Advisory Board
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Margaret Busby OBE became the UK’s youngest and first black female publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby Ltd, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan Publications. She is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, consultant and broadcaster, and has served as a judge for many literary awards, including the Orange Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Caine Prize for African Writing. She edited Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Women of African Descent (1992), has contributed to many publications and written drama for BBC radio and for the stage. Margaret is also an ardent campaigner for diversity in publishing, co-founding GAP (Greater Access to Publishing) in the 1980s. She is currently patron of Independent Black Publishers (IBP) and a member of the Arts Council’s Diversity in Publishing steering group.
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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: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture (2008), the collection of poetry, St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005) and the volume of short stories Real Time (2002). Earlier novels such as A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and Afternoon Raag (1993) won various prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the Southern Arts Literature Prize. Also a practising musician, he is currently a Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and has been on the Advisory board of Wasafiri since 2006. Visit Amit’s site .
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Laura Chrisman has been on the Editorial Board of Wasafiri from 1996 and became an Advisory member when she moved to the University of Washington in 2005. Her publications include Reading the Imperial Romance (2000), Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Empire and Transnationalism (2003) and the long-standing publication Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory which she edited with Patrick Williams in 1993. In 2003 she edited the special ‘World Poetry’ issue of Wasafiri. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary text focusing on the links between South African Nationalists and African American intellectuals of the early 20th century.
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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: Four Writers from Grenada (1984); her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks appeared a year later. In 1987, Collins published her first novel, Angel. Her short story collection, Rain Darling (1990) and poetry collection, Rotten Pomerack (1992), were followed by her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, published in 1995. She became a member of the Advisory Board in 1988. For more information about Merle and her writing visit www.geocities.com/merlecollins.
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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). A Harlot’s Progress (1999) continued Dabydeen’s interest in art history after he published his long poem Turner (1994), which revisits Turner’s painting The Slave Ship. In 2004 he received the Raja Rao Award for Literature and in 2008 he published his latest novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick, receiving in the same year the Anthony Sabga Prize for Literature. He has written and presented for radio and television and is also Guyana’s Ambassador-at-Large and a member of UNESCO’s executive board. He currently teaches at the University of Warwick where he is Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies. Dabydeen has been an active supporter of Wasafiri since 1985.
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Ferdinand Dennis has been a member of the Wasafiri Advisory board since 1999. He is a writer and broadcaster, presenting for Channel 4 and also for BBC Radio 4 on a series called Journey Round My People. Ferdinand has worked for the magazines Front Lines and City Limits, and his short stories have been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. He is the author of two travelogues: Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) and Back to Africa: A Journey (1992). And his novels include The Sleepless Summer (1989), The Last Blues Dance (1996) and Duppy Conqueror (1998). His Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writing from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, co-edited with Naseem Khan, was published in 2000 by Serpent's Tail.
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Robert Fraser is the author of several monographs, including studies of Sir James Frazer, Proust, Victorian quest literature and postcolonial fiction. His critical portrait of Ben Okri, Towards the Invisible City (2002), was described in Wasafiri as ‘poetic psychobiography’ and The Chameleon Poet (2002), his life of George Barker, became a Spectator book of the year. He is currently a senior research fellow at the Open University and is working on a history of the biographical form. After a long history with the magazine, Robert Fraser moved from the Associate Editorial Board to become an Advisory Board member in 2010.
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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: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (1996) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (2000). He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature (2002) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004). He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste.
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Nadine Gordimer is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist perhaps best known for her consistent condemnation of apartheid. Unlike many others of her generation, she chose to remain in South Africa during the difficult period and became centrally involved in the activities of the African National Congress. Gordimer’s first novel, Dying Days, appeared in 1953. Her other works include The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Burgher’s Daughter (1979), My Son’s Story (1990), The Pickup (2002) and Loot (2003). Gordimer is also a well-known essayist and delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1995 which were published the same year in the collection, Writing and Being. Her latest publications include the novel Get A Life (2005) and the collection of short stories Beethoven Was On –Sixteenth Black (2007). Gordimer became a member of the Wasafiri Advisory Board in 1996.
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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). His 1994 novel Paradise was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. His most recent novels are By the Sea (2001) and Desertion (2004). Gurnah is Professor of Literature at the School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, and has edited two volumes of critical work entitled Essays on African Writing: A Revaluation (1993) and Essays on African Literature (1995). He has also published on Wole Soyinka, V S Naipaul and his latest edited work on Salman Rushdie was published in 2008.
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Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Phillipines before moving to England in 1971. He is the author of various novels and short stories. After the 1992 appearance of his first novel Monkfish Moon, he went on to publish Reef (1994) which was shortlisted for the Booker and The Sandglass (1998). Both novels have won him several prestigious prizes, including the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing and Literature. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his most recent novel, The Match, was published in 2006. He currently lives in London. Visit Romesh’s site at www.romeshgunesekera.com.
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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. She has written widely for publications including the TLS, The Observer, Financial Times and Index on Censorship and has contributed to BBC radio programmes including Front Row, Off the Page and The World Tonight. She has twice been named National Newspaper Writer of the Year in the Race in the Media Awards (1996 and 1998) and feature writer of the year at the EMMA awards (1998 and 1999). Some of her literary profiles appear in Lives and Works (2002) and her introduction to Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah appeared in the 2001 Penguin Modern Classics edition. She has also been a judge on various literary prizes such as the David Cohen and Orange prizes, and has been an Advisory Board member of Wasafiri since 1991.
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Lisa Jardine is Director at the Centre of Editing Lives and Letters and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She appears regularly on television and radio, and has published widely in the field of Renaissance intellectual history, East-West cultural exchanges and the rise of modern science. She is a member of the Council of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and a member of Council of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She has judged the Whitbread and Orwell Prizes, and chaired the 1997 Orange Orize for Fiction and the 2002 Man Booker prize. Her latest publications include Going Dutch: How England plundered Holland’s Glory (2008) and A Point of View (2008) and she has recently been awarded the position of Distinguished Visitor Fellowship at the Hague which she will hold until 2009. She joined the Wasafiri Advisory Board in 1996. |
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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. Mimi Khalvati is also an award-winning poet. Her publications include In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995), Entries on Light (1997), Selected Poems (2000) and The Chine (2002). More recently, she has co-edited anthologies such as I am twenty people! (2007) and Entering the Tapestry (2003). Her latest collection of poetry, The Meanest Flower (2007) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize, and in 2006, she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She co-ordinates the Poetry School in London, is a tutor at the Arvon Foundation and teaches Creative Writing in North America and Britain. Visit Mimi’s site at www.mimikhalvati.co.uk
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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. She has published on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, autobiography, postcolonial agency, multiculturalism in an international context, postcolonial Joyce, Area Studies and Women's Studies and Algerian film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present (2008). Her current work in progress is called Asylum: The Concept and the Practice. Ranjanna Khanna was invited to join the Advisory Board in 2004.
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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. She is also working on a book-length study of postcolonial women's writing, provisionally titled, Writing and Reading 'the' Postcolonial Woman which originally started on a Leverhulme Fellowship. She was the judge of the Guyana Fiction Prize in 2003 and has been a member of the Advisory Board of Wasafiri since 2003 although she has been a contributor to Wasafiri for many years. |
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Michael Ondaatje is a writer and poet, best known for his Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient (1992), which became an Oscar winning film in 1996, directed by Anthony Minghella. His other prose works include The Collected Words of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Running in the Family (1982), The Skin of a Lion (1987), Anil’s Ghost (2000) and The Story (2006). He has published numerous volumes of poetry and edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Short Stoies (1990) and The Brick Reader (1991). His most recent novel, Divisadero, was published in 2007. He is currently a member of the Department of English at Glendon College, York University in Toronto and has been on the Wasafiri Advisory Board since 1996.
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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. His many novels include The Final Passage (1985), The Nature of Blood (1997) and, more recently, A Distant Shore (2003), Foreigners (2007) and The Falling Snow (2009). He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2002, and has won a variety of prizes for his work, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2004, Pen/Beyond the Margins Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is currently a Professor of English at Yale University. Visit Caryl’s site at www.carylphillips.com.
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Sukhdev Sandhu joined the Editorial Board in 2004 when he edited the highly regarded ‘Focus on Film’ issue (Winter 2004). Sandhu gained his doctorate from |
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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. Her other novels include The Crow Eaters (1978), The Bride (1982) and An American Brat (1993), which was adapted for the stage and produced in 2007. Her latest publications are Water and City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore, both of which came out in 2006. She has been on the Wasafiri Advisory Board since 1996. Visit Bapsi’s site at www.bapsisidhwa.com.
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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). His first novel, Weep Not Child was published in 1964. This was followed by The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967) and later Petals of Blood (1977). His insistence on writing in his native language, Gikuyu, led to his imprisonment in 1977 when he produced a Gikuyu play at the Kamiriithu Community and Education Centre, an activity deemed subversive by the Kenyatta-Moi regime. During his year-long detention in a maximum security prison he wrote Devil on the Cross. Ngugi’s latest epic novel, Wizard of the Crow was published in 2006. He has received many awards including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature and several honorary doctorates. Ngugi has been on the Advisory Board since 1996 and is currently at the University of California, Irvine. Visit his site at www.ngugiwathiongo.com. |
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Janette Turner Hospital grew up Queensland and began her teaching career in the state’s remote high schools before teaching in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing won Canada's Seal Award in l982. Among her other novels are The Last Magician; Oyster and Due Preparations for the Plague, which won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2003, and three short story collections. Her latest novel is Orpheus Lost, published in 2008. In 2003, Janette Turner Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland. She has been a member of the Wasafiri Advisory Board since 1996. Visit Janette’s site at www.janetteturnerhospital.com |
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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: Essays in Literature and Culture (2003) and The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought (2006). Her fiction includes In a Dark Wood (1977), The Skating Party (1982) and The Lost Father (1988), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Indigo (1992), The Leto Bundle (2001) and a collection of short stories, Mermaids in the Basement (1993). Amongst her publications for children are the books The Impossible Day (1981) and The Wobbly Tooth (1984). She wrote the libretti for the children’s opera The Legs of the Queen of Sheba (1991) and for In the House of Crossed Desires (1996). Marina is also a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and has been a member of the Wasafiri Advisory Board since 1996. Visit Marina’s site at www.marinawarner.com. |
