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 Editorial Board  

Susheila Nasta founded Wasafiri in 1984 when there were very few publications attentive to ethnic minority writing. She is a critic, teacher and currently Reader in Literature at the Open University. She has also taught at the Universities of London and Cambridge, and has published and lectured widely in the field of contemporary twentieth-century literatures, particularly on Caribbean literature, women’s writing and the fictions of the black and South Asian diasporas. She has acted as judge to a number of literary awards and is currently a member of the advisory committee for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her publications include Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002) and an edited collection of interviews originally published in Wasafiri to mark the twentieth anniversary of the magazine, Writing Across Worlds (2004). She has just completed a critical introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and is currently working on a study of Jamaica Kincaid called Writing A Life (forthcoming).
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Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to a Nigerian father and English mother. Critically acclaimed as one of Britain’s most original and exciting authors, she has been an active member of the editorial board since 1999. She has written two novels-in-verse, Lara (1997) and The Emperor’s Babe (2001), the latter being inspired by the little known fact that black European history stretches back at least as far as the third century AD, a history she has further explored in Soul Tourists (2005). In addition to writing novels, Bernardine Evaristo has also written for the stage and radio. She has won several prestigious awards and has participated in international literary tours and residencies. In 2004 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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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. He is one of the associate editors of Wasafiri.
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Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan and moved to Britain in 1970. His first collection of short stories, A Mirror to the Sun, was published in 1993. Since then he has produced several other collections of stories: This Other Salt (1999), Cactus Town and Other Stories (2002) and Turquoise (2002). He is a well-known reviewer and literary critic and has been a member of the Wasafiri editorial board since 1995. Hussein has also published translations of Urdu poetry and fiction in English and was one of the judges in 2002 of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2000 he co-edited Hoops of Fire: Fifty Years of Fiction by Pakistani Women (2000). Hussein is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and he teaches at the University of Southampton.
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Lyn Innes recently retired from the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she was Emeritus Professor at the School of English. Born in Australia she graduated at the University of Sydney before moving to North America where she developed her interest in minority studies, focusing on African, Caribbean (both French and Hispanic) and Irish literatures and wrote her doctoral thesis on Caribbean and Irish nationalism. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she met the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe who was then Professor of African Literatures and she became associate editor on the journal founded by Achebe, OKIKE magazine: Journal of African Creative Writing. Lyn Innes has published widely in the field of postcolonial studies including The Devil's Own Mirror: the Irish and the African in Modern Literature (1990); Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880-1935 (1993); and A History of Black and South Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. She is currently engaged in a diverse set of projects: compiling an anthology on the afterlife of the Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly, writing an Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures, and researching the history of black and Asian writers and artists in Ireland. Lyn Innes has been an on the editorial board of Wasafiri since 1984.
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Born in Malaysia, Minoli Salgado is a writer and poet of Sri Lankan descent whose work has been published in journals in the UK and North America and regularly featured in the International Conference on the Short Story. She also teaches English at the University of Sussex on the MA programmes in Creative and Critical Writing and Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures. Her academic publications include Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2007) - the first monograph to situate Sri Lankan English literature within current postcolonial theories and debates - and critical essays in the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (forthcoming, 2007) and Diaspora and Multiculturalism (2003). Minoli Salgado has been an associate editor of Wasafiri since 2004.
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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 Oxford University before moving to America to teach at the University of New York. An award-winning film critic for the Telegraph, he also writes for London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Modern Painters and Vertigo. His book London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City was published in 2003.
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Melanie Abrahams is a producer and the founder of the artist management and production agency Renaissance One. She was the producer of Modern Love, a spoken word tour on love and modern relationships nominated for an EMMA Award for Best Theatre/Play. She recently collaborated with BBC Radio 3 and Topher Campbell on ‘ Facing Leicester Square’, a revisiting of James Baldwin's Another Country. Melanie Abrahams joined the Wasafiri board in 2001.
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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). He has been an editorial board member since 1995.
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Angus Calder is an author, poet, critic, editor, historian and journalist. His The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 was published in 1969. It won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewllyn Rhys Prize the following year and has been in print ever since. His more recent work includes the Penguin anthology Wars and The Raucle Tongue: Selected Essays, Journalism and Interviews, co-edited with Hugh MacDiarmid. He was co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 1981 to 1987. He won a Gregory Award in 1967 for verse and brought out his first volume of poems, Waking in Waikato, in 1995. Angus Calder has been on Wasafiri’s editorial board since its inception.
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Becky Ayebia Clarke is a Ghanaian UK-based writer, editor and publisher specialising in African and Caribbean Literature. She worked on Heinemann’s African and Caribbean Writers Series for twelve years before founding Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd with her husband in 2003 as a way of looking into to new directions after Harcourt ceased publishing new African Writers Series titles in 2002. Ayebia’s mission is to promote African and Caribbean writing to an international audience, targeting educational institutions in particular. She was appointed to the board of the Executive Council of the African Literature Association (ALA) USA in 2005 and was one of the judges of the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in Lagos, Nigeria in August 2006. Becky joined the board in 2006.
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Maggie Gee joined the Wasafiri editorial board in 2004. Born in Poole, Dorset, she studied at Oxford and has a doctorate in the twentieth century novel. She was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1982 after the publication of her first novel, Dying In Other Words. Her eighth novel The White Family (2002) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and she has since published two further novels, The Flood (2004) and My Cleaner (2005). Maggie Gee is the first woman to occupy the Chair of the Royal Society for Literature.
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Louis James is Emeritus Professor in the School of English at Kent University and an Honorary member of the Centre. He edited Islands in Between (1968), the first published collection of West Indian criticism, and wrote the first study of Jean Rhys (1978). He has also written Fiction for the Working Man (1963) and Print and the People (1976). His most recent publication is Caribbean Literature in English (1998).
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David Johnson is senior lecturer at the Open University. His publications include the monograph Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), he was principal author with Steve Pete and Max du Plessis for Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (2001), and co-edited, with Prem Poddar, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005). David Johnson’s recent research is on South African cultural histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has been on the Wasafiri editorial board since 2004 and edited issue 35 of the magazine entitled ‘Travellers Tales: Alternative Traditions’.
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Jean Khalfa was invited to join the Wasafiri editorial board in 2004 and in 2005 edited a special issue on the Algerian activist, writer and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, partly reproduced in translation, in Les Temps Moderne, of which Khalfa is an editor. Khalfa lectures in the Department of French at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he specialises in the history of philosophy, modern literature – particularly contemporary francophone writing – aesthetics and anthropology. He is editor of, among other publications, What Is Intelligence (1994 and 1996); Afrique du sud le cap de bonne espérance (1995) and New French Poetry, A Bilingual Anthology (1996). Khalfa is currently working on a new edition of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, a study of Rousseau and a further publication on Frantz Fanon.
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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 both 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). She co-ordinates the Poetry School in London, is a tutor at the Arvon Foundation and teaches Creative Writing in North America and Britain. Mimi Khalvati has been a member of the editorial board since 2004.
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Karen McCarthy 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. Her writing is published in numerous magazines and anthologies and she has presented her work at a variety of locations such
as the Voice Box at the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican in London, and in Slovenia with the British Council. Her play ‘Dido’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this spring. She has been on the editorial board of Wasafiri since 2004.
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Nana Yaa Mensah

Alastair Niven, OBE, is Principal of Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, and is President of English PEN.
He was former director of literature at the Arts Council of Great Britain (latterly the Arts Council of England) and the British Council. Currently chair of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Advisory Committee, he was one of the judges of the Booker in 1994. He has written several critical books, including two on D H Lawrence and two on Indian fiction. For thirteen years he was the of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and has been a member since 2001 of Wasafiri’s editorial board
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Advisory Board

Margaret Busby, OBE.

Previously a member of the Editorial Board from 1996, Laura Chrisman became an advisory member when she moved to the University of Washington in 2005. Her publications include Reading the Imperial Romance (2000), Rethinking Race and Nation (2002), 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 .
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After graduating from the University of West Indies Merle Collins returned to her high school where she taught History and Spanish for two years. After receiving her MA from Georgetown University, she served as a coordinator for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean with Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary government. During her time as a research coordinator, her first works were published in an anthology entitled Callaloo: Four Writers from Grenada (1984). Her first published collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks (1985) was dedicated to the Grenadian people. In 1987, Collins published her first novel Angel. Rain Darling (1990), and Rotten Pomerack (1992) preceded her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, published in 1995. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications, including Penguin Modern Poets Volume 8 (1996) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (1999). She became a member of the advisory board in 1988.
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Historian, writer and critic,David Dabydeen 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 his long poem Turner (1994), which revisits Turner’s painting The Slave Ship. 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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A member of the Wasafiri advisory board since 1999, Ferdinand Dennis is a writer and broadcaster, presenting for Channel 4 and also for BBC Radio 4 on a series called Journey Round My People. He has worked for the magazines Front Lines and City Limits, and has had short stories 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 has also published three novels: The Sleepless Summer (1989), The Last Blues Dance (1996) and Duppy Conqueror (1998).
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Simon Gikandi 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), Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (1992), 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 also has a special interest in the relation between literature and the production of knowledge and the history of English as a field of study. He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste.
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A Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Nadine Gordimer is perhaps best known for her consistent condemnation of apartheid. Unlike many others of her generation, she not only chose to remain in South Africa during the difficult period, but 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), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son’s Story (1990), The Pickup (2002) and Loot (2003). As well as being a distinguished writer of fiction, Gordimer is also a well-known essayist and delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1995, the collection of essays which were published the same year as Writing and Being. Her latest novel is called Get A Life (2005). 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 off the coast of East Africa, he left in the late sixties 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 fourth novel Paradise (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. His last three novels have been Admiring Silence (1996), By The Sea (2001) and Desertion (2004). Gurnah teaches at the School of English at the 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: Contemporary Literature (1995). He has also published on Wole Soyinka, V S Naipaul and his latest edited work on Salman Rushdie is forthcoming.
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Formerly Literary Editor of Third World Quarterly, Maya Jaggi 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, the Independent, New Statesman and Index on Censorship, and contributed to BBC radio programmes including Front Row, Off the Page, World Update, Arts in Action, Analysis 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). Many of her literary profiles appear in Lives and Works (2002). She has also been a judge on a number of literary prizes such as the Commonwealth Writers Prize 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 the television, radio and other media and has published widely in the field of Renaissance intellectual history, East-West cultural exchanges and the rise of modern science. She was the first woman Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge. 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. She joined the Wasafiri advisory board in 1996.
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Ranjana Khanna is Associate Professor of English and 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 has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (2006). 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. Following a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2002, she worked on a study of contemporary postcolonial 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 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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Writer and poet, Michael Ondaatje is 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). He is currently a member of the Department of English at Glendon College, York University in Toronto. He became a member of the Wasafiri advisory board in 1996.
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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 honor and in 1998, her novel Cracking India (1991 – originally published as Ice Candy Man in 1988) was adapted into the movie, Earth, by renowned filmmaker, Deepa Mehta. Her other novels include The Crow Eaters (1978), The Bride (1982) and An American Brat (1993). Her latest publications are Water and City of Sin and Spendour: Writings on Lahore, both of which came out in 2006. She has been on the Wasafiri advisory board since 1996.
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Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Kenya’s best known novelists, not only for the success of his novels, but also for campaigns for ‘cultural decolonisation’ in Africa’s educational institutions and his 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 promotion of African languages, particularly his insistence on writing in his native language Gikuyu, was something which lead to his imprisonment in 1977 when he produced a play in Gikuyu with a community theatre group at the Kamiriithu Community and Education Centre, an activity that was deemed subversive by the Kenyatta-Moi regime. It was during his year-long detention in a maximum security prison that he wrote Devil on the Cross. He wrote Matagari (1987) whilst in exile, all Kenyan copies of which were seized and an attempt was even made to arrest its fictional hero. Ngugi’s latest epic novel, Wizard of the Crow was published in 2006. Ngugi has been on the advisory board since 1996.
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Janette Turner Hospita l ’s 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. In 2003, Janette Turne Hospital also 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.
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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. In 2003, Janette Turne Hospital also 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.
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Marina Warner is an art and literary 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, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), Signs and Wonders: Essays in Literature and Culture (2003) and Phantasmorgoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media 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). Her children's books include 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). Her BBC Reith Lecture was published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994). Warner is also a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a member of the Wasafiri advisory board since 1996.
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