Wasafiri News - wasafiri

Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2010

Tue, 6 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Renowned worldwide for featuring some of the best and brightest new talent, Wasafiri launched an annual new writing prize as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations in 2009. The prize is now in its second year and the competition is open for entries.

The competition is open to anyone worldwide who has not published a complete book. We are looking for creative submissions in one of three categories: Poetry, Fiction or Life Writing. Three winners (one from each category) will receive £300 and their winning entries will be published in an issue of Wasafiri.

This year's judges are Romesh Gunesekera (Fiction), Moniza Alvi (Poetry) and Marina Warner (Life Writing) and the Chair is Susheila Nasta.

To enter simply fill in the entry form and return it with your entry and a fee of UK Sterling £5 by the closing date of 30 July 2010 (preferably by cheque or via PayPal). Entrants who are visually impaired or prevented from typing through disability can submit their entry on audio CD.
Entries can emailed to n.a.jonesATopen.ac.uk or posted to the following address:

New Writing Prize
Wasafiri
The Open University in London
1-11 Hawley Crescent
London NW1 8NP
UK

Please ensure that you have read the terms and conditions before submitting your entry.

ENTRY FORM.PDF

Olufemi Terry Wins 2010 Caine Prize

Mon, 5 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Sierra Leone's Olufemi Terry has won the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa's leading literary award for short story fiction, for 'Stickfighting Days' from Chimurenga vol 12/13, Cape Town. The Chair of Judges, The Economist's Literary Editor Fiammetta Rocco, announced Olufemi as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held on Monday 5 July at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Fiammetta Rocco said ‘ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative, Olufemi Terry's “Stickfighting Days” presents a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception. The execution of this story is so tight and the presentation so cinematic, it confirms Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future.’

Read Olufemi Terry's 'Stickfighting Days' here.

Wasafiri writer, Lily Mabura's short story, 'How Shall We Kill the Bishop', published in issue 53 (Spring 2008) was shortlisted for this year’s prize. For a limited period you can also read Lily’s short story here.

Also shortlisted were:

Ken Barris (South Africa) ‘The Life of Worm’ from New Writing from Africa 2009, published by Johnson and King James Books, Cape Town
Namwali Serpell (Zambia) ‘Muzungu’ from The Best American Short Stories 2009, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston MA
Alex Smith (South Africa) ‘Soulmates’ from New Writing from Africa 2009 (as above).

Previous Caine Prize winners and nominees published by Wasafiri include Segun Afolabi, Brian Chikwava, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Uzor Maxim Uzoatu.

Pilgrimages: 14 African Writers re-imagine Africa's cities

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

'Pilgrimages,' a new project of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College and Chimurenga, will send 14 African writers to 13 African cities, and one city in Brazil, for two weeks this June and July to explore the complexities of disparate urban landscapes. The writers will create 13 nonfiction travel-writing books about their trips that will capture each city as South Africa hosts Africa’s first World Cup. The 13 collected books are intended to prompt a shift in the focus of African reportage and will comprise the “Pilgrimages” book series, to be published simultaneously in Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town during the 2012 African Cup of Nations football tournament.

The Pilgrimages web site (www.pilgrimages.org.za ) will present blogs, videos and other content from the 14 pilgrims, as well as essays from other prominent writers, bloggers, and commentators, such as Professor Achille Mbembe (WISER) and Dr Grant Farred (Cornell University). The website will also invite contributions—short essays, letters of support, grammar school football tales, travel pieces—from the general public.

The 14 writers that will participate in the 'Pilgrimages' project and the cities they will visit are: Chris Abani (Johannesburg, South Africa); Doreen Baingana (Hargeisa, Somaliland); Uzodinma Iweala (Timbuktu, Mali); Funmi Iyanda (Durban, South Africa); Billy Kahora (Luanda, Angola); Kojo Laing (Cape Town, South Africa); Victor LaValle (Kampala, Uganda); Alain Mabanckou (Lagos, Nigeria); Nimco Mahamud Hassan (Khartoum, Sudan); Akenji Ndumu (Abidjan, Ivory Coast); Yvonne Owuor (Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo); Nicole Turner (Nairobi, Kenya); Abdourahman A. Waberi (Salvador, Brazil); and Binyavanga Wainaina (Touba, Senegal).

Visit www.pilgrimages.org.za for more information

Lily Mabura's 'How Shall We Kill the Bishop' is shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Lily Mabura's short story, 'How Shall We Kill the Bishop', published in issue 53 (Spring 2008) has been nominated for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing. Kenyan Mabura joins fellow shortlisted writers, Ken Barris (South Africa), Namwali Serpell (Zambia), Alex Smith (South Africa) and Olufemi Terry (Sierra Leone) as this year's nominees for the prize which also known as the 'African Booker' and highlights the best in short story fiction from Africa and the African diaspora.

For a limited period, 'How Shall We Kill the Bishop', is a available to down load here.

Previous Caine Prize winners and nominees published by Wasafiri include Brian Chikwava, Segun Afolabi and Mukoma wa Ngugi.

Asian Enough? Call for submissions for a new anthology of British Asian writing

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Working title Asian Enough? is an anthology of short stories, to be edited by Tindal Street author Kavita Bhanot, which will be published in October 2011.

Kavita says of the project:

“This anthology is not a disparate collection of literary stories by writers who identify themselves as British and Asian, but a recognition that we share something in common, whether it is influence, experience, or the expectations of others. It is also a protest, a shared agenda to resist these expectations and pressures.

So you won’t be told that your story is not Asian enough or that it’s too Asian for this anthology. You don’t have to write a funny story about an arranged marriage, about the culture clash between parents holding onto ‘outdated’ traditions while their children just want to be ‘British’, or a drama about being a ‘normal’ Muslim in a time of religious fanaticism. Because these are not the only stories that we have to tell.

But it is OK if this is what you want to write about, because these might be aspects of our realities, as long as you do it from the inside, with compassion, understanding and freshness, showing other perspectives, since the stories that we see again and again reflect only one angle. We’re looking for well-crafted stories with wisdom, depth, complexity, energy and detail. You write about what you care about, the story you want to tell.”

Stories are for an adult literary readership, between roughly 3000 and 5000 words. Apart from correspondence concerning the finally selected stories, there will be no individual feedback to authors on stories submitted, although all submission will be read.

If you identify yourself as British Asian send one story only, by email, with a short covering letter, to rikhi@tindalstreet.co.uk, with the subject heading: British Asian Anthology

Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2010
Final Selection: October 2010
Publication: October 2011

West Indian Bibliographies now available as free downloads

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Bibliographies of West Indian fiction and poetry up to 2005 are now available to download for free. More than 850 individual fiction titles and 950 poetry titles are listed, along with authors' names, birthplace and publication details at http://stores.lulu.com/parfitt

Maggie Gee's Other Life

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

With the publication of her new memoir, My Other Life, Maggie Gee talks to The Observer about her parallel lives in cyberspace.

Wasafiri's 25th birthday celebrations end on a high note.

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The final event marking Wasafiri's 25th anniversary, 'Everything to Declare', took place at the Purcell Room, South Bank, London, in front of packed audiences on Saturday October 31. Ngugi declared the ceremonies open with a keynote speech stressing the importance of communicating between and across cultures. The event was chaired by Aminatta Forna, after which crowds queued to share their thoughts with Ngugi at his book signing.

After the announcement of the winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, Anita and Kiran Desai took the stage to talk about their writing lives and influences with Maggie Gee. The event, which had virtually sold out, was a huge success and it is with great pleasure that Wasafiri was able to bring the mother-daughter duo together for this rare public conversation.

The grand finale, 'Back to the Beginning with the Word', featured renowned poets, Lizzy Dijeh, Nii Parkes, Sujata Bhatt, Fred D'Aguiar and Elaine Feinstein, and was expertly compered by Bernardine Evaristo. Musical due Sridhar/Thayil finished the evening with an electrifying performance, which was also their UK debut.

Wasafiri wishes to thank all the writers, poets and musicians who took part on Saturday 31 October at the Purcell Room, and all those who have offered their support throughout the year to make this 25th anniversary a year to remember.

Pictures by Graham Fudger

The Lost Man Booker Prize 1970

Sun, 1 Nov 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The Booker Prize was originally awarded for any book published in the previous year, but in 1971 it became an award for the best novel published that year. It meant a wealth of books by writers like Iris Murdoch, Melvyn Bragg, Joe Orton and Elaine Feinstein (pictured) were never eligible. Now the organisers have decided to redress the balance 40 years on with a special award, the Lost Man Booker Prize.

The shortlist will be announced in March, and the public will decide the winner by voting via the Man Booker Prize website. The overall winner will be announced in May.

Lost Man Booker Prize longlist

Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
HE Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
Christy Brown, Down All The Days
Len Deighton, Bomber
JG Farrell, Troubles
Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
Susan Hill, I'm The King Of The Castle
Francis King, A Domestic Animal
Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
Joe Orton, Head To Toe
Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat
Patrick White, The Vivisector

Wasafiri's 25 most influential books

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri's Editorial Board and staff have compiled a list of influential books (mostly) published in the last 25 years.

Melanie Abrahams Orange Laughter by Leone Ross

Sharmilla Beezmohun Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby

Ruth Borthwick The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

Richard Dyer Spillage of Mercury by Neil Rollinson

Bernardine Evaristo Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer

Robert Fraser Dr Johnson and Mr Savage by Richard Holmes

Maggie Gee Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Rachel Gilmour Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra

Aamer Hussein Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

Lyn Innes Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Louis James Omeros by Derek Walcott

Nisha Jones Foe by J M Coetzee

Stephanie Jones My Place by Sally Morgan

Tabish Khair The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Jean Khalfa La Douleur by Marguerite Duras, L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse by Patrick Chamoiseau and Patagonian Hare by Claude Lanzmann

Gary Mckeone Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Lost Their Lives as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles edited by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelter, Brian Feeny and Chris Thornton

Nana Yaa Mensah Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau

Susheila Nasta Mr Potter by Jamaica Kincaid

Alastair Niven The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

Teresa Palmiero The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Roger Robinson Sula by Toni Morrison

Minoli Salgado Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Fiona Sampson New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz

Sukhdev Sandhu The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr Li Zhisui

Hirsh Sawhney River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder

Melanie Abrahams

Orange Laughter (2000) by Leone Ross

As I walk down Oxford Street, I’m reminded of Orange Laughter as I spot ‘shop closed’ signage on Borders. The flagship store used to host literary readings including one for Orange Laughter, and up-and-coming talent was welcomed. Before square footage and best-selling authors became the thing, 150+ people would come out to discover and enjoy new writers.

In the book, Leone Ross’s words bubble, sing and pique to bursting. It covers ambitious terrain — North Carolina in the 60s, New York in the late 90s and four main characters of different ages, races and sensibilities. The audacious and fruity language of the Tony character, combined with descriptions of mental illness and destitution (he lived in the New York subway) are particularly arresting. I recall critics saying the novel was ‘too’ ambitious, cogitating on whether a British writer could write accurately about America, whether women authors could write from a male perspective and the theme of mental illness. My response was different. I felt the playfulness was its strength, and the breadth and range admirable.

Books I’ve found to be most influential have been written over 25 years ago, but considering the period of 1984–2009, I’ve valued many anthologies, verse-novels, recordings and novels, including Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days, Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara, Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom, and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Tings An’ Times’. Not forgetting the wildly successful London-based multi-cultural romps. However, Orange Laughter marked me for life, and marked new territory, in that it bellowed risk and innovation, was ‘mashup’ before the term became cool, and is a teasing and eloquent novel beautifully told.

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Daughters of Africa (1992) edited by Margaret Busby

Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby and published in 1992, is a veritable treasure trove. The subtitle of the collection is ‘An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present’. And it delivers all that and more. From traditional African poems which are so old they cannot be dated, through nineteenth century works by women from Africa, the Caribbean and the USA and onto a twentieth-century journey that covers these areas and now also South America, Europe, Turkey and Russia, this book challenges any preconceptions of how long women have been using words creatively. Moreover, the collection includes a range of genres from autobiography to letters, from science fiction to journalism, from oral tradition to political speeches.

For me, Daughters of Africa was an inspiring eye-opener, introducing me to names I had never heard before at a time when there were only a few women of African descent appearing on bookshop shelves. This anthology was and is the ultimate reference guide to the writing of ‘daughters of Africa’; more importantly, it is a book of endless discovery and surprises.

Ruth Borthwick

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) by Hanif Kureishi

‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.’ From the opening line Kureishi’s novel is a direct challenge to Enoch Powell’s speech of November 1968 in which he states that an Asian person did not become English by being born in England. Published in the shadow of Rushdie’s fatwah, Buddha, Kureishi’s comic debut novel, looks back at the period 1964–1979 as years of relative freedom and progress in England and charts Karim’s coming of age and his journey from Bromley, ‘a town so suburban as to be exotic’, to the heart of London’s artistic community. Buddha coupled the exotic and the mundane, and described many different ways of being English. And always with a brilliant soundtrack.

Richard Dyer

Spillage of Mercury (1996) by Neil Rollinson

I return again and again to Rollinson's debut collection. He manages to conflate a flawless technical command of the art of poetry with original insights about the significance of the everyday and the seemingly ordinary — spare ribs, dying goldfish, sex, shopping, scampi and running for a bus. This is truly the poets’ art, not to display their erudite and obscurantist knowledge of the history of poetry through excessive and florid displays of language, but to employ the simplest of vocabularies to express the vast complexities of the human condition and thus make the ordinary extraordinary and the unnoticed incidents of life profound.

Bernardine Evaristo

Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) by Peter Fryer

Staying Power remains the definitive guide to Britain’s Black history. It told the world that Black and Asian roots went deep into British history because our presence on these shores span nearly 2,000 years. For a country steeped in the myth of its own racial purity, this was a bit of a culture shock. A History of Blacks in Britain by Edward Scobie was the first book of this kind, but its scope was less ambitious (Johnson Publishing, 1972). It was Staying Power, both scholarly and accessible, that expanded our understanding of what it means to be British.

Robert Fraser

Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993) by Richard Holmes

In 1984, the year in which Wasafiri started publication, I wrote a play about Dr Samuel Johnson called God’s Good Englishman, which toured the provinces for several weeks before dying a premature death in Epsom. Ten years after my play, Richard Holmes published his book Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, a double biography that investigated the relationship between Johnson and Richard Savage, a derelict might-have-been who paced the streets with him at nights during his early years in London, long before he had a house, a name or a reputation. This was life-writing at its best. It also possessed the enthralment of fiction and strongly recalled, in its parable of human vicissitude, Saul Bellow’s better known novel of 1975, Humbold’s Gift,in which a celebrated writer is haunted by the presence of a friend who, without his luck or charm, is reduced to raiding dustbins.

Holmes’s book is my choice. Why? Because it tells a tale that all of us can recognise, and because each of us, in his or her own way, is both success and failure, and can therefore empathise with both sides of this human equation. Like Bellow’s novel, it raises a question that preoccupies many of us: just who in this life can be accounted one of the fortunate, and who among the unfortunate? Despite superficial appearances, all of us change positions between these two extremes constantly or, perhaps more accurately, at any given stage our place on the spectrum of blessedness depends on the light in which we are viewed, by ourselves or by others. I could draw parallels with my own life, and with writers I have known, but will not. The Johnsonian parallel is far more potent than any anecdote I might be tempted to recount. As William Makepeace Thackeray once asked in his most famous work of the imagination – though not altogether of the imagination – Vanity Fair: ‘Which of us has his desire or, having it, is satisfied?’

Maggie Gee

Disgrace by (1999) JM Coetzee

This lean, cool, brilliant book cuts to the heart of South Africa’s past and future and of relations between colonist and colonised everywhere. JM Coetzee’s central character, David Lurie, begins as a touchy ageing academic who abuses his position by having a relationship with a mixed-race undergraduate. The narrative slowly strips everything away from him. In Coetzee’s depressive but commanding vision, the only redemption for white people in the Eastern Cape is to yield power utterly; to become as powerless as the colonised once were and do the worse-than-menial jobs which were once done for them. Their reward, if they are lucky? Survival at subsistence level — the same reward they once offered to the indigenous peoples of South Africa. Morally relentless, pared to the bone, showing the rape of Lurie’s daughter by black intruders as a political and genetic weapon in a wider war, this great book presses inexorably towards its ending, but then there is a kind of surprise. As David Lurie, like King Lear, learns from his daughter to manage with nothing, he earns the compassion that Coetzee finally affords to all of us dying animals, human and non-human.

Rachel Gilmour

Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007)by Daljit Nagra

Given the wealth of marvellous books on this list, which have already reached 'classic' status it seems risky to choose something very recent, but that is what I shall do: Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! Nagra is a poet's poet, and the critical and popular success of this debut collection is astonishing at a time when we have become used to rolling our eyes and saying that 'nobody reads poetry any more.' Punjabi and British in equal measure, the poems address questions of nationality and belonging, love and loneliness, poetic influence and poetic obligation. They are complex and allusive, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and as bleak as they are beautiful.

Nagra is also, probably quite obviously, my writer to watch for the next twenty five years.

Aamer Hussein

Meatless Days (1991) by Sara Suleri

In the summer of ‘89, a group of Pakistani friends began to talk about a book by Sara Suleri, an academic teaching English at Yale. It had the evocative title of Meatless Days. Who wants to read a memoir? I thought and possibly imagined that it was merely the novelty of a Pakistani of our generation publishing in America that made them recommend her. (Remember in those days, Bapsi Sidhwa was the only renowned Pakistani writer.) ‘It is her prose!’ a friend remarked and when I acquired a copy to read at Christmas, I discovered she was right. Suleri’s language sings; languages – Urdu and English – reflect each other magically in her texts.

To call this book, which deliberately issues chronologies, documentation, even confession, a memoir is perhaps fallacious. Elegiac short stories drawn from life? More like it, but often the chapters are like prose poems. I once remarked to Sara that it was about memories and mothers. ‘Forgetting, more like it’, she remarked. It is, in fact, about belonging and writing, parents, loss and – yes – Pakistan. Living with pain and grace. And an oblique portrait of a generation. Ours. At its core are two elegies for Suleri’s dead – mother, sister – that rival the Urdu poetry she loves (and has since translated). It was a hard act to follow. Years later, she did. Boys will be Boys (2003) is, perhaps, even better. But Meatless Days claims a unique and unassailable place in Pakistani literature.

Two writers I’m watching with great interest: American-educated Bina Shah has published 4 works of fiction in Pakistan and another in Italy and Spain (her best, Children of Sindh, is also being translated). She’s as yet unknown in Britain, which is our loss. Venice-born, Dubai bred half-Iranian Andre Naffis is just emerging as a poet and fabulist, charting the deserts that are his imaginative landscape.

Lyn Innes

Paradise(1994) by Abdulrazak Gurnah

‘The boy first. His name was Yusuf, and he left his home suddenly during his twelfth year'. So begins Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise, a novel which revisits and reclaims territory and peoples described and dismissed by Conrad and Naipaul.

Using as a frame the Koranic account of Yusuf who was sold into bondage, this is a story of enthralment, which also enthrals the reader as she or he discovers Africa through Yusuf's eyes. There are magical descriptions of mountains and lakes, and vivid evocations of the terrains and villages encountered on a long journey into the interior. But we also experience the accommodations made by those who are relatively powerless and the struggle for psychic survival in a world defined by the rich and powerful. Told in limpid and eloquent prose, this is a brilliant portrayal of a complex and varied society just before the full impact of European colonisation.

For the writer who will (continue to) have future impact, I suggest Jackie Kay, in part because she is such a brilliant and original writer in a variety of genres — fiction, poetry, and drama.

Louis James

Omeros (1990) by Derek Walcott

Omeros brought Derek Walcott to worldwide recognition. A poem of over 7,000 lines,it embodies a dazzling complexity of narratives and perspectives. The title evoked ‘Homer’ (the Odyssey, voyaging, the epic history of civilisations), essential humanity (‘homo sapiens’) and mankind’s involvement with its environment – ‘mer’ (sea), ‘mère’ (mother),’os’ (human bone, island coral) – all central themes. The villagers’ classical names, natural in the Caribbean, implied both the heroic essence of the folk, and the folk origins of classical myth. Yet the interwoven human stories, stretching beyond the Caribbean itself, were simply told, using terza rima to recover a narrative medium existing before the division between poetry and the prose novel came into being. Finally, as a post-modern text, it offered a meditation on the relationship between art and life. Internationally acclaimed and enjoying circulation sales usually reserved for prose fiction, Omeros led directly to Walcott receiving the Nobel Prize in 1992.

Nisha Jones

Foe (1986) by J M Coetzee

When thinking about an influential book published in the last twenty-five years, I tried not to think about J M Coetzee’s Foe but I couldn’t resist. One can trace Foe’s footprints through ideas about otherness, identity, origins, the narration of history and the preoccupation with language in the European theoretical world and beyond. A retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, this time foregrounding a female castaway who is desperate to tell and sell the story of the tongueless, mutilated Friday with the help of the writer Mr Foe, Coetzee’s novel is both brilliant and terrifying. The subject of an unending catalogue of critical studies, I’m not sure whether Foe is just a book or a computational machine for the production of ethical dilemmas or a living being which feeds on our desire for resolution. It may sound like a monstrosity, but after the despair and frustration, Foe delivers the tenderest moment of peace: we are under water and the narrator has discovered Friday in the wreckage — ‘He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my skin … I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in. His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream … soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face’. Foe is more than a formidable novel, haunting, sublime and maddening.

Stephanie Jones

My Place (1987) by Sally Morgan

Critically and popularly acclaimed, My Place is a classic of Australian and indigenous literature. It tells of the author’s discovery that she is Aboriginal, and seeks to understand why her grandmother kept this secret. It is autobiography and family history, but in its presentation of dialogue and character, it reads like a novel. Lending voice to three generations, it portrays the brutalities and shame that have defined the relationship between non-indigenous and indigenous Australians. The book has been criticised for being too accessible for allowing non-indigenous readers to feel a false intimacy with Aboriginal history and feeling that too easily enables a sense of redemption. But Morgan’s low-key writing is hugely powerful and this book continues to be an undeniably important personal account of the fragmentation of indigenous culture in colonial and postcolonial Australia.

Tabish Khair

The Satanic Verses (1988) by Salman Rushdie

In the 1997 anthology of the ‘best’ of Indian writing that he co-edited, Rushdie briskly dismissed Indian writing in languages other than English. He did not advance the reasonable argument that it is impossible to know (let alone select between) so many languages, but the less plausible implication that English fiction was simply better. In choosing The Satanic Verses as one of the important books of the last twenty five years, I am consciously leaving out books in the three other languages (Hindi, Urdu and Danish) I have some knowledge of that could have competed for the honour. But to name them, in an English journal, appears to be little else than self-indulgence, for they would not be familiar to most readers of (even) Wasafiri regardless of how many other readers might swear by them.

Hence, it has to be Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), a baggy monster of a novel, brilliant in some parts, self-absorbed and gimmicky in others, a book of ‘metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes’, as The Times has put it. It is a novel that could only have been written by someone from a Muslim background. It is also a novel that could only have been written by someone immersed in Western ways of seeing Islam.

One can love it or hate it – personally I feel a position in between is the clearest indicator of sanity in today’s world – but one cannot ignore it. Perhaps one could have, if a certain Ayatollah Khomeini had not urged the ‘faithful’ to murder the author, if bans (the first in India) had not been imposed or contemplated, if mobs had not gone on the rampage and the author into hiding, if the ‘liberal West’ had not chosen (often) to use the conflict to consolidate its own need for a devilish Other, the previous incumbents (Soviets/communists) having recently disappeared with the Berlin Wall. How many novels become history? This one did. How many novels lead to deaths of supporters and detractors? This one did.

And strangely enough, how many novels remain unfinished in the troubled impact of their texts and paratexts? This one remains thoroughly unfinished. The inability of critics on all sides to relate to The Satanic Verses is inadvertently revealed by all but a couple of texts written about it. This inability points to a future that is yet to emerge from the cloud of unanswered questions surrounding The Satanic Verses: is blasphemy a vehicle of truth; what relation does freedom of speech have to cultural dominance in an unequal world; how can we distinguish between a jealous God (or Allah) and an abstract principle which craves similar sacrifices; are Western nations, with their ‘cultural’ Christianities, really secular; does our capability to denounce pre-Capitalist structures of power rest on a matching blindness to the employment of Capitalist structures of power? There are many other questions, some raised by Rushdie, some against him. We will be lucky if they are answered in the next 25 years.

Jean Khalfa

I can only compare books read over such a period on two grounds: a repeated desire to reread and the pleasure still felt. In the first perspective two stand out, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur (1985) and Patrick Chamoiseau's L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997). In the second, Claude Lanzmann's Patagonian Hare (Le Lièvre de Patagonie, 2009) wins without contest. It charts an extraordinary life: a high school resistance and a clandestine love in post-war North Korea, where he sneaks back 40 years later, imagining a remarkable film; years shared with de Beauvoir, his work with Sartre, the Algerian war, his friendship with Fanon and the contradictions of national struggles, the first text on the Dalaï Lama’s flight to India, meetings with Castro, Nasser... Then twelve feverish years shooting and editing a monumental film, Shoah. This is the history of half a century by someone who has no patience for unfoldings, sees events as act and experience, and film and writing as the means to relate to the present in its immediacy. It takes the sudden leap of the hare in the title for him to feel one with Patagonia, beyond all the knowledge accumulated. This book does that to the reader.

Gary Mckeone

Lost Lives –The Stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles(1999) edited by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeny and Chris Thornton

‘Everywhere, wrenching grief, everywhere, terror

and a thousand shapes of death.’

The Aeneid, Book 2, 460-463, trans. Robert Fagles

There is a now famous photograph of Martin McGuinness and Dr Ian Paisley, taken in Stormont Castle not long after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The former enemies are sitting side by side, their faces creased with laughter. The Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ are over. Sorted. Solved. It is peace in our time.

Many poets, playwrights, novelists and artists have grappled, often brilliantly, with the troubles in their art. Think of Brian Friel’s play Translations or the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. But a book that stands out for me is by none of these. It is a simple, heartbreaking record — a litany of loss. It takes no sides, makes no judgements, offers no excuses or explanations. It neither condemns nor condones.

Lost Lives, edited by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeny and Chris Thornton was published in 1999. It lists chronologically some 3,600 killings, all carried out in the name of one cause or other. Each entry has a number, a date, a name, a location and a brief description of what happened. There are no metaphors, no linguistic flourishes. The language is plain, matter-of-fact and all the more harrowing because of it. To read it is to confront horror, savagery, grief and courage. It is both a testament and a warning.

Historians will eventually corral the whole sorry episode of the troubles into a bloodless narrative. Lost Lives will stand as a memorial to all those men, women and children, most of whose names will not feature in the history books. It bears witness to what happens when a community resorts to violence to resolve differences. It is nothing to laugh about.

Two influential writers over the next 25 years - Guadalupe Nettel (Mexico) - Deirdre Madden (Ireland).

Nana Yaa Mensah

Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau

It is always a delight to read a writer at the peak of his powers. When this novel appeared, we needed reminding how elastic storytelling can be, how plastic language can be, too. Patrick Chamoiseau hoarded away his many talents in here. The stories of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, Iréné, Esternome, Sonore, Ninon, Aimé Césaire, Ti-Cirique, Marie-Clémence, ‘the Christ’, even the békés and the blancs-france, and the host of other waifs, wraiths and bardic figures crammed into l’en Ville, flow so smoothly that even the tallest of these tales seem normal, mingling melodiously with a multiple History: the modern Caribbean, the enslaved past, ‘metropolitan’ France, the ancestral myth of Arawaks and Mentôs.

In one guise, Texaco is chiefly a treasury of events, images, linguistic games. In another, it blows open the doors of the academy and breathes out authenticity spiced with the honest scent of sweat — the people’s sweat. Its style continues to clear cobwebs from francophone writing. The creole hybridity of this novel is to French letters what Tutuola’s Yorubanglish was to writing in English … but more elegantly so. It cleared a space for the likes of Alain Mabanckou and the mature Thierno Monénembo. It fully deserved to win the Goncourt. And it still cries out for a translation equal to the rococo original.

Susheila Nasta

Mr Potter (2002) by Jamaica Kincaid

Sometimes what appear to be small books can make a big impact. I have been impressed by Kincaid’s evolving series of intimate fictional family portraits since the appearance of Annie John in 1985. Most commonly set in Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean, these life-writing narratives (often, prose poems), cross the genres of fiction and autobiography as a means of giving voice to unwritten silenced lives. Mr Potter, Kincaid’s most recent addition to this ever-expanding album, is the culmination of an aesthetic vision that determinedly explores the contradictory limits of language to frame a world previously voiceless, absent in history and without definition. Sketching the life of an unknown and absent father, an illiterate black taxi driver, Kincaid constructs a haunting poetic landscape defined by loss but driven by the desire to literally imagine him into existence. Her incantatory, almost mesmeric style immediately draws the reader into Mr Potter’s small world whilst simultaneously interrogating Kincaid’s own diasporic location as daughter-writer-New York cosmopolitan.

Major philosophical questions are raised as Kincaid characteristically struggles for answers: ‘in some dim and distant way we feel that we are nothing’, but ‘how certain we are that we are everything’. Whilst Mr Potter lives in a barren universe devoid of love, justice, meaning, it is linked throughout to Kincaid’s exploration of their mutual illegitimacy. Both of them lack signatures on their birth certificates which have lines drawn through them where names ought to appear. In inventing Mr Potter, Kincaid continues to rewrite herself: ‘ … because I learned how to read and how to write, only so is Mr Potter’s life known, his smallness becomes large, his anonymity ... stripped away, his silence broken’. Perhaps, most significantly, the book asks searching contemporary questions that concern us all.

Alaistair Niven

The Ground beneath Her Feet (2000)by Salman Rushdie

Midnight’s Children does not qualify, having been published twenty eight years ago. The Satanic Verses caused more trouble than almost anything published since Darwin, but is it ‘the best’, even of Rushdie? There is no getting away from the fact, however, that Salman Rushdie’s name will resonate whenever the period in which we live is talked about in decades to come. In his personal story converge so many of the tensions, diversity and cultural conflict of our time. As a writer he helped to restore to modern fiction the grand aspirations, the sheer sense of scale, which by the early 1980s seemed sometimes to be draining out of it. The sweep, ebullience, experiment, wit, humanity and bravado of Rushdie’s work contributed in a major way to the re-invigoration of the novel in the last twenty five years. The Ground Beneath Her Feet has the capaciousness of a great book, besides which its world of pop culture and celebrity catches the awful tawdriness sprouting from the ground beneath our feet. Under-estimated when it came out in 1999, it holds its own among the best of its age.

Teresa Palmiero

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is one of those huge, epic novels, which at moments leaves you cowering at the scale of the events unfolding before you to moments of wonderful, immediate detail. Set in Burma and India during English Colonial rule, The Glass Palace charts the emotional and physical journey of the Burmese Royal family’s refuge in India.

Although this novel has been criticised by some to be too sprawling and at times too heavily laden with intricate descriptions of incidental things such as the workings of a car’s engine, I was drawn into a world that I could see, touch, taste and feel with immediacy. The novel introduces the reader to a myriad of perspectives on colonial rule, which includes the exploitation of the teak forests in Burma. It is this forceful representation of the impact of colonialism interwoven with multiple strands of narrative that made The Glass Palace one of the most significant books I have read.

Roger Robinson

Sula (first published 1973) by Toni Morrison

I came late to Toni Morrison and picked up Sula after fellow poet, Peter Kahn said it was his favourite book and he could not believe that I had not read it. When I got home, to my surprise, it was already in my library. It was my wife's copy and she had read it when she was a student. It is the only book I have ever read, from beginning to end, in one day. It is the first novel that I saw my aunts, mum and sisters in. Not in a metaphorical sense but I actually saw them. Sula was my Aunty Lynette extracting choice from choicelessness. Nel was my Aunty Monica, a good woman. It is a novel full of death but not in a morbid way but death punctuating the celebration of life and living. There is birth death, sex and food. Everything I ever wanted to find in a novel.

Minoli Salgado

Anil’s Ghost (2000) by Michael Ondaatje

Anil’s Ghost is that rare and vital find — a quiet and utterly human book on the violent effects of war. There are no easy judgements or bold political gestures here, Ondaatje’s focus remains disarmingly direct, attentive to the most tenuous connections between people and events. In the process the occluded emotional landscape of war is revealed – fear, mistrust, the loss of faith and bearings – as well as the necessity for finding a language to translate the dislocations of experience. This novel is about Sri Lanka – a country that for over twenty five years has endured a war as brutal as it is hidden – but also about so much more than Sri Lanka. It is a novel that reminds us that, perhaps, the only way to end political violence is by stepping outside the language that accommodates it.

New writer for the next 25 years: Michelle de Kretser.

Fiona Sampson

New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001(2001) by Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz’s New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001 is important not least as an extended act of poetic witness. Those astonishing dates, and the fact that the poet was a Lithuanian Pole, a resistance fighter who survived the Warsaw Uprising to live more than half his life in exile, mean it is no surprise that Milosz turns the European tradition upon itself, as if to ask what becomes of fine sentiments under pressure. Nor that in 1957’s A Treatise on Poetry, Poland is poetry. Above all, though, it is poetry whose sensuous beauty, vivid symbols and emotional intelligence suggests the potential in messy humanity.

Writer for the future

The brilliant Palestinian American doctor-poet Fady Judah (b.1971) is published in the UK as the supple, sensitive translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, awarded the Banipal Translation Prize and short-listed for the PEN Translation Prize. But in the States, Joudah’sfirst book The Earth in the Attic won the 2007 Yale Younger Poet Series. His sophisticated but clear-as-a-bell verse draws on both his cultures and their poetries. Reading him you get a sense of enormous capacity and range: of thoughtfulness matched by political and human engagement. He has the wherewithal to produce extraordinary work in the decades to come.

Sukhdev Sandhu

The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) by Dr Li Zhisui

The last twenty five years have not borne witness, as Francis Fukuyama predicted it would, to the end of history, but rather to its beginning. What has been unfolding in China has been a breathtakingly accelerated version of the Industrial Revolution, a Great Leap Forward altogether more momentous than anything effected by Mao Zedong. It was his death though that triggered these transformations. And it is the death of his mystique that is announced on every page of this magnificent, agonised biography by his personal physician who offers insights, unparalleled in their intimacy, about the Great Helmsman’s whoring, hypochondria and megalomania. A map of a corrupted body, to say nothing of a corrupted body politic, it remains, even in an era overflowing with genocidal tyrants and dictators, a remarkable book, one whose reverberations will continue to be felt for the next twenty five years too.

The next 25 years? I'd say John Berger; the magnitude of his achievements will be belatedly acknowledged, his work canonised, his politics misrepresented. He will be seen as the pre-eminent global (pre-'globalisation'!) writer of the post-1945 period.

Hirsh Sawhney

River of Fire (1998) by Qurratulain Hyder

My first reading of Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire completely blew me away. Published in English during the 1990s, the book was originally printed in Urdu in 1959. Despite being released forty years ago it, nonetheless, enchanted my MTV generation sensibilities. Here was a woman who wrote about migration without romanticising it. She conjured up artistic aspiration and liberal ideals and then mocked them both. Most importantly, her sweeping version of the Indian subcontinent’s history was erudite and radical and could only displease the powers that be. In times like ours, when stories about South Asia, Islam and women are clouded by a barrage of simplistic media images, readers can be educated and entertained by this iconic, edgy masterpiece.

For a limited time only, view selected writings of the best of Wasafiri for free

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

As part of the 25th birthday celebrations, Wasafiri's publisher is offering free online access to a selection of complete articles, short stories, poems and interviews chosen by Wasafiri's editor Susheila Nasta. Click here to access the writings spanning the whole of the 25 years the magazine has been published.

1984
Earl Lovelace ‘Engaging the World’
Volume 1, Issue 1

1985

David Dabydeen ‘Ballad of the Little Black Boy’

Volume 2, Issue 3

1986

E A Markham ‘The Pig was Mine’

Volume 3, Issue 5

1987

Sara Chetin interviews Ama Ata Aidoo

Volume 3, Issues 6 & 7

1988

Fred D’Aguiar ‘Various poems’

Volume 4, Issue 9

1989

Mia Couto ‘The Tale of the Two Who Returned from the Dead’ (David Brookshaw, trans)

Volume 5, Issue 10

1990

Nayantara Sahgal ‘The Schizophrenic Imagination’

Volume 5, Issue 11

1991

Chris Searle interviews Chinua Achebe

Volume 7, Issue 14

1992

Kamau Brathwaite ‘Caliban’s Guarden’

Volume 8, Issue 16

1993

Mary David interviews Wole Soyinka

Volume 9, Issue 18

1994

Wilson Harris ‘Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition’

Volume 10, Issue 20

1995

V S Naipaul Acceptance Speech of the first David Cohen British Literature Prize Speech

Volume 10, Issue 21

1996

Abdulrazak Gurnah ‘Escort’

Volume 11, Issue 23

1997

Alastair Niven interviews Salman Rushdie

Volume 13, Issue 26

1998

Suzanne Moore interviews bell hooks

Volume 13, Issue 27

1999

Caryl Phillips Following On: ‘The Legacy of Lamming and Selvon’

Volume 14, Issue 29

2000

Amit Chaudhuri ‘The Prince of Arragon’

Volume 16, Issue 32

2001

Tabish Khair ‘Remembering To Forget Abu Taleb’

Volume 16, Issue 34

2002

Aamer Hussein Living in London: A Memoir

Volume 17, Issue 36

2003

Harish Trivedi interviews Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Volume 18, Issue 40

2004

S A Afolabi ‘Monday Morning’ Fiction (Caine Prize winner)

Volume 19, Issue 41

2005

Bernardine Evaristo interviews Diana Evans

Volume 20, Issue 45

2006

Susheila Nasta interviews Hanif Kureishi and Blake Morrison

Volume 21, Issue 2

2007

Marina Warner ‘The Word Unfleshed: Memory in Cyberspace’

Volume 22, Issue 3

2008

Jamal Mahjoub ‘Last Thoughts on the Medusa’

Volume 23, Issue 4

2009

Emma Parker interviews Linda Grant

Volume 24, Issue 1

Read Zoe Wicomb's short story 'In Search of Tommie' as published in issue 59

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Click here to read the short story In Search of Tommie by Zoe Wicomb as first published in issue 59 of Wasafiri magazine.

Kachi A Ozumba, featured in issue 58 of Wasafiri, has his novel selected as one of the Books of the Year 2009 in the Observer newspaper

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Well-known writers, filmmakers, politicians and fashion designers were asked about the books that kept them turning the pages in 2009.

Renowned poet, Jackie Kay and regular contributor to Wasafiri magazine (see current issue 60), selected Kachi A Ozumba's novel The Shadow of a Smile and said it 'is a brilliantly funny and gripping novel that examines the corruption and hypocrisy within the Nigerian justice system'.

Winner of the Decibel Penguin Short Story Prize in 2006 and the Regional Winner for Africa of the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, Kachi's short story Police and Thieves was published by Wasafiri in issue 58 of the magazine.

Click here to read the other books selected as the page turners of 2009 in the Observer newspaper.

New Year Special Offer - buy 1 back issue of Wasafiri and get one free!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri would like to offer its readers a chance to purchase any back issue of the magazine for £10 and get another issue absolutely free!

Please contact wasafiri@open.ac.uk and order your two back issues of Wasafiri magazine for the extremely low cost of £10. Click here to browse through the entire archive of Wasafiri issues.

Payment may be made by paypal to the account wasafiri@open.ac.uk or by cheque made payable to Wasafiri and sent to the following address:

Wasafiri Magazine

Back issue offer

The Open University in London

1-11 Hawley Crescent

London NW1 8NP

United Kingdom

Please note that due to demand some back issues may not be available.

Lisa Appignanesi, Nick Hornby, Aamer Hussein, Hanif Kureishi and Andrea Levy join Clare Sambrook in a petition to stop child detention now.

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

International writers have joined lawyers, health professionals, teachers and social workers in a campaign to end the detention of children seeking asylum. The petition has been organised by Esme Madill, Simon Parker, Clare Sambrook, Alexa Kellow and Mary McCormack of End Child Detention Now and is one of the fatest growing petitions of the No.10 website. A long list of authors, including Lisa Appingnanesi, Nick Hornby, Aamer Hussein, Hanif Kureishi and Andrea Levy, have signed their names in protest. The petition, draft letters to MPs and more information about the campaign can be found at the End Child Detention Now website.

25 acclaimed international writers choose 25 of the best books from the last 25 years.

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude tops the list of books that have most shaped world literature over the last twenty-five years, according to a survey of international writers specially commissioned by Wasafiri as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary.

The 25 books were chosen by 25 respected names in international writing, many of whom have contributed over the years to Wasafiri magazine, including Indra Sinha, Blake Morrison and Fred D’Aguiar. The list of prize-winning fiction, poetry and ground-breaking non-fiction includes Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie; Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama; Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes; Nabokov’s Lolita and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was the only book to have been picked by more than one writer, demonstrating the huge breadth of writing covered within world literature.

Susheila Nasta comments: ‘Writers have always moved worlds with words, transporting us beyond the known and familiar. The eclecticism of this selection showcases the true diversity which is international contemporary writing today. 25 years ago ‘international writing’ was considered off-centre. This selection shows how much the landscape has changed, with many of these titles now part of our literary canon’.

Add to the debate or choose the book that you think has shaped world literature over the last 25 years by posting your comment in the box below.

For press links click here

Aminatta Forna: The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Amit Chaudhuri: Collected Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Bernardine Evaristo: Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Frye

Beverley Naidoo: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D Taylor

Brian Chikwava: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

Blake Morrison: The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver

Chika Unigwe: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Daljit Nagra: North by Seamus Heaney

David Dabydeen: A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul

Elaine Feinstein: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

Fred D'Aguiar: Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris

Hirsh Sawhney: River of Fire by Quarratulain Hyder

Indra Sinha: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

John Haynes: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Lesley Lokko: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Maggie Gee: Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Marina Warner: Dreams from My Father by Barak Obama

Maya Jaggi: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Michael Horovitz: Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg

Minoli Salgado: Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Nii Parkes: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Roger Robinson: Sula by Toni Morrison

Sujata Bhatt: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Sukhdev Sandhu: The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr Li Zhisui

Tabish Khair: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Aminatta Forna: The Famished Road by Ben Okri

I think Ben Okri's The Famished Road did for a literature concerned with Africa what Rushdie's Midnight's Children did for literature of and about India. I think both books brought a new interest, audience and understanding to literature that was not of the West. Both authors were based in the UK and were published by UK publishers, they open the floodgates for writers based both here and on Asian and African continents who offered a new way of seeing.

Amit Chaudhuri: Collected Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems, which I first chanced upon in Bombay in the late seventies in a library, has had an enormous, if subtle, impact on how we think of poetry and language today. It's a reminder that travel, exile, cosmopolitan irony, as well as a certain narrative of the self can be addressed just as well - if not better - through the means poetry has at hand (economy, form, the image, and a kind of grace) as they can by the novel or the essay. Poetry experiences and communicates the undercurrent of our lives incomparably; there's hardly a better argument for this simple fact than Bishop's book. My only regret is that her voice is not heard more clearly in the country in which I first discovered her.

Bernardine Evaristo: Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer

This remains the definitive guide to Britain’s black history. It told the world that black and Asian roots went deep into British history because our presence on these shores spanned nearly 2000 years. For a country steeped in the myth of its own racial purity, this was a bit of a culture shock. A History of Blacks in Britain by Edward Scobie was the first book of this kind, but its scope was less ambitious (Johnson Publishing, 1972). It was ‘Staying Power, both scholarly and accessible, that expanded our understanding of what it means to be British.

Beverley Naidoo: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D Taylor

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, winner of the 1977 Newberry Medal, by Mildred D Taylor. For three decades, this novel has made 1930s African-American lives in Mississippi vividly present in secondary school literature classes throughout the UK. Drawing on family stories she had heard since childhood, Mildred D Taylor created feisty young Cassie Logan and her family who pit humanity and survival humour against the crude brutality and stupidity of racist power. Roll of Thunder opened a door to a world previously suppressed and ignored. Taylor continued to develop an award-winning saga of books about the Logan family, and a wonderful prequel The Land – about Cassie Logan’s grandfather - won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001.

Brian Chikwava: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

I've earmarked Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which I think is a stunning novel in the scope and depth of its subjects, and probably the only novel in recent years that convincingly unfolds on four continents. With a candid realist style that casually swashes utopian dreams against the cold hard edges of the late twentieth century capitalism this is a piece of work that is disarmingly colloquial and virtuoso in its rather unliterary flounce.

Blake Morrison: The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver

For better or worse, the most influential book of the past 25 years is the paperback edition of 'The Stories of Raymond Carver', published in 1985, which gathered his first three collections into a single volume. No creative writing course would be complete without it: thousands of young writers have been taught to pare their work to the bone, just as Carver was by his editor Gordon Lish - though nobody can match Carver's genius for rhythm and nuance.

Chika Unigwe: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

It will have to be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez completely redefines how one looks at reality. Its language is powerful; the manner in which it crosses genres is revealing and I cannot think of a single writer-friend I know who has not been influenced by Márquez.

Daljit Nagra: North by Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s North, for its intensely lyrical and idiosyncratic focus on aesthetic resolutions to conflict.

David Dabydeen: A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas placed the Indo-Caribbean person at the heart of world literature. Up to then, the Caribbean was perceived as being part of Africa and significant minorities like Indians were almost completely ignored in accounts of Caribbean culture.

Elaine Feinstein: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

One of the most influential books of poems in the last 25 years was Ted Hughes Birthday Letters. Not only did it bring his relationship with Sylvia Plath to vivid life, the book created a new form of intimate poetry, quite different from Robert Lowell’s confessional verse. On another tack, Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker - a book, written before became so polemical - introduced a whole generation to Darwin.

Fred D’Aguiar: Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
I've re-read, dipped into for a quote and passed on countless copies to friends and students, ‘Palace of the Peacock’ (Faber) By Wilson Harris.
This brief and brave novel celebrates its 50^th year of publication in 2010 and it deserves the graces of every pair of literate eyes from Land’s End to John O’Groats for its poetic limpidity, narrative invention, and eco-wisdom.

Hirsh Sawhney: River of Fire by Quarratulain Hyder

My first reading of Quarratulain Hyder¹s River of Fire completely blew me away. Published in English during the 1990s, the book was originally printed in Urdu in 1959. Despite being released forty years ago, it nonetheless enchanted my MTV generation sensibilities. Here was a woman who wrote about migration without romanticizing it. She conjured up artistic aspiration and liberal ideals and then mocked them both. Most importantly, her sweeping version of the Indian subcontinent¹s history was erudite and radical and could only displease the powers that be. In times like ours, when stories about South Asia, Islam and women are clouded by a barrage of simplistic media images, readers can be educated and entertained by this iconic, edgy masterpiece.

Indra Sinha: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

One has to consider Midnight's Children (1984), as its success opened doors for so many new writers. But I will choose Lolita (1955) for Nabokov's astonishing virtuoso performance, which has never been excelled.

John Haynes: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Investigations shows the relationships between poetry and philosophy, lies behind/comes before the (in my view mainly derivative sometimes narcissistic) ideas of post-modernism, post-structuralism, post Marxism.

Lesley Lokko: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

It would have to be Midnight’s Children – it opened up an enormous window into the post-colonial experience that has continued to shape, mould and influence English language fiction ever since.

Maggie Gee: Disgrace by JM Coetzee

This lean, cool, brilliant book cuts to the heart of South Africa’s past and future and of relations between colonist and colonised everywhere. JM Coetzee’s central character, David Lurie, begins as a touchy ageing academic who abuses his position by a relationship with a mixed-race undergraduate: the narrative slowly strips everything away from him. In Coetzee’s depressive but commanding vision, the only redemption for white people in the Eastern Cape is to yield power utterly, to become as powerless as the colonised once were and do the worse-than-menial jobs which were once done for them. Their reward, if they are lucky? Survival at subsistence level - the same reward they once offered to the indigenous peoples of South Africa. Morally relentless, pared to the bone, showing the rape of Lurie’s daughter by black intruders as a political and genetic weapon in a wider war, this great book presses inexorably towards its ending, but then there is a kind of surprise. As David Lurie, like King Lear, learns from his daughter to manage with nothing, he earns the compassion that Coetzee finally affords to all of us dying animals, human and non-human.

Marina Warner: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Obama's Dreams from My Father is definitely the most influential book historically, but it is also a work of literature too, beautifully written, and the product of deep, open-hearted reflection. But I'll also propose that the kinds of stories gathered from the witnesses at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as collected, re-told and shaped by the Afrikaans poet Aintje Krog in her book Country of My Skull have had a huge impact on literature's sense of its own mission. Her appointment as official rapporteur was an act of exceptionally inspired patronage, because personal testimony to atrocity has come to inspire every branch of writing, from fiction to memoir.

Maya Jaggi: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and WG Sebald’s The Emigrants (1993) have all forged paths for others in their vision of the individual’s vexed relationship to history and language. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), assailing gaps left by mountains of second world war fiction and film, not only created an influential model for a new anti-war war novel, but remapped the post-war world through four characters in a Tuscan villa. While Anthony Minghella’s now classic, Oscar-winning film adaptation became skewed towards epic desert romance, the novel registers tectonic shifts in global history through the luminous intimacy of a chamber piece.

Michael Horovitz: Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg

The book which has probably most shaped my own literary and supra-literary awareness of the past 25 years is Collected Poems by Allen Ginsberg (Viking, 1984). This 860-page compendium of just about every poem the American-Jewish-Buddhist bard wanted to keep from his beginnings in 1947 will surely prove enlightening for anyone interested in contemporary writing. His two classic longer poems, ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, along with the rest of this vast body of richly diverse experiments, have done more than anything else I know of to open up the forms, content, musicality and candour of contemporary English-speaking poetry.

Minoli Salgado: Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Anil’s Ghost is that rare and vital find – a quiet and utterly human book on the violent effects of war. There are no easy judgements or bold political gestures here – Ondaatje’s focus remains disarmingly direct, attentive to the most tenuous connections between people and events. In the process the occluded emotional landscape of war is revealed – fear, mistrust, the loss of faith and bearings – as well as the necessity for finding a language to translate the dislocations of experience. This novel is about Sri Lanka but also about so much more than Sri Lanka – a country that for over 25 years has endured a war as brutal as it is hidden. It is a novel that reminds us that perhaps the only way to end political violence is by stepping outside the language that accommodates it.

Nii Parkes: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

I think One Hundred Years of Solitude taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia. Apart from the fact that it’s an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives.

Roger Robinson: Sula by Toni Morrison

I was late to Toni Morrison and picked up Sula after fellow poet Peter Kahn said it was his favourite book and he couldn't believe that I hadn't read it. When I got home to my surprise it was already in my library. It was my wife's copy and she read it when she was a student. It is the only book I ever read in one day from beginning to end. It's the first novel that I saw my aunts, mums and sisters in. Not in a metaphorical sense but I actually saw them. Sula was my Aunty Lynette extracting choice from choicelessness. Nel was my Aunty Monica, a good woman. It is a novel full of death but not in a morbid way but death punctuating the celebration of life and living. There's birth death sex and food. Everything I ever wanted to find in a novel.

Sujata Bhatt: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

I don't think any book has shaped world literature to the extent that the internet has in the past 25 years. I believe that the last book that has had a significant impact on world literature was One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquez.

Sukhdev Sandhu: The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr Li Zhisui

Dr Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994). The last 25 years have not borne witness, as Francis Fukuyama predicted it would, to the end of history, but rather to its beginning. What has been unfolding in China has been a breathtakingly accelerated version of the Industrial Revolution, a Great Leap Forward altogether more momentous than anything effected by Mao Zedong. It was his death though that triggered these transformations. And it’s the death of his mystique that is announced on every page of this magnificent, agonized biography by his personal physician who offers insights, unparalleled in their intimacy, about the Great Helmsman’s whoring, hypochondria, megalomania. A map of a corrupted body, to say nothing of a corrupted body politic, it remains, even in an era overflowing with genocidal tyrants and dictators, a remarkable book, one whose reverberations will continue to be felt for the next 25 years too.

Tabish Khair: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

In choosing The Satanic Verses as one of the important books of the last 25 years, I am consciously leaving out books – in the three other languages (Hindi, Urdu and Danish) I have some knowledge of – that could have competed for the honour. But to name them appears to be little else than self-indulgence, for they would not be familiar to most readers of (even) Wasafiri regardless of how many other readers might swear by them. Hence, it has to be Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988): a baggy monster of a novel, brilliant in some parts, self-absorbed and gimmicky in others, a book of “metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes’, as The Times put it. It is a novel that could only have been written by someone from a Muslim background. It is also a novel that could only have been written by someone immersed in Western ways of seeing Islam. One can love it or hate it – personally I feel a position in between is the clearest indicator of sanity in today’s world – but one cannot ignore it.

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Read Tabish Khair's blog about Wasafiri on the Bookseller website

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Tabish Khair is the associate editor of Wasafiri magazine, a critic and a writer, whose most recent novel is Filming: A Love Story (Picador, 2007).

Read Tabish's blog 'On the sidelines?' on the Bookseller's website here.

Susheila Nasta's top ten books to take you travelling

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri Editor, Susheila Nasta, selects her top ten books for the Guardian. The full feature can be read here.

'The tragic-comic creation of a black city of words that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens is a must.'	'An intimate African-American classic which looks forward to Morrison's award-winning novel, Beloved.'
'Delicately interweaving a series of interconnected histories of diaspora and ... dislocation, this haunting story takes us from [a] tortured childhood in pre-war Berlin to Calcutta and Bombay.'	'A story about loss and redemption, trauma and memory, [which] leads us through a maze of uncanny dialogues. An inconsolable Holocaust history... a major chronicle of our times.'
'Set in East Africa a decade before the first world war, this novel is a feast of luminous storytelling.'	'A hybrid mix of fiction, politics and journalism, populated by strong female figures who are transported beyond its confining patriarchal history.'
'It may be a surprise that two centuries ago London was at the heart of the opium trade ... This previously untold story ... exposes the histories of all who were drawn into the corrupt politics of this lucrative business.'	'A powerful and hypnotic prose poem which plunges us into the world of an illiterate Antiguan taxi driver whose mundane existence is defined by absence and loss.'
'There are many stories about fathers and sons, about childhood friendships and betrayals, but few set in Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion, and few so moving.'	'Fast-moving, witty, humorous and above all inventive, we are taken on a journey through the streets of a London which has long had a diverse history.'