gertrude Press, Meridian, Adda, The Rumpus, Passages North, and The Gulf Coast.

Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings (Black Lawrence Press, USA, 2023). He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon is co-founder, Translation Editor, and Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. His book-length translations include the novels Immigration: The Contest by Carlos Gámez Pérez and There Are Not So Many Stars by Isaí Moreno, both from Katakana Editores.

Ashley Barr is a poet and researcher from Boise, Idaho who currently teaches rhetoric in Zhejiang, China.

Ashok Bery is Senior Lecturer in English at the London Metropolitan University where he teaches Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Twentieth-Century British and American Poetry, Romantic Poetry and Poetic Forms and Genres. In 2000 he published Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations (edited with Patricia Murray).

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982 and is currently based in Dubai. She won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 2014. Her debut novel is published in India by Fourth Estate under the title Girl in White Cotton and was longlisted for the Tata Literature Live First Book Award, one of India’s biggest literary prizes. Elsewhere, the novel is published as Burnt Sugar, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. 

Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist, and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India. Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s: critical of the caste and class system, the Bandaya Sahitya movement gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers, of whom Mushtaq was one of the few women.

Bapsi Sidhwa is one of Pakistan's most prominent English fiction writers. In 1991, she was the recipient of Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest honour and in 1998 her novel Cracking India (1991, originally published as Ice Candy Man in 1988) was adapted into the film, Earth, by renowned filmmaker Deepa Mehta.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary and a specialist in British intellectual and cultural history , feminist ideas and movements , and histories and theories of subjectivity . Her publications include Eve and the New Jerusalem:

Basma Ghalayini is an Arabic translator and interpreter and has previously translated short fiction for the KFW Stifflung series, Beirut Short Stories, published on addastories.org, as well as for Comma Press projects, such as Banthology, The Book of Cairo, and The Book of Ramallah. 

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse is an award-winning Rwandan writer based in Bordeaux, France. She is the author of two short story collections, Ejo (2015) and Lézardes (2017); two novels, Tous tes enfants dispersés (2019, translated by Alison Anderson as All Your Children, Scattered, 2022) and Consolée (2022).

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books among which are Girl, Woman, Other (2019), Lara (1997), and the Emperor's Babe (2001). She won the Booker prize in 2019 and the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025, as well as many other prizes over the years (over 80 in total). 

Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian novelist, poet, educator, and former director of the George Town Literary Festival.

Beth Hickling-Moore is a translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian into English. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, Circumference, and Wasafiri, among other journals.

Beverley Bryan is a founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent and recently retired from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as Professor of Language Education.

Bhavit Mehta has worked as a publisher, translator and festival director. He studied Biological Sciences and worked in a research environment at UCL before entering the world of children’s books in 2009, writing and publishing tales from India under his own imprint Saadhak Books .

Bhoomika Ghaghada is a writer from the UAE. Her fiction explores how structural inequalities and trauma shape everyday realities in the Gulf.

Bidisha is a writer, critic, and radio and TV presenter. She specialises in the arts and culture, social issues, and international affairs. Her most recent book is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, based on her outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees.

Billy Kahora is a Kenyan writer and former Editor at Kwani?. His publications include The True Story of David Munyakei (2008) and The Cape Cod Bicycle War (2019). He wrote the film Soul Boy and co-wrote Nairobi Half-Life.

Bina Shah is a Karachi-based author of five novels and two collections of short stories, including a feminist dystopia called Before She Sleeps, published in 2018. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper, Dawn; the literary journal Granta; and other international newspapers and journals.

Bora Chung is a writer and translator whose works include the National Book Award finalist and International Booker Prize-shortlisted Cursed Bunny.

C.A. Davids works as an arts and culture worker, writer, and indie publisher of children’s books. Her forthcoming novel, How to be a Revolutionary, will be published in 2022 by Verso Books in the UK and the USA, and by Penguin Random House in South Africa.

C N Lester is a multi-genre musician, author of the critically acclaimed book Trans Like Me, artistic director of Transpose, and trans feminist researcher, educator, and activist. Words and music at BBC Radio 3 and 4, SBS, The Guardian, and at the Sydney Opera House. They're currently working on their next album and next book.

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.

Carlos Páez González is a multidisciplinary theatre artist, educator, and game designer based in Abu Dhabi. His work focuses on creating participatory spaces where one can explore different ways of being in the world.

Caryl Phillips is an internationally acclaimed writer whose work includes novels, television documentaries, and screenplays such as the adaptation of VS Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, for which he won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata Film Festival.

Cassie Lawrence is a journalist and content editor. She has worked for various literary organisations with a global outlook, including Saqi Books and Asia House. Alongside her work she has volunteered for free-speech advocates English PEN and literature site, Asymptote Journal, among others.

Cecilia Knapp is the 2020-21 Young People's Laureate for London. Her poems have appeared in The White Review, bath magg, Magma and Ambit, and she was shortlisted for the 2020 Women Poets Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Peach Pig, will be published by Corsair in 2022 – as well as her debut novel, Little Boxes, forthcoming from Borough Press in 2022. 

Chiké Frankie Edozien is a Nigerian-American journalist and memoirist. His memoir Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man was published in 2017 the UK and US by Team Angelica Press and was the winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award Gay Memoir/Biography category.  In 2018, the book was distributed in South Africa through Jacana Books and in West Africa by Ouida Books.

Christina Sharpe is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto and the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Ordinary Notes.

Christopher Kazar Janigian was born in Rhode Island. Some of his recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, FENCE, Lana Turner, and Second Factory. He lives in Queens, NY.

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Claudia Piñeiro has won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A crack in the wall).

Cristina Rivera Garza is an author, translator and critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth, 2023), which was long listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The Taiga Syndrome, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, (Dorothy Project, 2018), won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020), was a finalist National Book Critics Circle Award In Criticism. She is M.D. Anderson Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies, and a MacArthur Fellow 2020-2025.

Daisy Hildyard is a writer based in the north of England. Her first novel Hunters in the Snow (2014) won a Somerset Maugham Award at the Society of Authors (UK), and a ‘5 Under 35’ honorarium at the National Book Awards (USA).

Dal Kular is a Sheffield born and based writer of Punjabi/Sikh heritage. She is a facilitator, tutor, and mentor specialising in creative writing arts for healing and has an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes.

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.

Dani Salvadori is a poet and image maker based in London whose photography and short films have been shown globally. Her writing has been published in a range of publications in the US and UK. Her first chapbook In the Blood was published by Ghost City Press in summer 2025.

Dantaé Garee Elliott, PhD, is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her dissertation, 'Barrel Poetics', examines barrel culture within the Caribbean diaspora and its representation in contemporary Caribbean art. She served as Co-Director of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Summer Seminar for the Curatorial Fellowship class in 2022.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; The American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; Poem­-A-Day; Poetry; and Tongue — among other journals and anthologies.

David Dabydeen is a writer, critic and historian who first became known for his prize-winning collection of Creole poems, Slave Song (1984). His first novel, The Intended, was published in 1991 followed by Disappearance (1993) and The Counting House (1996).

David Johnson is senior lecturer at the Open University in English Literature. His publications include Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Jurisprudence:

Dean Atta is a poet from London, UK. His debut collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, published by the Westbourne Press, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. He was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday Pink List and featured in Out News Global Pride Power List.

Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Her columns, essays, and cultural criticism have been published in India and internationally.

Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi.

Denise DeCaires Narain is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex and has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing. Her book, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing: Making Style was published in 2001 and she is currently working on a monograph on the Jamaican writer Olive Senior.

Deniz Utlu was born in Hannover in 1983. His published novels include Die Ungehaltenen [The Falling] (Graf, 2014), Gegen Morgen [Towards Morning] (Suhrkamp, 2019) and Vaters Meer (Suhrkamp, 2023), which will be published in English as My Father’s Sea in 2027, translated by Katy Derbyshire.

Diana Evans is the author of the novels A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a, which was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers.

Dilyana Kodjamanova holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the American College Dublin. She participated in the Translation Academy, organised by Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, where she translated an excerpt from 'Ánne' by Kamelia Panayotova. Dilyana translated the essay 'Masters and Chevengurs' by Mitko Novkov, published in the catalogue, Contemporary Bulgarian Prose 2024.

Divya Ghelani is a former CHASE placement holder at Wasafiri. She was born in Gujarat and grew up in Loughborough, Leicestershire. She is currently a PhD Scholar in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia, where she is working on a critical thesis in literary ethics and a second novel.

Don Mee Choi is a writer and literary translator. She received the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry), as well being the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst] Artists-in-Berlin Programme. She is training as a visual artist.

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net nominee, Cave Cavem Poetry Prize Semifinalist, Obsidian Fellow, and Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

Maryam Mirza is from Lahore, Pakistan, and is Associate Professor of South Asian Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. She is the author of two monographs, Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Resistance and Its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Durre Shahwar is a writer and researcher with a PhD in autofiction and Pakistani-Welsh identity from Cardiff University. She was shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize 2022. Durre is the co-editor of multiple books: Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (404 Ink); Just So You Know (Parthian Books). She was the recipient of a Future Wales Fellowship, researching climate justice and art. She was formerly a Deputy Editor at Wasafiri. Durreshahwar.com

Dushi Rasiah is a Tamil fiction editor and writer from London. Her writing explores cross-cultural relationships, inter-generational family dynamics and diasporic experiences. Her short stories have previously been longlisted for the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award and published by Dear Damsels.

Dwight Thompson is the award-winning author of the novel Death Register and has published short stories in PREE and the Caribbean Writer. He won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize, was shortlisted for the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition, and was longlisted for the 2021 and 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Dzifa Benson is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work intersects science, art, the body and ritual, which she explores through poetry, prose, theatre-making, performance, essays and criticism. She has performed nationally and internationally for Tate Britain, the Courtauld Institute of Art, BBC Africa Beyond and more, and she abridged the National Youth Theatre’s 2021 production of Othello in collaboration with Olivier award-winning director Miranda Cromwell. Dzifa Benson is a recipient of the 2021 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, a prize which champions the UK’s leading new poetry voices.  

Elif Lootens is a Belgian-Turkish writer and researcher. Her research concerns migration, borders, in particular the reproduction of colonial legacies and white ignorance in the academy. She obtained her Master’s degree in Migration and Diaspora studies at SOAS University of London.

Elizabeth Chakrabarty is an interdisciplinary writer using creative and critical writing, besides performance, to explore themes of race, gender and sexuality.

Elizabeth has a background working in arts organisations focusing on new writing, project management, and live literature events.

Elizabeth Wong is a Malaysian author and geologist, and is based in London and Kuala Lumpur. Liz has degrees in Geology and English from Yale University and Imperial College London. Her debut novel, We Could Not See the Stars, is published by John Murray Press.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is an author, an academic and a poet of the 'more-than-human.' Her latest book, Of Sea, dwells in wetlands, salt marshes, and other intertidal zones of language and the natural world. Burnett's other publications include the poetry collection Swims (Penned in the Margins, 2017), a nature memoir, The Grassling (Penguin, 2019) and a monograph on contemporary innovative poetry communities. She is a nature diarist for Oh magazine and The Guardian, and is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow. Three poems from Of Sea are published in Wasafiri 106: the Water issue, and are available to read free online until the end of June.  

Ellah P Wakatama, OBE, (Hon) FRSL has over 25 years of experience as a publisher, including five years as Deputy Editor of an international literary journal. Wakatama is Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian and critic. She is the author and editor of just under twenty books, including Stories of Women (2005), Postcolonial Poetics (2018), and a widely translated biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). Indian Arrivals 1870-1915:

Ellen Corbett is an award-winning literary translator, PhD Researcher, and Fulbright alumnus. Her translations from Irish have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Words Without Borders, and Modern Poetry in Translation, and translations from English have appeared in Comhar.

Emma Oldham (she/her) is an award-winning conservation biologist, campaigner, public speaker, and writer from Newark-on-Trent, England. Her passion for wildlife and storytelling took root in childhood, never far from a notepad or a rescued creature. This early curiosity has blossomed into a lifelong mission:

Erin Brady is a self-employed translator who has spent her life moving between places. Currently doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, she was shortlisted in the Writers’ & Artists’ Short Story Competition 2023 and her flash fiction was published in Mslexia Issue 99.

Esme Feurtado is an AHRC-funded PhD student supervised jointly between Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and King’s College London (KCL). Her thesis, ‘Feeling Out of Humour:

Esme Godden is currently School Business Manager of the School of Arts & Creative Industries at University of East London. She has worked in the arts and creative sector for fifteen years, in a variety of roles from project and event management to recruitment and organisational development.

Esther King is the deputy editor of The Dial, a magazine of international writing and reporting. She is based in Brussels, Belgium. 

Eugenia Ladra (1992, Montevideo) holds a degree in Communication and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing. Carnada (Bait), her debut, was a finalist for the IESS Prize in Italy and has been published in Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, and Italy.

Eve Newstead is a writer from Newcastle Upon Tyne, with fiction twice-shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and published in Aayo Magazine. Typically, her writing explores northern identity, class, female mental health and sexual assault. Eve’s shortlisted piece is an extract from her first novel, for which she is seeking publication.

Farah Ahamed’s writing has been published in Ploughshares, White Review, LA Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, and Markaz Review. 

Farah Ali is the writer of the novels Telegraphy and The River, The Town, and the short-story collection People Want to Live. Her work has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of Lakeer, and an editor at Wasafiri.

Farhaana Arefin is an editor and organiser based in London. She is a co-founder and co-publisher of Hajar Press and a consulting editor at Hurst Publishers.

Faridoun Farrokh was born and educated in Iran, where he began a teaching career. He was a professor of English at Texas A&M International University. His research focused on 18th-century English literature and contemporary Iranian fiction, as well as literary translation. His English language translation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. He is currently based in the USA.

Fatima AlJarman is a writer, researcher, and cultural practitioner based between the UAE and New York City. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Unootha and a writing residency co-director + public programs co-ordinator at Bayt AlMamzar.

Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. Their literary work has been longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Carol Shields Award. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of colour.

Fiona Doloughan is a Lecturer in English (Literature and Creative Writing) in the Dept. of English at the Open University. Her research and teaching interests revolve around contemporary narrative; and issues of translation and creativity. She has published a monograph on Contemporary Narrative:

Florian Stadtler is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Migration at the University of Bristol. From 2010-2022 he was Reviews Editor of Wasafiri, after which he joined the Board of Trustees. He is an expert in British South Asian Film, History and Literature, as well as South Asian Writing and Indian Popular cinema.

Foday Mannah hails from Sierra Leone and currently lives in Scotland, where he is employed as a teacher of English. He holds an MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation from the University of Stirling and an MA with Distinction in Professional Writing from Falmouth University.

Forrest Gander is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator whose most recent book of poems is Mojave Ghost. His many translations include Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda and It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho.

Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo.

Francesca is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UCL. Her research project explores literary representations of the ecological crisis in everyday life, with a specific focus on forms of ecological duration and slow violence. Her broader interests include creative-critical practices and multilingual writing.

Franklin Nelson is a writer and editor at the Financial Times. A graduate of the University of Oxford, his work has been published by the TLS and WritersMosaic in the UK, and by Diário de Notícias and the Jornal de Letras in Portugal, among others.

Franklyn Usouwa is a Nigerian storyteller and writer. He loves storytelling in all its forms but is particularly partial to the short story. Franklyn has twice been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in Adda, Writers Space Africa, Ake Review, The Kalahari Review, and Pride Magazine Nigeria.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is a writer and teacher living in London. Their recent books include, We, The Heartbroken (Hajar Press) and The Futures of Racial Capitalism (Polity Press). They are working on a book about sex and death.

Garine Boghossian is an architect, urbanist and researcher based in New York. Her work experience includes large-scale regional planning projects worldwide. She is currently developing a decolonial atlas of Armenian neighborhoods in modern day Turkey based on mental maps produced by genocide survivors.

Gary McKeone was Literature Director at Arts Council England from 1995-2006. Before that he worked with Field Day Theatre Company in Ireland and at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, journalist, broadcaster and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is an editorial board member of The Nation, a Type Media Fellow and formerly editor-at-large for the Guardian.

Dr Gavin Herbertson is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at SWPS University, Warsaw, and an Early Career Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies. His research focuses on modernism, colonial and postcolonial aesthetics, and cross-cultural literary form, with particular attention to Caribbean and global modernist contexts.

Gloria Blizzard is a writer with deep interests in music, dance, science, race, culture, language and spirituality. She brings these perspectives to essays, poetry and reviews of music, dance and film.

Gopika Jadeja is a bilingual poet and translator, writing in English and Gujarati. Her literary writing and translations have been published widely. She is committed to translating writing from marginalised communities. Gopika is working on a project of English translations of poetry from Gujarat.

With roots in London, Punjab, Nairobi, and now Berlin, Gouri Sharma is an internationally renowned freelance journalist and writer working with global media for two decades. She spent five years working on the production desk for the Listening Post, Al Jazeera's flagship media critique show and now covers politics, race, gender, sexual health, and diaspora histories, with bylines in Al Jazeera, MIT Tech Review, BBC, New Lines, and South China Morning Post, among others.

Gurnaik Johal was born in West London in 1998. He was shortlisted for The Guardian’s BAME short story prize in 2018 and graduated from the University of Manchester in 2019. His debut short story collection, We Move, was published by Serpent’s Tail and maps an area of West London as he sees it.

Guy Gunaratne is a British novelist, playwright, and contemporary artist, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, Jhalak Prize, and longlisted for the Booker and Goldsmith’s Prize.

Haia Mohammed is a Palestinian poet and artist from Gaza. Her work explores memory, land, and the intimate textures of survival, often weaving personal witness with collective history. Through poetry and visual art, she documents the fragile and resilient moments that shape Palestinian life.

Haider Shahbaz is a translator and writer from Pakistan. He is the translator of Mirza Athar Baig’s Urdu novel Hassan’s State of Affairs (HarperCollins India) and Fauzia Rafique’s Punjabi novel Keeru (Hachette India).

Haiyan Xie is an associate professor at Central China Normal University. She received her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Alberta. She has published several essays on Yan Lianke and is now working on her book project, tentatively titled “Mythorealism as Method: Form and Ideology in Yan Lianke’s Fiction.”

Born in 1954 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed 'unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service, where he worked for 25 years. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway, The Dead Lake, which was long-listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground. The Devils' Dance is the first of his Uzbek language novels to appear in English, and the translation by Donald Rayfield and John Farndon won the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize. His second book published by Tilted Axis Press is Of Strangers and Bees, about an Uzbek writer in exile who traces the fate of the medieval polymath Avicenna. His works are banned in Uzbekistan.

Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College.

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi me Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Waewae, Kaati Mamoe, Waitaha) is a writer and artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Their work is concerned with realising Indigenous sovereignty through the body, and through the whenua — the land.

Haniya Habib was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared previously in Litro and Behenchara Magazine. She currently teaches comparative literature at Habib University in Karachi.

Hannah Fox is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, funded by the AHRC through the WRoCAH doctoral training partnership. Her research focuses on literary representations of bibliomigrancy and censorship in twenty-first century world literature.

Hasti is a poet and writer living in South East London. They are the recipient of the 2023 White Review Poet's Prize, the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and their debut pamphlet ' young, dumb, and full of poems'  is out now with Little Betty.

Hazel Evans (b. 1994) is an artist, writer, and literary translator based near Aarhus, Denmark. She translates Puk Qvortrup, Glenn Bech, and Shekufe Tadayoni Heiberg, among others.

Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and is studying for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (Hajar Press) is her first book.   …  

Heewon Chung is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the Institute for Urban Humanities, University of Seoul. Her research interests take up comparative literature and urban culture from the eighteenth century to the contemporary. She has published essays on Samuel Richardson, D A François de Sade, Virginia Woolf, Agnès Varda, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and others.

Henghameh Saroukhani is Assistant Professor in Black British Literature at Durham University. She has published widely on contemporary black British and black Atlantic literatures and is co-editor of a recent special issue on the late Andrea Levy (ARIEL, 2022).

Heuijung Hur was born in Seoul in 1989. She began publishing fiction in 2016 after receiving the Literature and Society New Writer’s Award.

Hilal Chouman is a Lebanese novelist and writer born in Beirut. He has written five novels in Arabic: Stories of Sleep (Dar Malamih, 2008); Napolitana (Dar Al Adab, 2010); Limbo Beirut (Dar Al Tanweer, 2012); Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow (Dar Al Saqi, 2016), and Sadness in My Heart (Khan AlJanub, 2022).

Hirsh Sawhney was joined the Wasafiri board in 2006. He is the editor of Delhi Noir, an anthology of brand-new fiction published by Akashic Books and HarperCollins India. He regularly writes for the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian and is a Contributing Editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

Hitomi Yoshio is a literary translator whose publications include Natsuko Imamura’s This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? (Pushkin Press, 2023) and Mieko Kawakami’s Ashes of Spring (Amazon Audible, 2025; co-translation). 

Idza Luhumyo is a Kenyan writer. Her work has been published by Popula, Jalada Africa, The Writivism Anthology, Baphash Literary & Arts Quarterly, MaThoko's Books, Gordon Square Review, Amsterdam's ZAM Magazine, Short Story Day Africa, The New Internationalist, The Dark, and African Arguments.

Ilya Katrinnada is an educator, researcher, and writer with a geeky interest in the intersections of creativity, community, and culture. Her written works have been published by National Heritage Board (Singapore), National Library Board (Singapore), and Kitaab International, among others.

Imani Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America, as well as seven other books of nonfiction.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency.

Ioana Radulescu is Wasafiri's Prize intern, and co-founder of Wonderer Journal. She is currently a student at Queen Mary University of London, and will be reading for an MPhil in English Studies at Cambridge University in autumn 2022.  

Ira Mathur is an Indian born Trinidadian journalist and columnist.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author. Her books have won and been nominated for multiple awards. She co-presented the BBC's Novels That Shaped Our World podcast. She has judged various prizes including the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Irma Pineda is among the most prominent Indigenous-language poets of the Americas, as well as a leading Indigenous rights activist. She is the author of ten bilingual Didxazá-Spanish books of poetry, three books of poetry in Spanish, and three trilingual books (Didxazá-Spanish-English) in Wendy Call’s translation.

Isabel Waidner is a novelist based in London. They are the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), Sterling Karat Gold (2021), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019), and Gaudy Bauble (2017). They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Isabella Peralta is a Manila-born writer and educator. Her work has been listed for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award, the 4thWrite Prize, and the Bloomsbury Mentorship Programme.

Jack has worked as a writer since his MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, and since then has written numerous short and long-form fiction to varying degrees of success. In 2020, he collaborated on a gift book about the suffragettes. He is currently working on a novel.

Jack Little is a young British poet and edits The Ofi Press. He is based in Mexico City.

Jack Rutherford received his PhD from University of Essex. His thesis considers representations of Native Americans in film. Jack also teaches in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies and is an Assistant Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Jaden Morton is a writer of poetry and fiction based in Nottingham, UK. Much of their work explores trans and neurodivergent identities. Their writing has been published in Sweet Tooth, Impossible Archetypes, and Left Lion Magazine.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

James Bradley is an Environmental Scientist whose research interests are in understanding the co-evolution of life and Earth, including processes that are driven by the activity of microorganisms - such as the fluxes of carbon between the atmosphere and other components of the Earth system.

Jay Bernard (FRSL) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in sound, poetry and social history. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge.

Jean Khalfa joined the Wasafiri Board in 2004 and in 2005 edited a special issue on the Algerian activist, writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, partly reproduced in translation in Les Temps Modernes, of which Khalfa is an editor.

Jeannette L. Clariond is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers.

A self-taught photographer and a fisherman from the indigenous Orang Seletar community residing in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, Jefree Salim uses photography to document the lives of his people, as well as their ever-changing environmental and cultural landscapes.

Jen Calleja's most recent books include the experimental memoirs Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (a Guardian Book of the Day, July 2025) and Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (5-star review, The Telegraph).

Jennifer Wong is the author of Light Year (Nine Arches Press, 2026) and 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020). She studied English at Oxford and has a PhD in creative writing from Oxford Brookes University.

Jeremy Tiang (he/they) is a novelist, playwright, and literary translator. He has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Jess Mally (they/them) is a London based anti-racism practitioner and organisational health consultant, writer, speaker, podcast host, creative, events producer, and more. With a passion for Social Change, Mental Health, the Arts, and Spirituality, they hope to use any and all means available to them, to tell stories that shape a better world.

Jess Thayil’s work has appeared in Magma Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Wales, The Seventh Quarry, Black Bough Poetry, PoetryNI, Poetry Ireland Review, The Tangerine Magazine, The Stinging Fly, AbstractMagazineTV, Whale Road Review and Potomac Review with more forthcoming elsewhere. She/They are of South Indian origins.

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson is a Swedish/Colombian writer and climate justice activist based in Edinburgh. Recently appointed Wasafiri's new Writer-in-Residence for 2021-22, she facilitates workshops exploring the colonial roots of the climate crisis.

Born in Manila, Jim Pascual Agustin moved to Cape Town in 1994 and married the Canadian-South African woman he met while travelling in the Philippine North.

Jimin Kang is a Seoul-born, Hong Kong-raised, and England-based writer and journalist now studying environmental theory at the University of Oxford. Her work has previously been published in The New York Times, Asymptote , Off Assignment and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, among other outlets.

José Buera is a Caribbean and Latinx poet from the Dominican Republic. His poetry has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Konch, Magma, Wet Grain, and elsewhere. He won the 2024 Happiful Poetry Prize, placed third on the Plaza Poetry Prize and is part of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme 24/25.

Joshua Idehen is a Poet, workshop facilitator, musician, and founder of renowned poetry/music magazine Poejazzi. As a poet, he has performed at most major festivals, appeared in anthologies alongside Linton Kwesi Johnson. As a musician, he works in three bands: Benin City, HUGH and with electro dub outfit LV.

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-nehiyâw, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed.

Juan Gonzales is a Filipino migrant and multidisciplinary performance-maker based in Dubai. He began his artistic journey in the Philippines, where he studied and practised theatre, learning early on that art must engage with social issues.

Juana Adcock is a poet, translator and editor. Her poetry collection I Sugar the Bones (Out-Spoken Press, 2024) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for The Saltires, Scotland's National Book Awards. She is co-editor of the anthology Temporary Archives: Poetry by Women of Latin America (Arc, 2022), and has judged the Premio Valle Inclán prize for translation from Spanish.

Juleus Ghunta is a Chevening Scholar, poet and children’s writer. His poems have appeared in 30 journals. He is the co-editor of two issues of Interviewing the Caribbean journal (The UWI Press), focused on children’s literature and childhood trauma. His picture book Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows was published by CaribbeanReads in 2021.  

J.A. Mensah is a prose and theatre writer and a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of York. She was a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Applied Human Rights and her plays have been produced by Pilot Theatre in York and Live Theatre in Newcastle, among others.

Juni is currently a PhD researcher in English Literature at the University of Kent writing about the narrativization of climate emergency in post-2008 American dystopias and utopias.

Kai Easton is Professor of Literature and Visual Cultures at Krea University near Chennai in South India.

Kaliane Bradley is the author of The Ministry of Time, which was an Observer Best of 2024 debut and has sold in 20 languages to date. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Kamelia Panayotova (b. 1999) has authored the novel Anne (2023) and the poetry collection The Man Who Leaves (2021). Her poetic debut was shortlisted for the Peroto national award for contemporary poetry. She is a winner of numerous literary accolades, as well as awards for children’s literature and translations from English. Kamelia has been honoured with significant awards from the national poetry competitions Dobromir Tonev and Sea.

Kareena Gianani is an Indian journalist and a CHASE-funded Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. She is writing a lyric essay collection about long-distance love and how it shapes women’s freedom, work, and migration in a globalised world.

Karen McCarthy Woolf writes poetry, prose and radio drama. She is the editor of Bittersweet: Black Women’s Contemporary Poetry (1998) and Kin: New Fiction by Black and Asian Women (2004), both of which went on to form the basis of two nationwide tours.

Karim Kattan was born in 1989 in Jerusalem and holds a doctorate in comparative literature. His 2017 short story collection, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was a finalist for the Prix Boccace. 

Karina Lickorish Quinn is a Peruvian-British writer and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her works include The Dust Never Settles (Oneworld, 2021), The House of Skin (Stanchion, 2023), and The River Dies Quietly (Oneworld, forthcoming 2026).

Karthik Shankar is a PhD student in English at the University of Virginia. His PhD project focuses on queer theory and environmental humanities across South Asia and the Middle East. 

Kate Arthurs is director of strategy for the British Council’s global arts programme. She previously ran her own company managing cultural and artistic projects, including partnership between London Book Fair and British Council to shape an annual programme of international writing in India, China and Turkey.

Kate Griffin is a fiction and poetry writer from Newcastle Upon Tyne. Her story, Flicker, was longlisted for The Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in 2024 and Thin Walls, was longlisted for The Aurora Writing Prize in 2023. She has been published by Quagmire Magazine, The McNeese Review, Driftwood Press, and more.

Kate Hawkes is a writer of short stories, articles, and the occasional play. Her work has been featured in publications including Blue and Green Tomorrow, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and Culture Trip.

Katharine Halls is translator of contemporary Arabic literature. Her work has been awarded the James Tait Black Prize for fiction and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, named finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and the EBRD Literature Prize, and longlisted for the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize.

Katherine Agyemaa Agard is a Trinidadian writer who currently lives mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. of colour was the winner of the 2018 Essay Press Open Book Prize, and was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature. 

Kavita Bhanot is ECR Leverhulme Fellow at Leicester University. She wrote the landmark essay 'Decolonise not Diversify' in 2015. She has edited three short-story collections, including Too Asian, not Asian Enough and Book of Birmingham, and co-founded the Literature Must Fall collective and festival, with whom she organises reading groups and events.

Kayo Chingonyi  was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of two pamphlets, and a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry.

Kayte Ferris has been writing on the internet since 2016. In her creative non-fiction she is interested in desire, knowing and emotional experience, exploring fundamental, and unanswerable, personal questions.

Kazi Sharowar Hussain, also known as Kazi Neel, is a Miya poet, multimedia journalist, and cultural activist from Barpeta, Assam. His work depicts life, culture, marginalisation, displacement, statelessness, and more.

Khairani Barokka (she/her/dia) is a writer from Jakarta, based in London. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards.

Khaled Esguerra is a photographer, artist, and designer from Abu Dhabi.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress. Mouradian is the author of the award-winning book The Resistance Network:

Kiera Vaclavik is Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of London and directs its interdisciplinary Centre for Childhood Cultures.

Kimberly McIntosh is a writer and researcher and is currently Senior Policy and Research Officer at Child Poverty Action Group. Previously, she was Senior Policy Officer at The Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank, where she published extensively on race and inequality.

Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is a co-convener of the Revolutionary Papers project and author of Crossroads: I Live Where I Like. (illustrated by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, foreword by Robin DG Kelley, PM Press, 2021).

Koye Oyedeji’s writing has appeared in a number of publications including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Wasafiri, BRAND Magazine, and the Washington City Paper Fiction Issue. He has also contributed to British anthologies such as IC3: The Penguin Book of Black British Writing (Penguin) and the anthology Closure (Peepal Tree).

KUCHENGA is a writer, an agitator and avid consumer of all culture high and low. She is a black transsexual feminist whose work has been published in online magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, gal-dem, Dazed, i-D and Broadly. Her short story 'Saved' is published in Wasafiri Special Issue 98: Queer Worlds/Global Queer.

Lalah-Simone Springer is a working-class poet, speculative fiction writer and digital marketing consultant.

Laura Jane Lee is a Hong Kong-born, Singapore-based poet. She is a winner of the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize and various international poetry competitions. Her work has been featured in The Straits Times, Tatler Asia, Poetry London, Ambit, QLRS, and the 52nd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. Laura Jane also works with the Asia Creative Writing Programme, and is Poetry Editor at SPLOOSH. She is also part of the poetry.sg team. Her most recent pamphlet flinch & air was published with Out-Spoken Press in 2021.

Laura Lynes is a writer living in London. Her writing has appeared in publications including Litro Magazine, SAND Journal and Stillpoint Magazine. She has been shortlisted for the London Magazine's Short Story Prize and received honourable mentions in the 2022 Berlin Writing Prize and the 2022 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition. 

Laure Assaf is an anthropologist and an Assistant Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research and teaching focus on youth, urbanity, migration, and social hierarchies in the contemporary United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the broader Gulf region.

Laurel Taylor is a translator, poet, writer, and scholar. Her recent work includes a co-translation (with Hitomi Yoshio) of Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow, and her translation of Maiko Seo’s Five Blessings for a Wedding, forthcoming from Europa Editions. 

Lauri Kubuitsile is an award-winning writer and the author of numerous works of fiction for both children and adults. She has won several prestigious literary awards, including the Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing, an honour she received twice, the Bessie Head Literature Award, and the Botswerere Prize for Creative Writing.

Laurie Bolger is a London-based writer and the founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. Laurie’s work has been widely anthologised and has featured at Glastonbury, TATE and Sky Arts.

Layan Kayed is a Palestinian activist currently pursuing a master's degree in sociology at Birzeit University.

Lee Langvad (b. 1980) is a writer and translator who lives in Copenhagen. (S)he is the author of Find Holger Dane and SHE IS ANGRY – a testimony of transnational adoption, among others. Langvad has received the prestigious Montana’s Literature Prize.

Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), her novels include Bird Summons, The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards.

Len Lukowski is a writer and performer living in South East London. His work has been published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Cardiff Review, Live Canon, The Ofi Press and LossLit. He came 3rd in the 2018 York Literature Festival / YorkMix poetry competition. He is a former Flight 1000 Associate at Spread the Word.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet born in Argentina who lives in London. His debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix’s second English collection, Southernmost:

Leon is Professor of Art History at The Open University. Along with a range of edited and co-edited books on modern and contemporary art and aesthetics, museums and curating, cultural policy and anthropology, he is the author of Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester 2011) and Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art (Liverpool 2017).

Lerah Mae Barcenilla is a writer and poet who grew up in Capiz, Philippines. Her work explores Filipino history, superstitions, mythologies, and folklore.

Liana Badr is a novelist, short story writer, journalist, and poet. Raised in Jericho, she obtained a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from the Beirut Arab University, but was not able to complete her MA due to the Lebanese Civil War. She has worked as a volunteer in various Palestinian women’s organisations, and as an editor in the Al Hurriyya review cultural section.

Liliana A Romero known as LILOPHILIA, is a Colombian graphic artist, printmaker, and activist based in London. Her work blends Afro-Caribbean heritage with feminist and decolonial narratives

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Her work includes Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa (New Directions, 2023), Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome (FSG, 2025), Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows (Knopf, 2025), and Yoko Tawada’s Exophony (Dialogue Books, 2025) among others.

Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Safal Kiswahili Prize for African Literature.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. Lola Olufemi's 'Red' was shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Our 2022 prize is open now — enter here.

Louis James is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury. In the 1960s he taught at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and published widely in the fields of Victorian, Modern and Caribbean literature.

Luiza Sauma is a Brazilian-British writer. She is the author of two novels, Flesh and Bone and Water and Everything You Ever Wanted. The latter was short-listed for the Encore Award and recommended by Florence Welch’s Book Club. Her writing has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published widely.

Lyn Innes is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Born and educated in Australia, she moved to North America and developed her interest in cultural nationalism, focusing on Irish, African, African American and Caribbean literatures.

Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and cultural critic. He is the author of Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu, and the translator of Fikr's Taunsvi's journal from the Partition of India, The Sixth River. Maaz was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow with Literature Across Frontiers in Wales for Creative Writing and Translation in 2018, and teaches literary studies at Jindal Global University. He is presently working on his PhD monograph, Heterodoxies of Friendship in E M Forster, besides other projects. Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu and The Sixth River were reviewed in Wasafiri 103, which you can purchase here.   

Madeleine Ballard is a mixed-race writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

Madeleine Thien is the author of five books, most recently Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), and The Book of Records (2025). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018), and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018).

Maggie Gee joined the Wasafiri Advisory Board in 2004. She is the writer of eleven novels, a collection of short stories, The Blue, and a memoir, My Animal Life (2010). Born in Poole, Dorset, she was one of the original 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

Mahvish Ahmad works on political organising and documentary practices in sites of disappearance, tracing circulating techniques of imperial and sovereign violence, as well as the material legacies of anti-colonial and left movements.

Mailé Nguyen is an academic and Vietnamese-American adoptee based in Chicago. They are pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS University of London. Their research interests are in queer Korean literature, adoptee media, and transcultural consumption of gendered aesthetics. Cover image:

Maisa Almanasreh is a Palestinian translator based in Portugal. She has an MA in Interpreting and Translation from Leeds University and has previously translated fiction for Egypt + 100: Stories from a Century After Tahrir and The Book of Sana’a (both Comma Press).

Malachi McIntosh is Editor and Publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge.

Malak Abdelkhalek is a LAHP AHRC- funded doctoral researcher at King’s College London. Her research looks at political commitment and avant-garde literary production’s relationship through the lens of periodicals based in Egypt in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Malak N Hijazi is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza, whose work has appeared in international magazines across journalism, literary non-fiction, and poetry.

Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. Glitchwork (the87 press, 2026) is his debut collection.

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) is a major cultural figure around the world. Her career has spanned work as a publisher, editor, interviewer, reviewer, scriptwriter, lyricist, radio and TV presenter, activist and mentor. 

Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she has worked as a journalist and scriptwriter.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica.

María del Pilar Kaladeen specialises in the history of Indian indentured labour in the Caribbean. She is the co-editor of the Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies and has collaborated in the production of two anthologies of writing on this subject.

Marina Salandy-Brown is founder and president of the Bocas Lit Fest, the writer and reader development organisation in Trinidad and Tobago, which hosts the Caribbean’s largest annual literary festival, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. Marina is a multi-prizewinning former BBC producer and editor with a publishing background.

Marina Warner CBE is an eminent and prolific cultural critic and writer. Her non-fiction publications include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), which won the Fawcett Book Prize, Signs and Wonders:

Marine Petrossian is an Armenian poet. She has six books of poetry published in Armenia, two published in France, and one in Argentina. In 2007-2009, Petrossian was a columnist at Haikakan Zhamanak, a prominent opposition newspaper. It had an unprecedentedly large readership and made her a public figure in Armenia.

Marral Shamshiri is a PhD candidate in international history at LSE. She is a co-editor of the book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World (Pluto, 2023). Her recent writing and research have been published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), History Workshop, Kohl:

Marta Fernández Campa has previously worked as an editor in the journal Anthurium and is currently editor at Caribbean InTransit and Postcolonial Text.

Marta Naigzy Woodward considers herself an American child of East Africa, and a member of the African diaspora at large.

Martin Reed is a writer, campaigner, and trade unionist based in London. He worked for the Society of Authors for eight years, which he quit in July 2024 then joined Fossil Free Books the next day. His work has appeared in Critical Quarterly, Litro, The Author, Writing Magazine, Ethical Consumer, and elsewhere.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize.

Masha Keryan is a visual artist based in Boston. Her current work explores the Armenian identity existing in the Western contemporary context, through research and incorporation of the inherited Armenian visual language. For recent and future shows: mashakeryan.com

Maung Htike Aung is a poet, literary translator and educator from Mandalay, Myanmar. He holds an MA in English from Yadanabon University and completed an online literary translation workshop at National Centre for Writing, UK.

Max Porter is the multi-award winning author of four novels, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, The Death of Francis Bacon, and Shy. His work has been translated into thirty-six languages. He is a frequent collaborator with theatre-makers, artists, and musicians.

Maya Caspari is a writer, curator, and lecturer at the University of York. Her forthcoming book is called Memory, Violence and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary World Literature. Her poetry has been published in journals including Poetry Review, Ambit, Butcher’s Dog and highly commended in the Forward Prizes.

Maya Jaggi was formerly Literary Editor of Third World Quarterly. She is a well known and highly respected feature writer and lead reviewer on international literature for The Guardian.

Mazen Maarouf is a Palestinian-Icelandic poet, writer, translator and journalist. His collection of short stories Jokes for the Gunmen won the 2016 Al-Multaqa Prize and in 2019 it was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize with translator Jonathan Wright.  

Dr Meena Kandasamy FRSL is a poet and provocateur who has spent two decades triggering online trolls. She has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her novel, When I Hit You, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, Jhalak Prize and Hindu Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Melanie Abrahams is the founder of the companies renaissance one and Tilt. She mentors emerging producers and lectures widely. She was the curator of Modern Love, a project exploring love and modern relationships which was nominated for an EMMA Award for Best Theatre/Play.

Merle Collins was born in Grenada and studied in Jamaica and the USA. After university, she served as a coordinator for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean with Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada. During this time, her first works were published in Callaloo:

Mica Montana Gray, a trainee psychologist and writer, passionately explores life’s diverse stories. Her writing can be found in ‘Postscript’, ‘The Color of madness’ anthology and her poetry collection ‘When Daisies Talk’ which explores her personal experiences of mental health. Presently, she curates a newsletter exploring faith, culture, and wellbeing.

Michael Hammer is founder of the ROCsalt research and consultancy network and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Keele University. He takes a particular interest in the voice of civil society in the Global South, post-colonial power dynamics in international NGOs, as well as accountability and equity in the work of multi-lateral institutions.  

Michael McMillan is a playwright, writer and curator/artist.

Mieko Kawakami is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Breasts and Eggs, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and one of TIME’s Best 10 Books of 2020, and the highly-acclaimed Heaven, her second novel to be translated and published in English, which Oprah Daily described as written “with jagged, visceral beauty.”

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, grew up on the Isle of Wight and went to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Having worked both as an actor and director in Britain and Iran, Khalvati founded Matrix, a women’s experimental theatre group and was co-founder of Theatre in Exile.

Minoli Salgado is a writer and academic who teaches English literature at the University of Sussex. Born in Malaysia, raised in Sri Lanka and South East Asia and educated mainly in England, she has published widely on migrant studies and diasporic literature. She is the author of Writing Sri Lanka:

Miriam Tobin is a literary translator from London, working from Spanish into English. She studied in Edinburgh and Barcelona, where she lived for some years, and later completed her MA in Literary Translation at UEA. Her work has appeared in Southwest Review, The Dial, and The London Magazine.

Mistale Taylor is an Oman-born, Australia-raised writer and academic. She recently completed an undergraduate diploma in creative writing at Oxford University. She has published in Amsterdam Quarterly and wrote and staged her first play, 'Fiasco Framed', in London in 2025. Mistale lives in Europe.

Mo Ogrodnik is a filmmaker, writer, and professor in the film department at NYU. She served as the associate dean of the arts for NYU in Abu Dhabi and as a mentor for the Sundance Labs in Jordan. Gulf is her first novel.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is Associate Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Karnataka, India. He is the author of The Gulf Migrant Archives of Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 2024).

Molly Slight is Editorial Director at Scribe UK, an award-winning international independent publisher. She commissions and edits literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, as well as being part of the management team.

Mona Kareem is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has been translated into nine languages, including in Sara El-Kamel's I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, London 2023). 

Monica Ali is a bestselling writer whose work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She is the author of five books: Brick Lane, Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen, Untold Story, and Love Marriage.

Half-Brazilian and half-Montenegrin, Monika Radojevic was born and raised in London. Her first poetry collection, Teeth in the Back of My Neck, was published in 2021. A Beautiful Lack of Consequence is her debut collection of short stories.

Born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Morgan Giles is a literary translator based in Tokyo. She graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Japanese Language and Linguistics in 2009 before moving to London. Her translation of the Naocola Yamazaki short story 'Dad I Love You' appeared in The Book of Tokyo (Comma Press). She won the TA First Translation Prize for her translation of Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri.

Myriam Louise Taleb is a multimedia artist based in Dubai. Her photography work revolves around portraiture, with an aim to learn more about connection and intimacy with the self and her immediate surroundings.

Nadeen Dakkak is Lecturer in World and Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter.

Nadia Atia is a Reader in Postcolonial and Global Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

Nadiyah Abdullatif is an editor and translator based in Scotland working from Arabic, French, and Spanish into English. Her work has appeared in The Markaz Review and ArabLit Quarterly. She has also been a translator-in-residence with the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, UK, and has worked as a copy editor for Asymptote.

Naneh V Hovhannisyan is an Armenian-born writer of creative non-fiction. Her book reviews and life writing have been published by EVN Report, WritersMosaic, and The Cambridge Review of Books, among others. She is interested in history, loss, and belonging, and is currently writing a memoir with accompanying radio essays.

Naomi Madlock is chronically ill poet and nature enthusiast. She is a member of the Bristol-based poetry performance group Braid. At the University of Exeter, she was awarded the Gamini Salgado prize for her dissertation collection.

Naomi Wells is a researcher at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (School of Advanced Study, University of London). She researches on migration and multilingualism in Spanish- and Italian-speaking contexts, with a particular focus on everyday practices of linguistic and cultural translation.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her third book of poems is of sirens,  body &  faultiness, (Boiler House Press, 2018). Her creative and critical writing has recently appeared in MAP Magazine, Transgender Marxism, and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics.

Nathalie Teitler HonFRSL has worked promoting inclusivity in British arts, primarily literature, for thirty years. Born in Buenos Aires, she has a PhD in Latin American poetry. She is an editor, mentor, and writer and was shortlisted for a Sky Arts Award in poetry (editing) in 2024.

Nazik Armenakyan is an award-winning Armenian photographer and founder of documentary photography centre 4Plus. Armenakyan’s focus is on social narratives, specifically relating to those on the margins of Armenian society.

Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture at University of Washington in Seattle. He specialises in the decolonial work of articulating Malay-Indonesian vernacular knowledge in cultural studies expressed through literature, film, and art.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Kenya’s best known novelists and activists who campaigns for ‘cultural decolonisation’ in Africa’s educational institutions and the promotion of African languages — the subject of many of his essays including those that appear in Decolonising the Mind (1986) and Moving the Centre (1993).

Ni Made Purnama Sari is a Balinese writer and the author of two poetry collections, Bali Borneo and Kawitan, and two novels, Kalamata and Yang Menari dalam Bayangan Inang Mati.

Nick Makoha was Shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut poetry collection Kingdom of Gravity. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist, and fabulist. Auguries of a Minor God, her first collection, was published with Faber & Faber in 2021.

Nikesh Shukla's debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010. Alongside his second novel, Meatspace, Nikesh has written for The Guardian, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Vice and BBC2, LitHub, Guernica and BBC Radio 4. Nikesh is also the editor the bestselling essay collection…

Ning Ken was born in Beijing in 1959. His major works include The City of Masks, Tibetan Sky, and Three Trios. For many years, he was the executive deputy editor of the literary magazine October, and he is now a professional writer at the Lao She Literary Institute.

Nneoma Kenure is a Nigerian writer interested in the intersections of gender, media and culture. She is currently editing a collection of short stories on everyday epiphanies that change the course of lives.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet writing in Indonesian and English. In 2017, they were awarded the Sastrawan Muda Award from Southeast Asia Literary Council.

NoViolet Bulawayo is the winner of the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, 'Hitting Budapest', and author of the novels Glory and We Need New Names.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a Zimbabwean writer whose debut collection Shadows was published in 2013. Her most recent novel House of Stone was longlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 International Dylan Thomas Prize.

Nuraliah Norasid is a writer and educator, with a PhD in Creative Writing from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she currently teaches writing and inquiry.

A Sierra Leone–born writer and essayist, Olufemi Terry is the author of Wilderness of Mirrors (2026). Educated in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, and in New York, his short fiction has appeared in Guernica, The Georgia Review, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and has been translated into French and German.

Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer, and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Telegraph, the TLS, and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire.

Omar Sakr is the son of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants, born and raised in Western Sydney. He is an award-winning bisexual poet, author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books), and most recently, The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press), which released in North America through Andrews McMeel Publishing.   

Oyinkan Braithwaite is an author and Kingston University graduate. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her debut novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer, has been longlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction.

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American writer and translator.

Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer and translator.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation, Head of the School of Law and Founder/Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary, University of London. Professor Green has published extensively on state crime, state violence, mass forced evictions/displacement and resistance to state violence.

Perla Kantarjian is an award-winning Lebanese-Armenian poet, editor, and journalist with writings in 35+ publications including The Rumpus, Magma, Electric Literature, The Poetry Society, AMBIT, Black Warrior Review, and others.

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. His first jobs in publishing was as a translator from French and Italian and, then, as an editor for Pluto Press. In 1986, he founded Serpent's Tail, an independent publisher with a commitment to publish innovative fiction in translation.

Prateek is based out of Bangalore where he has been working as a software developer for almost a decade. He has been a kickboxing instructor in the past and has more recently started to dabble in the art of short story writing. He is a graduate of Bangalore Writers Workshop.

Prerana Kumar (they/them) is an Indian writer and editor based in London. They won the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet’s Prize 2022. They are currently reading for a doctorate in Creative Writing at QMUL. Their debut pamphlet, Ixora is out with Guillemot Press.

Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her first novel, We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press/Knopf), won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s best debut of the year and was listed for international awards including the Folio Prize, the Prix Jan Michalski, and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. It was a Top 10 literary fiction book of the year in The Sunday Times and others, and has been translated into several languages.

Princess Arinola Adegbite is a poet, performance artist, Author of Soft Tortures, Factory International, Youth Music, and MOBO Help Musicians funded musician and filmmaker from Manchester. Bitez is also a member of Young Identity and The Writing Squad.

R T Samuel is an editor and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. He is the co-editor of the anthology, The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which was helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the second-most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history.

Rachael Gilmour is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Much of her research focuses on issues of language, translation, and linguistic encounter in colonial and postcolonial contexts from 18th- and 19th-century South Africa to contemporary multilingual Britain.

Rachel Bolle-Debessay is a musician, school teacher, and intercultural mediator working with migrants and refugees. In 2020, she received a PhD from King’s University, London. Using a research-creation approach, her current work focuses on artistic socially engaged practice. In the echo of her PhD dissertation, her work continues to analyse how the global context of transnational and diasporic circulations gets reworked at ground level through processes of local recycling. Rachel Bolle-Debessay's winning essay, ‘Dub Poetry and Theatre in Conversation: The Development of a Performance-Driven Aesthetic’ is published in Wasafiri 113. You can read it online, or by purchasing a print copy.

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Rachel Long is a poet and founder of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, which is housed at The Southbank Centre, in London. Rachel’s poetry and prose have been published widely, most recently in Mal, Granta, and The Poetry Review. Her debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, is published by Picador, in August 2020. Order your copy here. 

Rajeev Balasubramanyam studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, Development Studies at Cambridge, and has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University.

Rajiv Ramkhalawan is an Attorney-at-Law and writer from Trinidad and Tobago. In 2022, Rajiv was the recipient of a Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship in the Prose category from the Bocas Lit Fest. The Fellowship is geared towards supporting emerging Caribbean writers in advancing or completing a manuscript.

Raluca David is a British-Transylvanian writer and psychology academic, currently finishing an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford. Her writing won an Andromeda Short Story Prize, was shortlisted for the Oxford-BNU Prize, the Martin Starkie and Dart Prizes, and appeared in The Mays, East of the Web, and Bluestocking.

Ranjana Khanna is Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone postcolonial theory and literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory.

Reece Williams is a towering presence on the UK’s northern spoken word and poetry scene. He joined poetry collective Young Identity in 2007, performing across the UK and internationally with the likes of Saul Williams, Kae Tempest, The Last Poets and the late Amiri Baraka.

Reem Abbas is a poet and literary critic whose work has appeared in PNR, PBRUM, ArabLit Quarterly, Wasafiri, and in a special issue of the philosophy journal, Crisis and Critique. Her work was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, and she was an UNDERTOW polylingual poet at the PTC.

Rehana Ahmed is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. His poetry has been published by the Financial Times, New Scientist, and the BBC, amongst many others.

Rituparna Mondal is one of the Assistant Editorial Interns at Wasafiri. She is a second year Ph.D. student in the School of English at the University of Kent.

Roba AlSalibi is a Palestinian researcher at the University of Oxford.

Robbie Arnott is a Tasmanian writer who was born in Launceston in 1989. Flames, his highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and the Guardian Booker Prize, and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Robert Fraser is the author of several monographs, including studies of Sir James Frazer, Proust, Victorian quest literature and postcolonial fiction.

Rocío Cerón (Mexico City) is one of the major Mexican poets and multimedia artists of her generation. Her books include Basalto (2002), for which she received the National Literature Prize Gilberto Owen; and Trevande (Swedish, 2012, translation by Ulrika Serling).

Rolando is a Doctoral researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London. His interdisciplinary project explores the ways in which speculative fiction intervenes in contemporary debates linking food security and ecological collapse.

Romalyn Ante is an award-winning Filipino-born, Wolverhampton-based poet, translator, editor and essayist. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, an online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language, and her accolades include the Poetry London Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize, Society of Author’s Foundation Award, Developing Your Creative Practice, Creative Future Literary Award, amongst others. Apart from being a writer, she also works full-time as a nurse practitioner, specialising in providing different psychotherapeutic treatments. Romalyn Ante is a recipient of the 2021 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, a prize which champions the UK’s leading new poetry voices.   Photos courtesy of Jerwood Arts.

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).

Roz Kaveney is a novelist and poet. Her novel Tiny Pieces of Skull won a Lambda Literary Award in 2016. Her Selected Poems 2009-2020 appeared in 2021.

Ruby Hembrom is an Adivasi cultural practitioner, writer, documentarian, and publisher. Her work addresses and challenges issues of non-representation, suppression, and appropriation of Indigenous cultures.

Ruilin is a LAHP-funded PhD candidate in Translation Studies at UCL. After 7 years studying Swahili, his research now sits at the intersection of translation, history, literature, and politics, examining Swahili translations of Chinese books in the 1960–70s and their role in Sino-Tanzanian decolonial solidarities.

Ruth Gilligan is an Irish novelist and journalist now living in the UK, where she works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published four novels to date, and was the youngest person ever to reach number one on the Irish bestsellers' list.

SK Grout (she/they) is a writer, editor, and poet who splits her time between London, UK, and Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Their debut pamphlet, What Love Would Smell Like, is published with V. Press. Their poetry and reviews are widely published in the US, UK, Europe, and the Pacific. Website https://skgrout.com

Sabah Choudrey is a reluctant activist on most things queer, brown, and hairy. Proud trans youth worker since 2014, public speaker, writer, and psychotherapist in training. Interested in the fluidity of sexuality, gender, and faith. Interests also include fostering cats and talking to houseplants.

Sabba Khan is an award-winning author bringing together visual art, architecture, and storytelling into a practice that asks pertinent questions of our times.

Sadia Khatri is a writer. Her fiction and nonfiction is often about cities, dreams, gender; walking and poetry; grief and God. She is a filmmaker and translator for Amrit Pyala, a project archiving Sufi and Bhakti poetry in Pakistan. Sadia lives in Karachi, and is writing her first book. Author photo courtesy of the author

Safa Khatib is a poet and graduate student in the Track for International Writers at Washington University in St Louis.

Sudanese by way of Washington DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa is a British-born Barbadian-raised poet, dancer, and choreographer. Her interdisciplinary art braids dance and poetry on the page and stage. Safiya is currently a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is an Obsidian Foundation fellow and an Apples & Snakes/Jerwood Arts Poetry in Performance recipient.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London.

Dr Sanah Ahsan is a poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, centering compassion and embracing each other's madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, embodiment and poetics as life-affirming practices.

Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran, which she left during the Islamic Revolution. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, the Idaho Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her research interests are primarily modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race.

Sang Young Park was born in 1988 and studied French at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. He worked as a magazine editor, copywriter, and consultant before debuting as a novelist.

Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of two novels, One Small Voice and Deviants, and several works of short fiction. One Small Voice was an Observer Best Debut Novel for 2023, and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.

Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer and independent scholar. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Ahmed is the author of books including What’s the Use?, Living a Feminist Life (2017), and most recently Complaint!, which was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Complaint!

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, she is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Sarah Anjum Bari (she/her) is a Bangladeshi writer, editor, and second year MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she also teaches literary publishing. She completed an MA in History & Literature at Columbia University's campus in Paris.

Sarah Lasoye is a poet and campaigner from London, based in Sheffield. Her debut chapbook, Fovea / Ages Ago, was published by Hajar Press in 2021. She is represented by Lexington Literary, and is working to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.

Saraid de Silva (she/her) is Sri Lankan/ Pākehā and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Among other things, Saraid has been an actor, bartender, theatre-maker, fairy light installer, voiceover artist, and nanny. She currently works as a TV writer. Amma is her first novel. Courtesy of Weatherglass Books

Sasha Debevec-McKenney's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work was shortlisted for the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and longlisted for The Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Mukasonga has won many prizes, for individual books and for the body of her work.

Sebastian Partogi is an Indonesian writer and journalist based in Ubud, Bali. As a literary translator, he has translated the works of Indonesian writers like Ratih Kumala, Djenar Maesa Ayu, Feby Indirani, Angelina Enny and Sindhunata into English.

Selina Nwulu is a poet and essayist. Her work has been widely featured in a variety of journals, short films, and anthologies, including the critically acclaimed New Daughters of Africa and, more recently, Nature Matters, an environmental anthology written by the global majority. 

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction who lives in London. Selma’s first novel, Out of It , was nominated as a Guardian Book of the Year. In 2024, it headed The Guardian's list of five best books to explain Israel-Palestine.

Şermin Sezer-Toraman is an assistant professor in the department of Foreign Language Education at Sinop University, Türkiye. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Middle East Technical University, Türkiye. Her main research interests include postcolonial literatures, diaspora literature, and gender studies.

Shady Lewis, born 1978, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing centres on cultural and political intersections within and beyond the Arab world. He lives in London, where he has spent many years employed by the National Health Service and local authority housing departments.

Shahrnush Parsipur was born in Iran in 1946. She began her career as a writer of fiction and producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. She was imprisoned for nearly five years by the Islamist government without being formally charged. Shortly after her release, she published Women Without Men and was arrested and jailed again, this time for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. While still banned in Iran, the novel became an underground best-seller there, and has been translated into many languages around the world. She is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, among many other books, and now lives in exile in Northern California.

Shalim M Hussain is a writer and academic based in Assam. His books include Betel Nut City (RLFA 2019), Post-Colonial Poems (Red River 2019), Asimot Jar Heral Sima (Papyrus Books 2020) and Again I Hear These Waters (Tilted Axis 2024).

Shalvi Jaxay Shah is a writer, translator, and critic. Born and raised in Gujarat, India, she now divides her time between New York City and Ahmedabad. Her work, translations, and criticism have appeared in Words Without Borders, Epiphany magazine, the Desi Books platform, Columbia Journal, the New York Times, and Scroll.in.

Shamini Sriskandarajah is a carer , therapist, bereavement counsellor, clinical supervisor, florist, writer, and editor. She writes poetry, fiction and life writing about the intricacies of loss, friendship, and family.

Sharanya Deepark is a writer from New Delhi whose work reflects on food, language, conflict, and the commodification of culture. In 2020 she won the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for life writing for her essay 'Seamless', published in Wasafiri's spring 2021 issue, and in 2020 she was part of the Montez Press Writers Grant. In this edition of Wasafiri Wonders, Sharanya writes about memory, rituals, resistance and the act of writing. Read more of Sharanya's work on her website.

Shere Ross is writer based in the United Kingdom. Her work includes short stories and other works of fiction, which have been shortlisted for several prizes including the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is a winner of BlackInk Writing Prize.

Shirley Camia is the Filipina-Canadian author of four poetry collections, including the award-winning Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Mercy. 

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, essayist, and critic. Her debut collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), was short-listed for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second book, a non-fiction narrative on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, was published from Noemi Press in 2023.

Siddhartha Lokanandi was born in Hyderabad. He went to an international school in Wales before attending Columbia University, where he was taught by Edward Said. In order to help his mother financially, he dropped out of school and got a job in a bookshop.

Sigrid Corry is a writer and researcher based in London and Copenhagen. She is interested in feminist futures and the intersections of colonialism, carcerality, and borders. She holds degrees from SOAS and Cambridge and is currently researching UK border issues at the Institute of Race Relations.

Silvia Rothlisberger is a Colombian journalist and writer based in London. Her work has been published in The White Review, Latin American Bureau, Minor Literature[s], Firmament Magazine, and others. She works in editorial at The Guardian.

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 United States of America and Britain.

Simon Gikandi is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organisations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His many books include Reading the African Novel (1987), Maps of Englishness:

Simon Peter Eggertsen came very late to poetry, after a career in international health.

Simone Khanyi Hadebe is Wasafiri's inaugural Illustrator in Residence. She is an interdisciplinary storyteller from Botswana and Zimbabwe. Raised by her grandparents in Bulawayo during the height of Zimbabwe's economic crisis, she draws upon Badia Ahad-Legardy's research in Afro-nostalgia to investigate the visceral act of remembrance.

SJ Kim is the author of This Part Is Silent (2024). She teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

So Mayer is a writer, publisher, bookseller, organiser and film curator.

Sohini Basak’s first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. In 2017, she received a Toto Funds the Arts award. Based in Barrackpore India, she works as an editor.

Sophia Arnold is a CHASE-funded PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kent in collaboration with the human rights organisation, Incomindios UK. Her research explores art and artistic practice within Indigenous-led environmental justice campaigns and movements in North America.

Sophie Hughes is the translator of authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán, Giuseppe Caputo and Enrique Vila Matas. She is the co-editor of Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe.

Sophie Jai is the author of Wild Fires (HarperCollins, 2022). The novel was longlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award.

Stella Dadzie is best known for her co-authorship of The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s lives in Britain which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature, and was recently re-published by Verso as a Feminist Classic.

Stephanie Jones is an Associate Professor in English at the School of Humanities, University of Southampton. She works on literature about marine and maritime worlds, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean.

Stephanie Sy-Quia is a writer and printmaker based in London. Her debut Amnion, won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her writing has featured in The White Review, The Guardian, The Boston Review, and others.

Sukhdev Sandhu joined Wasafiri's Board in 2004 when he edited the highly regarded ‘Focus on Film’ issue (Winter 2004). Sandhu gained his doctorate from Oxford University and teaches at New York University.

Sunny Singh is an anti-colonial academic, writer, novelist, and public intellectual. She has published three novels and three non-fiction books including her latest, A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema.

Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, Susheila Nasta is a writer, presenter, literary activist, and critic.

Susie Thornberry is a writer, producer, and artistic director. Her creative work has been presented with Battersea Arts Centre, WOMAD, BBC Radio 6 Music, and many others. She is working on a collection of funny and unsettling short stories about the lengths people go to hide from disaster, even as it unfolds.

Swati Arora is a Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work engages with the intersections of performance and visual culture, feminist theory, Black Studies, and dramaturgies of urban life.

Sylvia Angelique Alajaji is a Professor of Music at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile, recently published in Turkish translation. In the spring of 2021, she was the Dumanian Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago. 

Tabish Khair was educated mostly in Bihar, India. After working as a journalist for The Times of India in Delhi, he joined academia in Denmark via the usual immigrant process of washing dishes, painting houses etc. His publications include the studies, Babu Fictions (2001) and The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009), the anthology Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2006), the novels The Bus Stopped and Filming (2004, 2007) and the poetry collection, Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000). He is the recipient of numerous awards including the All India Poetry Prize and has published in journals and magazines in India, Britain, Denmark and elsewhere, such as The Times of India, Biblio, The Guardian, New Statesman and Politiken. Tabish Khair joined the Wasafiri board in 2007. Visit Tabish's website at www.tabishkhair.com.

Tatevik Ayvazyan is a London-based writer and producer with Rebel Republic Films and the former director of the Armenian Institute. She is the producer of the award-winning poetry film, Taniel, and is currently adapting Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organiser, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Tenny Arlen (B.A., UCLA 2013) was an author of Armenian and English poetry. Her debut book of poetry, To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? (Yerevan: ARI Press, 2021) was published posthumously and is one of the first books of creative literature written in Armenian by an American-born author.

Teresa Cherukara is a writer based in Dubai. She has been published by London Library Magazine, Taleem, and the Oxford University Press. Teresa was an India Scholar at King’s College London, where she graduated with a MA in Comparative Literature. Her work remains focused on the South Asian experience within the GCC.  

Tessa McWatt is a novelist, screenwriter and librettist. She is the author of six novels and a novella for young adults. Her second novel,  Dragons Cry,  was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Governor General Awards of Canada.

Theodora Danek lives in Vienna. Previously a project manager and managing editor at English PEN, Tilted Axis, and The White Review, she now writes, edits, and solves publishing problems on demand.

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and founder of the writer's magazine FourHubs. She is a joint winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and member of the poetry collective Octavia led by Rachel Long. In 2019, Theresa was announced as the Young People's Laureate for London. Her poetry collection 'In Search of Equilibrium' was published by Nine Arches Press in February.

Thomas Glave is the author of four books and the editor of an anthology, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, Glave's work has received numerous honours and awards.

Thomas Moran received his PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell University in 1994, and since that year has been on the faculty of the Chinese Department at Middlebury College.

Thomas Waller is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham researching Portuguese-language African literatures and cinemas with a particular focus on Angola and Mozambique.

Tice Cin is a British writer and multidisciplinary artist from North London. Her debut novel Keeping the House (2021) received a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for a British Book Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize among other accolades. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary How Much Can You Say?

Tiffany Tsao is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel The Majesties (originally published in Australia as Under Your Wings) and the Oddfits fantasy trilogy (so far, The Oddfits and The More Known World).

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet, novelist, and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Her fifth poetry collection, Egrets, While War, is published by Bloodaxe in May 2026. Her previous three collections from Bloodaxe are A God at the Door, shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2021; Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018; and Everything Begins Elsewhere (2012).

Usha Rungoo (she/her) is a Mauritian-American scholar, creative writer, teacher, and speaker, and is currently at work on a few academic and creative projects.

Vamika Sinha is an arts and culture critic and Deputy Editor of Wasafiri. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London and is a Senior Editor at the South Asian Avant-Garde Anthology and co-founder of Postscript, a now archived literary and arts publication based out of the UAE.

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014, and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Blue Peter, Don't Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of festivals and was Glastonbury Festival's Resident Poet in 2019.

Vicky Unwin has had a long career in media and publishing. Born in Dar es Salaam she has worked in Africa for the majority of her career, spanning 13 years at Heinemann Educational Books where she was Publisher of the African, Caribbean and Asian Writers Series.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet and writer. Her debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf.

Victoria Caudle is currently a PhD student in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Prior to moving to LA, she completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and has an MA in Modern Korean Literature from Seoul National University.

Vijay Khurana’s debut novel, The Passenger Seat, was shortlisted for the Novel Prize and was published by Ultimo Press in 2025. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Griffith Review, The Erotic Review, Big Issue and The Believer, among others.

Vimbai Shire is an independent editor, book designer and founder of Beyond White Space Ltd, which has provided project management, editorial and design services and training to publishers, businesses, institutions and individuals in the UK and internationally since 2007. Her client list includes the African Writers’ Trust…

Wendy Call (she/ella) is the author, co-editor, or translator of nine books and two chapbooks, including the annual anthology she co-founded, Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum). A former Fulbright Scholar and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

William Tham Wai Liang, based in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, was formerly Senior Editor at Vancouver’s Ricepaper magazine. His newest novel, The Last Days , is set in 1981 and covers the continuing legacy of the Malayan Emergency. His first book, Kings of Petaling Street , was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Book Prize.

Y-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង) was a deeply loved mother, researcher, writer, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, explored the enduring impact of war, genocide and displacement. She co-directed the short film Easter Epic and organized the exhibition Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later at Phnom Penh's Bophana Center. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 42.

Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days.

Yaser Hassan Ali is from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. He works as a lecturer at the College of Languages at the University of Duhok and as a visiting lecturer at Nawroz University.

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.

Yessica Klein is a Brazilian writer and artist based in Berlin, Germany. She holds an MA from Kingston University in London. Her writing and artwork have been featured in publications like Banshee Lit (Ireland), The Moth (Ireland), and The White Review (UK).

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados. She grew up in Nigeria and moved to South Africa in 1992. Yewande trained as an architect. Her debut novel Bom Boy was published in 2011 by Modjaji Books.

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books – stories, novels, poems, plays, essays – in both languages.

Dr Yvonne Battle-Felton is an author, academic, host, creative producer, and writer. She won the Northern Writers Award in fiction in 2017. Remembered, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2020).

Zainab Imran is a poet and facilitator of British Pakistani heritage from Manchester. She writes on a multitude of racial and social issues and is now working towards their PhD in creative writing at the University of St Andrews discussing race, queerness, and dichotomy in diasporic identity.

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, a Cave Canem Fellow ‘2025, is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and medical laboratory scientist from Bobi, Nigeria. She is the author of the chapbooks Cadaver of Red Roses (2024), which won the 2024 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize, and Uncensored Snapshots (2025).

Zeba Talkhani is an Indian writer based in the UK. Her work explores themes of identity, faith, and social deconstruction. She was most recently published in 404 Ink's Nasty Women anthology. Find her @zebatalk.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.

Zillah Bowes is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies including Wasafiri, Mslexia, The North and Poetry Wales. She has won the Wordsworth Trust Prize and Poems on the Buses Competition, and was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize/AONB Best Poem of Landscape, Manchester Poetry Prize and Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She has received the Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellowship and a RSL Literature Matters Award. Zillah was a Hay Festival Writer at Work and received a Literature Wales Bursary and Creative Wales Award in poetry. She also works with spoken and written poetry as an artist including her film work Allowed, which was listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize and won Zealous Amplify: Environment, and her digital work Gwawr / Dawn, which won Honorable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Visual Art Prize. She was awarded the Future Wales Fellowship 2023-2025.

Zoë Norridge is a Reader in African and Comparative Literature and Visual Cultures at King’s College London. She researches cultural responses to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, often in collaboration with Rwandan artists and survivors.

Zoe Patterson is a writer from Canada and the UAE. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-fiction at NYU and is writing a collection of essays about her family’s experiences in both places.