Wasafiri News - wasafiri

New Award to Recognise Excellence in Caribbean Literature for Young Adults

Thu, 9 May 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

New Award to Recognise Excellence in Caribbean Literature for Young Adults

Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, April 29, 2013 — An exciting global initiative in Young Adult literature is coming to the Caribbean! The Burt Award for Caribbean Literature was launched on April 27 at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

Part of a unique global literary award and readership initiative aiming to provide youth everywhere with access to books they will want to read, the Award was established by CODE – a Canadian charitable organization that has been supporting literacy and learning for over 50 years – in collaboration with William (Bill) Burt and the Literary Prizes Foundation and in partnership with the Bocas Lit Fest. The Award will be accepting submissions from publishers from May 13 until August 23, 2013.

“In the Caribbean, as in many other places around the world, the call for quality, locally-authored reading materials for young people is constantly growing. Supporting the development of books that reflect the lives of readers, providing opportunities for emerging writers to develop and showcase their talents, and stimulating the growth of the regional publishing sector is crucial,” said CODE Executive Director Scott Walter. “And that’s exactly what this Award aims to do — it helps address these issues by celebrating the literary achievements of Caribbean authors and improving young readers’ access to books that are engaging and meaningful to them.”

The Award will be given annually to three English-language literary works for Young Adults by Caribbean authors. A First Prize of $10,000 CAD, a Second Prize of $7,000 CAD and a Third Prize of $5,000 CAD will be awarded to the winning authors. The publishers of each winning title will also receive a guaranteed purchase of up to 3,000 copies, ensuring the books will get into the hands of young people in schools, libraries and community organizations across the Caribbean.

For this new initiative, CODE will build on the success it has achieved in implementing the Burt Award in four African countries, as well as its long established partnerships in the Caribbean.

“Oftentimes, the only books Caribbean youth have access to are the textbooks they use in school. But textbooks don’t encourage them to develop a love of reading,” said William (Bill) Burt, who was instrumental in its founding and financially supports the Award. “I hope that the high-quality books that will emerge from these annual awards will make young people love to read, build their language skills and, eventually, help them to make a lasting difference in their communities.”

Since its inception in 2008, the Burt Award for African Literature has resulted in the publication of nearly 150,000 copies of 24 titles for young adults in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. The inaugural Call for Manuscripts for the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature was launched in September 2012 in Canada and the first winners will be announced in the fall of 2013.

The winners of the Inaugural Burt Award for Caribbean Literature will be announced at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in April 2014.

For further details on the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature, go to www.codecan.org/burt-award-caribbean

For more information, please contact:

Dominique Naud

Communications Manager

CODE

1-800-661-2633 ext. 252

dnaud@codecan.org

About CODE

If you can read and write, you can learn to do, and be, anything. That’s the idea behind CODE. A Canadian NGO with over 50 years of experience, CODE supports literacy and learning in Canada and around the world. CODE’s international programs encourage development through education through support to libraries, professional development for teachers, as well as national and local book publishing in 20 languages.

www.codecan.org

Submissions welcome for Poetry Anthology to be launched by University of London's Human Rights Consortium

Thu, 9 May 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

The University of London’s Human Rights Consortium, in collaboration with the Keats House Poets and the Institute of English Studies, invites contributions for a new anthology of poems about human rights.

This is your opportunity to be published in a special collection by the University of London’s Human Rights Consortium; the anthology which will be launched at the Bloomsbury Festival at Senate House in London in October 2013.

We are looking for poems that focus on any human rights or social justice issue, national or international, current or historical. Poems could explore refugee rights, freedom of speech, indigenous peoples' rights, LGBTI rights, economic rights or environmental justice – the opportunities are endless!

The Human Rights Poetry Anthology will be selected, compiled and edited by academics with expertise in human rights and English studies from the School of Advanced Study (University of London); and the Keats House Poets, a collective of young poets supported by the Keats House Museum who actively write and perform poems about human rights issues.

For further information go to http://www.sas.ac.uk/hrc/projects/human-rights-poetry

Full submission rules:

All poems must be emailed to the anthology administrator at HRC@sas.ac.uk by 5.30pm May 15th 2013. Poems submitted after this date/time may not be considered.
Please send a maximum of two poems per poet, of 70 lines maximum per poem.
Poems must be the poet’s own work, original, unpublished and not entered into any other current competitions.
Poems must be emailed in Microsoft Word document or PDF file format (send us a PDF your poem as well as a Word version if it contains very particular form that must be retained, or if the original language contains special characters or symbols).
Poets should include with their submission a short biographical note and some information about the news article, human rights law, or anecdote that inspired their piece of writing, totaling no more than 300 words.
Only final versions of the poem should be sent; second submissions will not be accepted.
There is no entrance fee for this competition. Successful poets whose poems form part of the anthology will receive a contributor’s copy of the anthology (one copy per poet).
We encourage poets to submit work in languages other than English, provided that they are accompanied by translations, with each version no longer than 35 lines each.
All poems will be anonymised by the administrator, and successful poets will be notified by June 2013.
We will be unable to provide feedback, and the editors’ decision is final.
This is an open submission; we invite poets of all ages and abilities to enter.
Poets retain the full rights to their work. After the anthology has been in print for six months it will be available to download from the School of Advanced Study online repository, SAS Space.
Poets whose work is selected for publication will be eligible for the Spread the Word prize; will receive a contributor’s copy of the anthology; and will be invited to the Bloomsbury Festival launch and other performance opportunities organized by the Keats House Poets.

We will be holding a Creative Campaigning Workshop in April 2013 in Senate House. Led by the Keats House Poets and a lecturer in human rights from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Human Rights MA programme, the workshop will teach a number of skills related to framing and communicating your idea – whether you need to summarise an academic argument, tell a potential employer what you're about in a job interview, or create a simple yet effective campaign message.

Winner announced for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi been announced as the winner of the sixth International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

A daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Gulf countries, The Bamboo Stalk is the story of Issa, the son of a Kuwaiti father and a Filipino mother.

On returning to his father’s homeland as an adult, Issa finds himself in a difficult position. Rather than the mythical country his mother has described to him, he discovers he is caught between the natural, biological ties he shares with his father’s family and the prejudices of a traditional society, which views a child of Kuwaiti-Filipino heritage as socially unacceptable. Skilfully constructed, The Bamboo Stalk is a story of great strength and depth which questions identity in modern society.

Born in 1981, Alsanousi is the youngest writer to win the Prize. The Bamboo Stick is his second novel; his first, Prisoner of Mirrors, was published in 2010.

The Bamboo Stalk has been chosen as the best work of fiction from the last 12 months, selected from 133 submissions from across the Arab World. On behalf of the 2013 Judging Panel, Galal Amin comments on the winning novel:

‘‘The members of the Judging Panel are delighted that The Bamboo Stalk has won the Prize. All the Judges agreed on the superior quality of this novel, both artistically and also in terms of its social and humanitarian content.’

The five other shortlisted finalists were also honoured at the ceremony alongside the winner; each of the finalists, including the winner, receives $10,000.

The six names on the shortlist were announced in January, in Tunis, by a distinguished panel of academics and cultural figures. Chaired by Galal Amin, the Judging Panel is: Lebanese academic and critic Sobhi al-Boustani; Ali Ferzat, who is head of the Arab Cartoonists' Association, and owner and chief editor of the independent Syrian daily newspaper Al-Domari; Polish academic and Professor of Arabic Literature at the Arts College of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, specialist in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern and Gender Studies at Manchester University.

The Prize is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the TCA Abu Dhabi in the UAE, which marks its first year as the new sponsor of the Prize in 2013.

Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Board of IPAF Trustees, comments: ‘The Prize has a history of discovering new voices and we’ve done that again this year. The Judges have been working without fear or favour with their sole objective to identify the best of Arabic fiction published over the last year. We salute a distinguished shortlist and congratulate an outstanding winner.’

To date, five of the six winning novels have secured deals for publication in English. Overall, winning and shortlisted books since 2008 have been translated into over 20 languages.

For further information about the Prize, please visit www.arabicfiction.org or follow the Prize on Facebook.

THE WINNER

Saud Alsanousi

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines and he currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper. His first novel The Prisoner of Mirrors was published in 2010 and in the same year won the fourth Laila al-Othman Prize, awarded for novels and short stories by young writers. In the "Stories on the Air" competition organised in July 2011 by the Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic, he won first place for his story The Bonsai and the Old Man.

The Bamboo Stalk

Josephine comes to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a household servant, leaving behind her studies and family, who are pinning their hopes for a better future on her. In the house where she works, she meets Rashid, the spoiled only son of Ghanima and Issa. After a brief love affair, he decides to marry Josephine, on condition that the marriage remains a secret. But things do not go according to plan. Josephine becomes pregnant with José and Rashid abandons them when the child is less than two months old, sending his son away to the Philippines. There he struggles with poverty and clings to the hope of returning to his father's country when he is eighteen. It is at this point that the novel begins.

The Bamboo Stalk is a daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Arab countries and deals with the problem of identity through the life of a young man of mixed race who returns to Kuwait, the ‘dream’ or ‘heaven’ which his mother had described to him since he was a child.

The Judges are: Egyptian academic and writer Galal Amin (Chair); Lebanese academic and critic Sobhi al-Boustani; Ali Ferzat, who is head of the Arab Cartoonists' Association, and owner and chief editor of the independent Syrian daily newspaper Al-Domari; Polish academic and Professor of Arabic Literature at the Arts College of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, specialist in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern and Gender Studies at Manchester University.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is awarded for prose fiction in Arabic and each of the six shortlisted finalists receives $10,000, with a further $50,000 going to the winner. It was launched in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in April 2007, and is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the TCA Abu Dhabi in the UAE, who were announced as the new sponsor of the Prize in September 2012.

For further information about the Prize, please visit www.arabicfiction.org or follow the Prize on Facebook

Free download of Wasafiri article to celebate the Year of Shakespeare

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri celebrates the Year of Shakespeare

Routledge are giving readers the opportunity of a free download of the Wasafiri article Shakespeare in Africa: Reflections on the teaching of English literature abroad by Manfred Malhzan from Issue 22 (1995).

Click here to download the article for free!

Obituary: Chinua Achebe, the founding father of African fiction, dies aged 82

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

We are sad to announce the death of Chinua Achebe, Africa's best-known novelist. Wasafiri board member, Lyn Innes writes about his profound contribution to the world of literature in her obituary in The Guardian.

Click here to read further

Launch of The Writing Platform - Writers' views needed

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The Writing Platform, a website and program of live events dedicated to arming writers with digital knowledge, will launch in February 2013 and will be funded by the National Lottery and Arts Council England.

The free online resource will offer all writers and poets (whether published not yet published or self published) best practice information about writing in a digital age.

To inform the launch we are asking as many writers as possible to fill out this survey http://bit.ly/Rd8sKX in order to establish how The Writing Platform can best serve the writing community.

For more information about The Writing Platform, please follow this link to the press release (http:// http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2012/12/new-free-digital-knowledge”-resource-for-writers/).

Listen to Romesh Gunesekera discussing Reef on the BBC WorldService Book Club with Harriett Gilbert

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

To listen follow the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003jhsk

Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature 2012

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Our congratulations go to Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mo Yan, who was featured in Wasafiri issue 55, 'Writing China', in Autumn 2008, was born in Gaomi, China, in 1955 and is the first Chinese citizen to have ever won the prize.

The prize committee descibed Mo Yan as someone 'who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary'.

Mo Yan, the pen name of Guan Moye, left school to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution and joined the Poeple's Liberation Army at the age of twenty. he bagn writing while in the ary in 1981. In 1984 he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the People's Liberation Army's Art Academy. most of his novels and some of his short stories have been translated into English. These include the novels Red Sorghum (Viking, 1993), The Republic of Win (Arcade, 1996), The Garlic Ballads (Penguin, 1996), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (Arcade, 2003) and Love and Death are Wearing Me Out (Arcade, 2008). Collections of short stories in translation include Explosions and Other Stories (Renditions, 1993) and Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh (Arcade, 2003).

The Best of the Best of the James Tait Black Prizes will honour the best novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1919

Wed, 7 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Six critically acclaimed authors of the past 100 years are in the running to be named the best ever winner of Britain’s oldest literary award.

Novels by Angela Carter, Graham Greene, James Kelman, Cormac McCarthy, Caryl Phillips and Muriel Spark make up the shortlist for a one-off award of the James Tait Black Prizes.

The Best of the Best of the James Tait Black Prizes will honour the best novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1919.

Anniversary Celebrations

The award is being made to celebrate the 250th anniversary of English literature study at the University of Edinburgh.

The six books competing for the accolade are: Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter; The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene; A Disaffection by James Kelman; The Road by Cormac McCarthy; Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips and The Mandlebaum Gate by Muriel Spark.

Judging Process

The winning book, which will be announced in December, will be selected by a distinguished judging panel including broadcaster Kirsty Wark and award-winning author and writer in residence at the University, Alan Warner.

The shortlist was selected by scholars and students of literature at the University.

History of prize

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her deceased husband’s love of reading. They are the only major British book awards judged by scholars and postgraduate literature students.

Each year, more than 300 books are read by professors of literature and postgraduate readers prior to the conferment of the prizes.

The annual awards are for the best work of fiction and the best biography published during the previous 12 months.

Photo credit: Sally Jubb

Click here to find out more

Chike Unigwe wins the prestigious NLNG Literary Prize for On Black Sisters' Street

Fri, 2 Nov 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Chika Unigwe's novel, On Black Sisters' Street, topped a shortlist of ten Nigerian and Nigerian diaspora novels to win the NLNG Literary Prize 2012.

Described as 'Africa's biggest literary prize', Unigwe wins $100,00 and joins a list of NLNG winners which includes Gabriel Okara, Ezenwa Ohaeto and Ahmed Yerima.

Chair of judges, Professor Abiola Irele, Provost of the College of Humanities at the Kwara State University and Fellow of the Dubois Institute, Harvard University, said it took months of intensive scrutiny by the panel to produce the shortlist which was drawn from 214 entries from Nigerians at home and abroad, the largest number received since the prize was inaugurated in 2004.

The other shortlisted writers were:

Ngozi Achebe Onaedo The Blacksmith's Daughter
Ifeanyi Ajaegbo Sarah House
Jude Dibia Blackbird
Vincent Egbuson Zhero
Adaobi Tricia Nwubani I Do Not Come to You by Chance
Onuora Nzekwu Troubled Dust
Olusola Olugbesan Only a Canvas
Lola Shoneyin The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives
E E Sule Sterile Sky

Get your poems published for free on the UK Poetry Library website

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The Poetry Library has launched a new website which enables poets to publish their poems online for free and get more recognition for their work.

They do this by –

Publishing poetry on our website for free
Publishing poetry in their own book
Publishing poetry in an anthology of modern poets

You can be one of the first to be published with The UK Poetry Library.

All you have to do is submit some of your work to now – you can submit one poem or many. The choice is yours.

You can write on any theme you choose.

Chosen poems will be published on the Poetry Library website and could be published in an anthology.

For more information visit the Poetry Library website

DECOLONIZING THE MIND: two generations in conversation - Ngugi wa Thiong'o talks to Mukoma wa Ngugi

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Litquake hosts Nobel-nominated Kenyan author and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in conversation on politics, aesthetics, writing, and more, with his son, Cornell professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Moderated by author and professor Sarah Ladipo Manyika at the Museum of the African Diaspora, this event was part of the inaugural Words and Pictures: A Cultural Stroll through Yerba Buena—new to Litquake XIII. — Sunday, October 7th 2012

Watch the conversation here

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's production of Pantomime launched on YouTube

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Students, academics and people from around the world can now watch online the new production of Pantomime directed at the University of Essex by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.

In May, Walcott flew over especially from St Lucia to direct the premiere of a new production of his play at the Lakeside Theatre at the Colchester Campus as part of his role as Professor of Poetry. The show was a huge success with the Lakeside Theatre packed out throughout its three night run and fans travelling from across Europe to see the production.

Now a recording of the show is being made available on the University of Essex’s dedicated YouTube channel. At the same time there is also a chance to watch Walcott discussing his work with award-winning poet Glyn Maxwell, who is also a lecturer in the Centre for Creative Writing at the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies (LiFTS).

Professor Maria Cristina Fumagalli and Penny Woollard, from LiFTS, co-produced Pantomime at the Lakeside.

Professor Fumagalli, who has published extensively on Walcott and has introduced many Essex students to his work, said: “It was wonderful to bring Pantomime to the general public at the Lakeside Theatre. Derek was inspiring and everyone worked really hard to make it happen. Now it is very exciting to know that this extraordinary production is going to be available to everyone.”

For the past three years, Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T S Eliot Prize in 2011, has been visiting the University of Essex to teach students, give talks and readings, and direct his own plays.

This was believed to be the first production of Pantomime for the UK stage for close to 30 years and was originally written in the late 1970s. The play is a satirical reinterpretation of the Robinson Crusoe story and investigates a whole range of issues from colonialism to the creative process through the relationship between former English song-and-dance man Harry Trewe and his servant Jackson Phillip.

The show starred David Tarkenter (pictured), a leading member of the Mercury Theatre Acting Company, and Trinidadian actor Wendell Manwarren (pictured), both handpicked by Walcott who was supported by the Lakeside Theatre production team.

During his visit in May, Walcott said: “I feel very privileged. This is a lovely little theatre and they help me do what I want to do. It feels like it is the fulfilment of something.”

New Wasafiri Poetry Anthology Out Now!

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Poetry Bites

Celebrating poetry from around the world

A limited edition anthology showcasing 60 poets from around the world who have been published by Wasafiri magazine since 1984

ONLY £3.50!

To purchase a copy contact Wasafiri@open.ac.uk

Featuring poets from

Argentina, Australia, The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Botswana, Canada, The Cook Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Fiji, France, The Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Russia, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tonga, Trinidad, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, USA, Uruguay, Virgin Islands, Zambia and Zimbabwe!

Minoli Salgado wins the SI LEEDS LITERARY PRIZE 2012 for her novel A Little Dust on the Eye

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Minoli Salgado wins the SI LEEDS LITERARY PRIZE 2012 - a new award for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women

Minoli's novel, A Little Dust on the Eye, was selected by a judging panel chaired by Margaret Busby OBE, together with Hannah Bannister of Peepal Tree Press and Gail Bollard of SI Leeds. An extract of Minoli's novel appears here http://sileedsliteraryprize.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/minoli-salgado-a-little-dust-on-the-eyes-extract.pdf

The other shortlisted entries for the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize were:

The Book of Ghosts by Katy Massey

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing by Emily Midorikawa

Borrowed Light by Karen Onojaife

The Weekend for Sex, and other stories by Anita Sivakumaran

Storybank: The Milkfarm Years by Jane Steele

The inaugural prize ceremony took place on 3 October 2012 as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival. Prize Patron Bonnie Greer and Chair of the Judges, Margaret Busby discussed the need for the competition and the exciting future for writing by Black and Asian women. Our special congratulations go to Minoli who is a member of the Wasafiri Board and a long-time supporter of the magazine.

The prize is run and funded by Soroptimist International of Leeds, part of a worldwide network of Soroptimists who create opportunities to transform the lives of women through dynamic projects and international partnerships. The prize has also been generously supported by two well-established Yorkshire-based literature organisations, Peepal Tree Press and Ilkley Literature Festival, both of whom have an enviable track record in literature development.

About the prize: http://sileedsliteraryprize.wordpress.com/about-the-prize/

Listen to Susheila Nasta, Florian Stadtler and Bhavit Mehta discuss Asian Literature in Bloomsbury - podcast available to download now

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Fiction Uncovered FM podcasts are now all in the iTunes stores:

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/fiction-uncovered/id542154731?mt=2

Jeet Thayil shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize with his first novel Narcopolis

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Jeet Thayil shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize

Indian-born poet, Jeet Thayil’s first novel Narcopolis has been shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Jeet was recently interviewed by Siddhartha Bose for issue 69 of Wasafiri magazine (Spring 2012), where he talks about Bombay, his literary influences and his decision to write a novel.

Narcopolis, which is set around the Bombay opium den, has been described as written with a feverish and furious necessity.

Visit the Man Booker Prize website for further information.

The key 2012 prize dates:

25 July 2012 – Longlist announcement;
11 September 2012 – Shortlist announcement;
16 October 2012 – Winner announcement.

To purchase any Wasafiri issue or to subscribe to the magazine, email us at Wasafiri@open.ac.uk

A New Network - Diasporic Literary Archives

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

A new network led by the University of Reading has been established to better promote international collaboration in the preservation of, and access to, literary archives. It brings together a group of established scholars and experts from a variety of institutional backgrounds, and across different disciplines and regions, to initiate a context in which to practice and scrutinise methodological and conceptual frameworks. Through a programme of workshops the network seeks to establish an international perspective on these issues by examining the complicated and sometimes competing motives of different stakeholders.

The network’s five partners are: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; a prominent archivist from Trinidad and Tobago; the Centro di Ricerca sulla Tradizione Manoscritta di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei at the University of Pavia; the Institut Memoires de l’Edition Contemporaine in France; and the National Library and Archive Service of Namibia.

Click here to go to the website

Kwani? launches articles on writing by Africa's leading authors

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

To support writers through the process of developing and submitting manuscripts for our new literary prize, Kwani Trust have commissioned a series of articles by today’s leading African writers on writing craft and practice. Including contributions from Aminatta Forna, Leila Aboulela, Ellen Banda-Aaku and Helon Habila, the articles offer advice and inspiration for developing your novel manuscript over the next 2 months.

'Me and Dambudzo': Flora Veit-Wild comments on the reception of her personal essay on Dambudzo Marechera

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

In 2011 Wasafiri was approached by Flora Veit-Wild, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin, who was looking for a suitable home for her personal and revelatory essay, 'Me and Dambudzo', an account of her public and private relationship with late Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera. We were delighted to be able to publish the essay in issue 69 (Spring 2012). Post publication 'Me and Dambudzo' has gone on to spark controversy and debate. Flora Veit-Wild comments on the essay's astonishing reception.

Flora Veit-Wild While I was in Johannesburg the weekly Mail & Guardian, produced in Johannesburg – the main source of information, especially for the arts scene - reprinted excerpts of my essay 'Me and Dambudzo' (it was reproduced in full length in their online edition) with a large photo of myself which they took while I was there. I had also sent the essay to quite a few people interested in Marechera and my work on him. Responses were flowing in, almost all of them really lovely and full of appreciation. When I arrived in Harare, a storm set in. First of all I discovered that I was displayed in large format on the cover page of the Mail & Guardian - apparently they can change the cover for the Zimbabwe edition - so that many people who know me saw me at road crossings where newspapers are being sold or on pavements. The text also travelled onto various blogs and facebook etc. More and more people started talking about it. A quite ugly piece appeared in the Bulawayo Chronicle, all about scandal, picking on the juicy bits; quite moralistic and not at all adequate. The Herald, the main daily newspaper in Zimbabwe, and loyal to the government, serialised my text - without getting in touch with me - on three Mondays, without comment, thus helping to get it to even more people. In the meantime a Marechera evening took place at the Zimbabwe German Society which had been planned prior to my trip. It had the format of a panel chaired by myself with seven poets and scholars doing very short contributions in poetic form, or reading from Dambudzo's work or - in two cases - outlines of academic work on him. I read my short story ‘Lake Mcllwaine’ at the end, which was well received. It was a wonderful evening, a large audience and very lively panel. Of course there were also questions directed to my about my ‘disclosures’ which I could reply to or passed them on to others on the panel. Subsequently someone freelancing for the BBC World Service asked me for an interview, which we did the next morning, and a couple of days later a reporter for The Standard, a Zimbabwean weekly, hunted me down. The reporter obviously wanted to bring out a tabloid story, insisting on questions about my husband and the HIV issue. I refused to say anything about those, so they advertised the story as ‘Secret Lover still dreams about Marerechera’. Quite hilarious!

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On Tuesday March 13, 2012, The Zimbabwe German Society in Harare hosted a literary discussion themed 'Re-visiting Dambudzo Marechera: Old Texts Brought to Life' where a number of panelists, including Memory Chirere, Mhamo Mhiripiri, Comrade Fatso, Biko and Kudakwashe Muchena, read selected excerpts from the work of the late writer. Flora Veit-Wild also read Lake Mcllwaine. a fictionalised account, based on a three day outing she had with Marechera at the well-known lake (now called Lake Chivero).

Pictured: Flora Veit-Wild reading from Wasafiri, and Marechera scholar, Kudakwashe Muchena.

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'Me and Dambudzo' and 'Lake Mcllwaine' have also been reproduced in a new publication, Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century, edited by Julie Cairnie and Dobrota Pucherova (LIT Verlag, Berlin, May 2012).

A collection of multimedia works, many of which were featured at the 2009 Marechera Celebration conference in Oxford, at which Wasafiri was also represented, Moving Spirit demonstrates the growing influence of this author among writers, artists and scholars worldwide and invites the reassessment of his oeuvre and of categories of literary theory such as modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Middle East Arts Festival announces ambitious new plans

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The Nour Festival of Arts today announces ambitious new plans to bring dazzling contemporary artistic talent from the Middle East and North Africa to London audiences during October-November 2012. For the first time the festival is to expand beyond Leighton House Museum to include a stellar cast of participating cultural organisations.

New festival partners include the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Ismaili Centre, the Mosaic Rooms, the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre and The Tabernacle. A significant new feature of Nour 2012 is the organisers’ call to cultural organisations, big and small, across Kensington and Chelsea to get involved with events that:

reflect and celebrate the arts and culture of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African regions

promote film, literature, music, visual arts, fashion, dance, cuisine

demonstrate artistic excellence and work that is thought-provoking and challenging

The Nour Festival is coordinated by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and reflects the Council’s commitment to bring the very best international contemporary arts and culture to the borough. Nour – which means ‘light’ or ‘illumination’ in various Middle Eastern languages – sets out to explore contemporary culture from across the region and North Africa. The festival was inaugurated at Leighton House Museum in 2010, a building that is recognised as being an international symbol of east meeting west. The festival is non-religious in nature though recognises that faith can inspire great art.

The festival also works in collaboration with a host of London and UK partners, including the Arab British Centre, the British Egyptian Society, the Iran Heritage Foundation, and the London Arab Music Festival.

Nour Festival 2012 highlights include:

British Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh is confirmed as festival Writer-in-Residence. Known most recently for her acclaimed novel Out of It, Selma will deliver a series of master workshops on writing and publishing at various festival venues.

A programme of major concerts at The Tabernacle, Notting Hill with Tunisian singer-songwriter Amel Mathlouthi, Lebanese musician Charbel Rouhana and special guests.

Leighton House Museum will host a ground-breaking exhibition of work by photo-journalist Bradley Secker highlighting the often forgotten plight of gay and lesbian refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Cutting edge contemporary graphic design by Muiz Anwar and spatial design by Dia Batal will be showcased at Leighton House Museum.

The V&A opens ‘Light from the Middle East’ an exhibition of photography that reflects elements of the region’s social, cultural and political life from the end of the 19th century to the present day.

Contemporary Moroccan artist Abderrahim Yamou has his first ever UK exhibition at The Mosaic Rooms.

Music and musicians have historically played a vital role in the cultures of Central Eurasia and the Middle East.The Aga Khan Music Initiative (AKMI) will showcase this musical heritage in contemporary forms in a performance atthe Ismaili Centre

Film screenings from up-and-coming Middle Eastern and North African film makers will be shown at Leighton House Museum in association with the London MENA Film Festival.

For further information on how to get involved in this year’s Nour Festival please email arts@rbkc.gov.uk.

A full programme of events will be released in late summer. For more information visit www.nourfestival.co.uk or follow @NourFestival on Twitter.

Call for submissions to The African City Reader

Thu, 17 May 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The African Cities Reader is a journal creation of the African Centre for Cities and Chimurenga examining issues around urban spaces in Africa. It is looking for imaginative reflections on the recent global phenomenon of urban utopias for the growing middle-class, which are unmoored from the messy realities of the cities around them. It is also curious about enduring autonomous artist colonies and other creative spaces.

The Reader invites writing and art by writers, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa. Submissions will be accepted until Wednesday, 31st August 2012, and should be submitted electronically in Word format and low-res jpg to Liepollo Rantekoa at africancitiesreader@chimurenga.co.za.

For more details, visit http://www.africancitiesreader.org.za

Call for submissions to the Gaywise FESTival

Thu, 17 May 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

GFEST - Gaywise FESTival, the premier annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) arts festival in London is looking for submissions for this year’s festival.

Niranjan Kamatkar, artistic director of GFEST said ‘This year we want to address and question the issues and challenges that our community faces on a daily basis. We hope to encourage artists to work together on exciting, thought provoking and innovative work. We want to query what happens in the queer arts world.’ ‘Queer Art queries..’ is the theme of this year’s festival which will take place in November in venues across London.

We are looking for submissions from artists and organisations, with a particular focus on collaboration across art form, age and cultural backgrounds. The festival accepts submissions in three categories: films, visual arts and performance.

The deadline for submissions is Friday 29 June 2012.

Submissions are accepted on: www.gaywisefestival.org.uk

GFEST 2012 team

WISE THOUGHTS / GFEST - Gaywise FESTival - London's LGBT cross art festival for all

www.wisethoughts.org / www.gaywisefestival.org.uk /

twitter.com/GFEST / http://gaywisefestival.wordpress.com / youtube.com/wisethoughts

+44 (0) 20 8889 9555

The 2012 Wasafiri New Writing Prize is now open! Submissions are welcome from new writers anywhere around the world.

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Deadline - 5pm GMT on 27 July 2012

Entry fee: £6.00 if entering one category, £10 for two and £15 for all three.

Download the entry form.

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. Please see the terms and conditions on page 4 of the entry form.

Simply fill in the entry form and send it to us with your entry and fee, or pay online via paypal.

£300 will be awarded to the winner of each category and their work will be published in Wasafiri.

Founding Editor of Wasafiri, Susheila Nasta, will be joined by three distinguished judges on the panel this year: John Haynes, award-winning poet, teacher and lecturer; Maya Jaggi, cultural journalist, writer and broadcaster and Colin Grant, writer, playwright, historian and broadcaster.

The shortlist for the 2012 Caine Prize revealed

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The shortlist for the £10,000 Caine Prize includes stories by authors from Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The five stories on the shortlist, which looks to reward the best of short African fiction published worldwide, are "Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde, first published in Mirabilia Review; "Urban Zoning" by Billy Kahoa, published in McSweeney's; "Love on Trial" by Stanley Kenani, published in For Honour and Other Stories (eKhaya/Random House Struik); "La Salle de Depart" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo from online journal "Prick of the Spindle", and "Hunter Emmanuel" by Constance Myburgh from magazine Jungle Jim. The judges received 122 entries from 14 countries.

The winner will be announced at a dinner in Oxford on 2nd July, with the judging panel comprised of chair Bernardine Evaristo (pictured), fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; cultural journalist Maya Jaggi; Zimbabwean poet, songwriter and writer Chirikure Chirikure; associate professor at Georgetown University, Samantha Pinto, and Sudanese CNN television correspondent Nima Elbagir. The winner will also have the opportunity to take up a month's residence at Georgetown University in Washington DC, and to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September 2012, and events at the Museum of African Art in New York in November 2012.

Check out our good reads list by twelve renowned writers

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Maggie Gee
Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
Bloomsbury, London, 2011, pbk, 320pp, £12.99, 9781408821305, www.bloomsbury.com

Selma Dabbagh’s pacy, beautifully written first novel Out of It takes you to the heart of life for the young in Palestine today – as well as making viscerally real young (and old) Palestinian characters exiled by history from the home they long for. For Dabbagh’s central 27-year-old twins, the only way is ‘out of it’ – but the conflicts of class, education and culture that they experience both in Palestine and in Britain throw sharp, uncomfortable light on both countries. Sometimes funny, always gripping, its ending works as a metaphor for the world’s wider conflicts between rich and poor. Don’t miss it.

Lizzy Dijeh

Fiere by Jackie Kay

Picador, London, 2011, pbk, 72pp, £9.99, 9780330513371, www.picador.com

Originating from an Igbo-Nigerian background myself I was particularly interested in the cultural associations infused throughout Fiere, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of poems, which is a warming exploration of identity and the emotional journeys that shape us. Using the creative lyricism, humour and flair that have marked much of her previous work, Kay takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery, allowing her Scottish and Igbo identities to co-exist through a combination of speech and rhythmic expressions, through her many stories that chart the different forms of friendships made along the way. From the title poem, ‘Fiere’, a Scottish term for ‘friend’ or ‘equal’, to the mouth-watering ‘Egusi Soup’and the hopeful but cautious ‘Road to Amadou’,we encounter a large number of companions and hereditary ghosts embedded in a fascinating collection that both moved me and contextualised our human and cultural complexities. A great ‘road-trip’ read.

Muneeza Shamsie

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Fourth Estate, London, 2011, pbk, 400pp, £9.99, 9780007250929,www.harpercollins.co.uk/about-harpercollins/Imprints/4th_Estate

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a spellbinding book, an award winner, consisting of tales within tales and wonderful writing. Mukherjee’s journey of discovery and meticulous research, melds scientific ideas with lively, moving anecdotes, including physician Imhotep’s writings (c. 2625 BC), Queen Atossa of Persia’s mastectomy, Vesalius’s sixteenth-century anatomical drawings, and Marie Curie’s discovery of, and over-exposure to, radium. All this is knitted together with the passion and drive of pioneering doctors Farber, Halstead and others and recent investigations such as the genetic code of cancer cells. The triumphs and setbacks recorded embody the spirit of mankind and build an architecture around heroic battles fought by so many. The whole is linked by Mukherjee’s patient, Carla, and her struggle against leukaemia.

David Shook

My Naked Brain Leopoldo María Panero, translated by Arturo Mantecón

Swan Scythe Press, Sacramento, CA, 2011, pbk, 58pp, $15.00 9781930454347, www.swanscythe.com

Spanish poet Leopoldo María Panero has published prolifically since the 1970s, mostly from within the confines of psychiatric hospitals, like his current home in Gran Canaria. His exploration of drugs, alcohol, and sex have led to mostly superficial comparisons with Bukowski, but Arturo Mantecón’s translations in My Naked Brain – his first book-length collection in English – prove him to be a remarkably complex poet, as high-strung as a hummingbird and equally as capable of sudden turns. Panero’s cinematic poems relish a life without prescribed limits. ‘And so I offered her my naked brain/as obscene as a toad, as obscene as life…’

Mithu Banerji

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar

Viking, Penguin, London, 2011, hbk, 246pp, £16.99, 9780670916511,

www.penguin.com

During Gaddafi’s regime, Hisham Matar’s father was abducted by Egyptian secret service agents. This book, written from the point of view of 13-year-old Nuri, is a son’s desperate appeal for closure on the absence of his father. Matar’s profoundly heartfelt narrative has a beautiful illusory quality about it, which drew me in from the opening line itself, ‘There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.’ At its core the book is a tale of loss, and an often-disquieting reflection on the father and son relationship reinforced by Matar’s dignified and elegant prose. Anatomy of a Disappearance is a masterpiece of storytelling, bringing together the power of simple lucid prose and an inner depth and maturity which the author has triumphantly achieved. This is a moving and impressive novel which deserves to be on the bookshelf of every discerning reader.

Azadeh Moaveni

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War by Annia Ciezadlo

Free Press, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2011, hbk, 400pp, $26.00, 9781416583936, imprints.simonandschuster.biz/free-press

For nearly all of recorded history, from Thucydides to Robert Fisk, the genre of war memoir has belonged to men. Now that women fight in and report on modern wars, their accounts have nudged themselves onto the bookshelf, widening our view of how combat shapes, or more often disfigures, private and domestic life. In Day of Honey, the American foreign correspondent Annia Ciezadlo captures the wartime reality of Beirut and Baghdad through people’s struggle to answer the age-old question: ‘What's for dinner?’ Ciezadlo shows us that perhaps the best way of understanding a society and its war is through how people deal with food (the Lebanese stocked up on bread, while Iraqis yearned for the fish cafes along the Tigris River). Her memoir is frequently hilarious, laced with suspenseful moments of war zone escapade, and effortlessly instructive: she briefs us on Hezbollah, the generation that propelled the Arab Spring, and why Saddam Hussein’s father mocked Iraq’s Shiites for cooking chicken in pomegranate-walnut sauce.

Debjani Chatterjee
Dark Time Begins to Crack by Venetia Tompkins, edited by Roy Birch
Survivors’ Press, Survivors’ Poetry Mentoring Series, London, 2011, pbk, 74pp, £8.00, 9781874595342, www.survivorspoetry.org

People Are Their Own Dreams by Sean Burn, edited by Dr Simon Jenner
30pp, £5.00, 9781874595335

Finding Your Selves, by Trevor Innes edited by Peter Street
48pp, £5.00, 9781874595366

These collections come from Survivors’ Poetry, a unique charity promoting the writing of survivors of mental distress. Their talented poets write memorably about mental illness. Tompkins writes about schizophrenia; her ‘Watcher’ comes ‘thrice damned,/to barter in the marketplace of mind’ (‘Negotiating Daybreak’). Her long elegant poems show tenderness, biblical cadence and wide vocabulary. Sean Burn by contrast writes short staccato poems in starkly modern language arranged like paragraphs. His editor comments: ‘his poetry lives in telegraph pauses. Language space-walks, un-mutilated by bourgeois line-breaks.’ Trevor Innes’s poems of political comment interact with personal poems of survival: ‘Swimming through shit I make it to the beach/ … I want something new.’ (‘Still Life – Is He Thatcher’s Child?’) Collectively, these voices reflect our times.

Lara Pawson

Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture by Paul Gilroy

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2011, pbk, 224pp, £14.95, 9780674060234, www.hup.harvard.edu

On the first page, the author confesses to a fear: that this book will be seen simply as a study of the collapse of the political in African American popular music. By the final page, you wonder why. This brilliant work weaves threads through 50 Cent, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Améry and Giorgio Agamben, to name but a few. Writing with the heart of an artist, Gilroy revitalises thinking about culture, consumerism, climate and much more. In doing so, he offers optimism at this time of relentless gloom. Darker than blue is to African American culture what The Wretched of the Earth was to Africa’s liberation movements: an act of salvage.

Leone Ross

South of South: an anthology devoted to the humanity and narrative of migration edited by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, 2011, pbk, 248pp, £9.99, 9781845231545, www.peepaltreepress.com

This intense little anthology means to illuminate the complex detail of migratory lives – and it does so with a kind of beautiful ferocity. Editor Parkes selects stories from ten writers, and asks them that loaded question: how did you arrive here? Answer they do, through the visceral sensuality of Nam Le’s Tehran, to Naomi Alderman’s unexpected tale of homesickness and Junot Diaz’s frozen world of family. Nikki Aguirre also strikes hard, alongside the strange, delicate prose of Monica Arac de Nyeko. This collection is no easy bed-time read – and flawed – but its unerring commitment to the excavation of complex emotional landscapes can only be admired.

Luis Benítez

The Year Book (A Poem Sequence) by Hugh Fox

Ravenna Press, Spokane, USA, 2011, pbk, 70pp, $11.95, 9780983598251, www.ravennapress.com

The Year Book is a testament of the life and literary work of the American poet Hugh Fox (1932–2011), who was also a scholar and an archeologist, with a profound interest in the comprehension of reality and, particularly, of human reality. The Year Book extensively develops his impressions, ideas and feelings, imbued with a strongly humane vision. The format of The Year Book consists of a single poem, divided into XXXXIV fragments. In the manner of the Latin poet Lucrecio in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Fox builds a personal cosmogony which, in this publication, he donates to posterity.

Anjum Hasan

Day Scholar by Siddharth Chowdhury
Picador India, 2010, hbk, 164pp, Rs. 250, 9780330514064

This is possibly one of the best Indian coming-of-age novels ever. A close-knit group of male Bihari college students try to make it in early 1990s Delhi. The atmosphere is one of casual violence, sleaziness and indolence. Chowdhury captures the milieu with comic brilliance – everyone stereotypes everyone else on the basis of caste and community and yet these ways of seeing are crucial to making meaning of and finding one’s way through a conservative Indian middle-class world. The novel is also delightful for its evocation of pre-globalisation staples – Cuticura talcum powder, Graviera suitings and Bata Oxfords.

Brian Chikwava

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Jonathan Cape, London, 2011, hbk, 160pp, £12.99, 9780224094153, www.randomhouse.co.uk

Julian Barnes skilfully takes a story with sweeping temporal scope and compacts it into an intense novel. Perhaps more than in any of his past books, with this one, it is easier to see the merits of Barnes’s concise style: it’s easy to fly big ideas off such prose.

The novel opens with distinctly philosophical tonalities as the narrator, diminished in middle age, gazes back over his life. The major challenge Barnes faced here may, perhaps, have been to stealthily whittle down the penetrating, organising intellect of the beginning of the novel into that of the unreliable narrator of the story, a passive individual who let life happen on him. Sometimes things slip and high school lads mouth off staggering lines such as ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Still, a masterly accomplishment.

Book tree image from www.themarysue.com

Call for Papers: Special Issue of EnterText on Caribbean Literature and

Fri, 9 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Opening Out the Way(s) to the Future

"We can orient for the future only by comprehension of the present in the
light of the past," observed the Caribbean philosopher, C.L.R. James. In
his view, the arts and culture could provide direction and offer
alternatives to present horizons. The "supreme artist," he argued "summed up
the past and [.] opened out the way to the future." In the Caribbean
context, the need to envision alternatives to present horizons has taken on
a new sense of urgency, particularly given the many challenges facing the
Caribbean today, such as the exploitative dimensions of global capitalism,
ecological risk, natural and health disasters -- as in recent events in
Haiti and St. Lucia -- gender discrimination, sex tourism, labour
exploitation, drugs and violent crime.
We invite scholars and creative writers of the Caribbean and its diasporas
to explore present horizons and the (re-)envisioning of the future through
an engagement with the past. More generally, this special issue on the
Caribbean is concerned with questions such as: how can the creative and
critical potential of the arts, social sciences, and humanities be harnessed
to open out the way to the future? What insights do different experiences of
lived time and space offer to contemporary historical and political
perspectives? How do non-Western notions of time relate to revolutionary
dreams and resistance movements, and visions of the Caribbean's role in the
global order? How do Caribbean artists, writers, historians, leaders, and
philosophers represent the uses of the past? What are the perils and
possibilities of looking to the past as a resource for navigating an
uncertain future?
We particularly welcome revised versions of papers initially presented at
the 35th Annual Society of Caribbean Studies Conference, Liverpool, 2011.
Topics for the special issue include, but are by no means limited to:
. Liverpool and the Caribbean
. The Fall of the Plantation Complex
. Museums and Caribbean Histories
. Slavery, Commemoration, and Representation
. Ports and Cities
. Health, Social Policy, and Disability
. Environment and Natural Disasters
. The Challenges of Democracy
. Childhood and Education
. Theatre, Dance, and Performance
. Food and Material Culture
. Colonial Governance and Decolonisation

We also welcome creative writing submissions related to the topics of this
special issue.
Editors of the special issue are Sandra Courtman and Wendy Knepper
Deadline for submission April 15, 2012
Length for scholarly articles: 5000-7500 words
Please address questions, proposals and submissions to
s.courtman@sheffield.ac.uk.

Michael McMillan reviews - Migrations: Journeys into British Art - Tate Britain 31 Jan - 12 Aug 2012

Wed, 7 Mar 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Migrations: Journeys into British Art
Tate Britain, 31 January – 12 August 2012
£6 (£5 concessions)
www.tate.org.uk/britain

Reviewed by Michael McMillan

Immigration is a politicised discourse in which immigrants tend to be demonised as aliens, different, strange, even dangerous – read ‘terrorist’ – others, rather than people contributing to the national culture and economy through their skills, talents and labour. It is therefore courageous and timely for Tate Britain to mount an exhibition entitled Migrations: Journeys into British Art. Based on the premise that migrant artists have altered the landscape of what is perceived as British Art, the exhibition is divided into nine sections beginning with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finishing with contemporary art practices. Curatorially, these sections also mark out themes, genres, movements and practices: ‘Portraiture and New Genres’; ‘Italy, Neoclassicism and the Royal Academy’; ‘Dialogues between Britain, France and America’; ‘Jewish Artists and Jewish Art’; ‘Refugees from Nazi Europe’; ‘Artists in Pursuit of an International Language’; ‘The Dematerialised Object’; ‘New Diasporic Voices’ and ‘The Moving Image’.

While these sections follow a temporal trajectory, there is no narrative thread that links them. There are also some omissions, such as of works by Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach, who both came from Berlin in the 1930s. That said, the presence of the stylistically fresh portrait of Charles I by the Antwerp-born court painter Anthony van Dyck (pictured) and the grand panorama of Caneletto’s London: The Old Horse Guards from St James’s Park support the curatorial ambition to show how portrait and landscape genres for instance, perceived as quintessentially English or the establishment of the Royal Academy, have in fact been heavily influenced by mainland European artists.

As Paul Goodwin reminds in one of the catalogue essays, ‘People don’t make the journeys to come and die, they make them to come and live.’ The motives for many of these migrant artists coming to Britain were to escape war, political and economic instability, or religious or ethnic persecution in the case of Jewish artists leaving Nazi Germany. They also triggered different degrees of xenophobia, such as the 1905 Alien Act targeting Jewish immigration. This generated an assimilationist response from Jewish artists, as shown in the catalogue for the Jewish Art and Antiquities exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1906, which argued that the artists, like Jewish people generally, had identified themselves with their adopted country. Ironically, the subsequent exhibition The Twentieth Century: A Review of Modern Movements, also at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1914), would include a ‘Jewish Section’ that attempted to connect Jewish artists and modernism, as illustrated through Mark Gertler’s neo-primitive (intuitive) Jewish Family. What this shift signifies is the acute fluidity of identity and negotiated positions that migrants, especially migrant artists, have to encounter.

These white European and American artists, such as James McNeill Whistler, were usually referred to as to as ‘émigrés’, rather than the more politically charged ‘migrant’ or ‘immigrant’, which signified their ability to access a bohemian artistic network that included Paris, New York and London. As Kodwo Eshun argues in one of the exhibition catalogue essays, quoting from Perry Anderson’s essay ‘Components of the National Culture’ (New Left Review, July – August 1968), ‘…they managed, simultaneously, to reinforce the “existing orthodoxy” and to exploit the “weakness” of an establishment defined according to antiquated beaux-art principles’.

In contrast, Caribbean artists such as Frank Bowling and Audrey Williams and Indian artists such as F N Souza and Avinash Chandra coming to Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though creatively engaged with modernist art, would find themselves sidelined and viewed solely as ‘exotic’, in terms of their ethnicity rather than their work. Both my parents came from St Vincent & the Grenadines and, like Bowling and Williams, were ‘arrivants’, to use Edward Kamau Braithwaite’s term, from colonies where they were imbued with English culture. Like the writer George Lamming, Bowling and Williams saw themselves as beneficiaries of western art, classical and literary tradition, and for them ‘London was the Place to Me’, to echo the calypso Lord Kitchener’s famous words.

The red, yellow and green vertical stripes over blurred outlines of South America and Africa in Bowling’s painting Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman seem to aesthetically echo the Rastafarian iconography as much as the radical black politics and counter-culture which would impact a generation like myself born and educated in Britain. Within the context of post World War II migration from the Caribbean, Africa and South East Asia, the exhibition, unfortunately, does not engage with this intergenerational dialogue between first generation migrant artists such as Bowling, Williams and Rasheed Araeen for instance, and second generation migrant descendants grappling with identity, displacement, diaspora and what it means to be black and British in their work. Indeed, while works such as Sonia Boyce’s From Tarzan to Rambo: English Born ‘Native’ Considers her Relationship to the Constructed/Self Image and her Roots, Keith Piper’s Go West Young Man and Donald Rodney’s In the House of my Father in the ‘New Diasporic Voices’ section may have been made in the 1980s, they resonate with many contemporary subjectivities today.

If the moving image as a medium lends itself to the mobility of migration, then Zineb Sedira’s Floating Coffins fourteen-screen installation suggests a beginning as much as an end in our relationship with the sea. Sedira beautifully captures visually and aurally the wasted landscape of the largest ship graveyard in the world on the coast of Mauritania (pictured), which is also a departure point for West African immigrants. In a post 2011 riot era, Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal poetic film essay, created in 1986, Handsworth Songs (pictured below), which responded to the inner city riots of 1981 and 1985, has to be mentioned, because, as it says, ‘There are no stories in the riots only the ghosts of others’ stories.’

Image credits from top to bottom:
Anthony van Dyk, Charles I (1636). The trustees of Chequers Trust. Reproduced by permission of the Cheques Trust and Tate Britain.
Zineb Sedita, Floating Coffins (2009)
Black Audio Film Collective, Handswoth Songs (1986). © Black Audio Film Collective. Photo: Smoking Dog Films

Michael McMillan is a playwright, writer and curator/artist whose recent work includes: The Waiting Room – an arts in health installation and publication (Gwynedd Museum & Art Gallery, Bangor, 2012), a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan set in Jamaica in 1980 (MAT, 2010), The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum, 2005-06) and The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Black Dog Publishing, 2009) (see www.thefrontroom.org.uk/). He has an Arts Doctorate from Middlesex University (2010).

PoD Residency: Call for application for Points of Departure - creative exchange between the UK and Palestine

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

British Council in partnership with ArtSchool Palestine and Delfina Foundation are pleased to invite curators and artists from the UK and Palestine to apply for two-month residencies in Palestine with ArtSchool Palestine and in London with Delfina Foundation.

Points of Departure (PoD) aims to encourage creative exchange between Palestine and the UK and to provide an opportunity for research, public engagement, and the production of new artworks to be showcased in London and Palestine in 2013. Six artists will be selected to take part in this project, three from Palestine and three based in the UK. Additionally, one curator from Palestine and one curator from the UK will be selected to support the production and curation of the resultant exhibition.

CONDITIONS FOR APPLICANTS:

• Currently living and working in either Palestine and the UK;

• Seeking a career defining opportunity to research and produce a bold, seminal project;

• Able to demonstrate achievement or great potential in visually articulating ground-breaking and critically engaged ideas and concepts in an innovative and collaborative way;

• Able to work in an engaged fashion involving the general public;

• Resourceful and accomplished at working in a cost-effective way;

• Open to collaborations and producing ideas in partnership with others;

• Can demonstrate how the experience of an international residency may benefit his/her practice and career development;

• Proficient in English.

For application form and further information visit the Delfina website

Applications invited for early stage researchers in Diasporic Literary Theory, Literary Cultures and Cinema at the University of Mumbai

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

European Union’s Marie Curie Initial Training Network Fellowship
Early Stage Researchers in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies
Cultural Practices of Diaspora

Applications are invited for the position of three early stage researchers (for 36 months, full time) to work on a project situated within the area of Diasporic Literary Theory, Indian Diasporic Literatures and Cinemas at the University of Mumbai.

Marie Curie Initial Training Network
“Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging” (CoHaB)

All over the world, stable concepts of home and belonging have, for a variety of reasons, become the exception rather than the rule. This has led to dramatic cultural, social and political changes and challenges. The study of diaspora and migration has therefore evolved into a burgeoning field of research with an urgent practical relevance. The CoHaB Network unites some of the best research institutions in this field, i.e. the University of Muenster, Germany, the University of Mumbai, India, the Universities of Oxford and Northampton and the School for Oriental and African Studies in the U.K. and the University of Stockholm in Sweden, in the conviction that interdisciplinary training as well as international and inter-sectoral co-operation are key to any productive study of diaspora. CoHaB is based on the resolve to strengthen interdisciplinary research between the social sciences and the humanities in the field with a view to establishing diaspora studies as a transdisciplinary research area in its own right. Training young researchers on the basis of this conviction means to provide them with the opportunity to conduct their work in a variety of disciplinary environments as well as outside a purely academic context. Secondments to associated non-academic partners, the Centre for Advanced Studies in India, India, The Migration Policy Group, Belgium and the Cabinet d’Avocats, France, will not only help the fellows gain insight into specific diaspora-related, extramural fields of work, but also tie in the results of their work experience with their academic work. Academic secondments to co-supervisors from within CoHaB guarantee a sound interdisciplinary basis. Co-operating within this network, young researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds, but with similar interests in the field of diaspora studies, will join forces to develop their projects on a shared platform.

Applicants will be expected to engage in an open-minded and continuing dialogue about the methodology, theory, and terminology of diaspora studies as a transdiscipline. All project submission will be expected to attend to the nexus between aspects of diaspora on the one hand and constructions, politics, and ideologies of home and belonging on the other. In the context of the specific project at Mumbai University, this also entails an exploration of Literary Theories related to Diaspora and its cultural practices in the area of Indian Diasporic Literatures and Cinemas. In the context of Literature the focus should be on the manner in which diasporics negotiate multiple, hybrid identities in their hostland and homeland and how this in turn impacts upon their concept of Home and Belonging. Indian Diasporics also imaged not just their hybrid identities and notions of home and belonging in cinematic texts but also imaged India itself to the world. Such films have in the last couple of decades made for considerable global visibility for film makers such as Gurinder Chadha, Meera Nair and Deepa Mehta. However, such imaging is now no longer one-sided because Indian cinema too has begun to image its diaspora both to itself and to the world in cross-over films such as Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and My Name is Khan.

The three areas in which project proposals are invited at Mumbai University are:

1. Hybrid Selves – Hyphenated Identities: Diasporic Indian English Fiction

2. Representations of Diaspora in Popular Indian Cinema

3. Representations of Women in Diasporic Indian Literature and Cinema

These are wide area heads and applicants may have different angles and slants to their project proposals as long as they fit into these three categories.

Benefits

The researchers will be employed at the University of Mumbai on a full-time basis as Ph.D. students, with a gross salary of Indian Rupees equivalent of 1770 Euros per month. Tax will be deducted at source from this amount according to the Indian Government rules. ESRs will have to compulsorily make their own arrangements for Medical Insurance valid in India. The position also includes a flat rate monthly mobility allowance of Indian Rupees equivalent of 559 Euros for ESRs with family and 391 Euros for ESRs without family, as well as ample funds to participate in training activities of the CoHaB network and in international conferences.

Requirements

Applicants must:
have a Master’s degree (or equivalent) with at least 55% overall marks or B+ grade in the areas of Anglophone Postcolonial Literatures and Cultural Studies. Applicants with a first class or A grade will be preferred.

have less than four years of research experience and must not yet have been awarded a doctoral degree

not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in India for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to their recruitment

have previous experience (academic and/or extra-mural) in the field of diaspora studies, especially literature and cinema

have an excellent command of English (spoken and written)

satisfy the eligibility criteria for fellowships in Marie Curie Initial Training Networks.

Applications must include:
a curriculum vitae (including information on nationality and place of residence for the past three years),
academic record (including transcripts), letter of motivation, two references, a short proposal (2,000 words) for a research project, outlining the area of research, specific research hypotheses, objectives, methods, expected conclusions and tentative pattern of chapters and their contents with a select bibliography.

Submit applications electronically, in a single PDF file, to:

Professor Dr. Nilufer E. Bharucha, Coordinator and Scientist-in-Charge at nbharucha@hotmail.com and nilufer.bharucha@english.mu.ac.in, latest by 31st March 2012.

Formal evaluation of candidates will begin on April 1, 2012, and continue until the position is filled. The successful candidates will be expected to join CoHaB by September 2012.

The CoHaB website can be found at www.itn-cohab.net

CoHaB is committed to equal opportunities and encourages applications from all sections of the international community worldwide.

2012 OCM Bocas Prize longlist announced

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Ten writers representing six Caribbean countries have been named to the longlist for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media. The longlisted writers, announced by the judges on 12 February, 2012, range from internationally celebrated novelists to a debut biographer and poet.

Two novels and two books of short stories vie in the fiction category. Earl Lovelace’s Is Just A Movie, with its full cast of lively Trinidadian characters, is a gentle and often hilarious story of resilience, while Tessa McWatt’s Vital Signs is a poignant tale of love, marriage, and family dynamics. Keith Jardim’s short fiction collection Near Open Water offers clear-eyed tales of postcolonial Caribbean societies, and Merle Collins’s The Ladies Are Upstairs, the other short story collection on the list, deals with questions of diaspora, lost parents, and those left behind. The judges single out two further books for special mention: Olive Senior’s Dancing Lessons, the moving reflections of an old woman on her life, and Victoria Brown’s compelling story of the immigrant experience, Minding Ben.

In the poetry category, Fawzia Kane’s debut collection Tantie Diablesse, drawing on Trinidad and Tobago’s folkloric characters, is up against Loretta Collins Klobah’s collection The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, a lyrically playful and subversive exploration of Caribbean history, and Shara McCallum’s This Strange Land, evoking the Jamaica of her childhood. As in the fiction category, two further books receive special mention: Redemption Rain, by Trinidadian poet Jennifer Rahim, and Rubber Orchestras, by London-based Trinidadian Anthony Joseph.

The non-fiction category brings together Basil Ince’s historical survey Olympian: 75 Years of Trinidad & Tobago in Olympic Sport; Caryl Phillips’s Colour Me English, a collection of essays ranging from memoir to literature and politics; and a biography of the father of Belizean independence, George Price: A Life Revealed, by first-time biographer and former Attorney-General of Belize Godfrey P. Smith.

The judges read 45 books entered for the Prize, which is open to books by Caribbean writers published in the previous calendar year, and comes with an award of US$10,000. The winners in the three genre categories will be announced on 16 March, and the Prize will be presented on 28 April, during the second annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.

Wasafiri Board Member, Maggie Gee is awarded an OBE for services to Literature in the 2012 New Year Honours List

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Maggie Gee has been awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list for her services to literature.

She has written eleven novels, including The White Family, The Ice People, My Cleaner, My Driver and also a memoir about her life as a writer, My Animal Life. In 1983, she was chosen for Granta’s prestigious list of Best Young British Novelists.

She has judged many literary prizes including the Man Booker and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Impac award. She is currently teaching a novel writing course at Faber Academy and is Vice President of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature.

Her literary agent Karolina Sutton said: “We are all thrilled for Maggie. It is a richly deserved recognition for one of the most talented, intellectually curious and interesting authors writing in Britain today. In addition to being a wonderful storyteller, Maggie is brave and uncompromising in her choice of subjects, dealing with some of the most relevant social and human concerns, from the environment, through race, class and science. A true writer whose books will stand the test of time.”

All of us at Wasafiri congratulate Maggie on this wonderful achievement.

Christie Watson wins the Costa First Novel Award with Tiny Sunbirds Far Away

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Christie Watson wins the Costa First Novel Award with Tiny Sunbirds Far Away. Wasafiri published Christie's short story 'Basketball Player' in issue 59. The novel is based on this short story.

Contact Wasafiri to find out how to get a copy of Issue 59.

Khaled Mattawa wins the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

The 2011 Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has been awarded to Khaled Mattawa (whose work appeared in Wasafiri issue 54) for his translation of Adonis: Selected Poems, published by Yale University Press.

Barbara Romaine is runner-up for her translation of Spectres by Radwa Ashour, published by Arabia Books in the UK and by Interlink Books in the USA. Commended was Maia Tabet for her translation of White Masks by Elias Khoury, published by Archipelego Books, USA.

Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora - call for papers

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria in collaboration with
Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC)

Announces the second Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC)

July Monday 2 to Wednesday 4, 2012

Theme: Cultures, Identities, Nationalities, and Modernities in Africa and the African Diaspora

Venue: Peninsula Resort, Aja, Lagos, Nigeria.
Arrival date: Sunday, July1, 2012
Departure date: Thursday, July 5, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS
Submission of Abstract Due: March 30th, 2012
Cultures, Identities, Nationalities, and Modernities in Africa and the African Diaspora

The Toyin Falola Annual Conference (TOFAC) welcomes submissions of abstracts and outlines of papers for the 2012 conference, which is scheduled to hold in Lagos, Nigeria from July 2 to July 4, 2012 (arrival on July 1st, departure on July 5th). TOFAC 2012 is sponsored by the CBAAC.

The theme for the conference is Cultures, Identities, Nationalities, and Modernities in Africa and the African Diaspora.

We welcome papers that explore empirical and theoretical aspects of any or all of our four conceptual grids?cultures, identities, nationalities, and modernities. Papers may investigate and analyze the manifestation of cultural politics, identity contests, nationalist ferment, and competing modernities in specific geographic and trans-national contexts where Africans and peoples of African descent fight out their existential and ameliorative struggles. We also encourage papers that interrogate and question the very categories of cultures, nationalities, identities, and modernities as they relate to the experiences of African and Africa-descended peoples and institutions instead of taking them as binding, fixed and self-evident frames of analysis. The definitional and semiotic latitude for interpreting these categories belongs to authors, as we have no bounded, restrictive definitions in mind.

There is a sense of urgency to the thematic of the conference based on the uneven and unpredictable effects of globalization, development, technology, new modes of communication, wars, and migration among others. Sometimes the effects of these factors can be utterly tragic and destructive without relief or redress. Fortunately, people and communities are not always passive victims. The categories of culture, identity, nationalism and modernity allow people to make visible the multiple, overlapping and intricate forms that people's agency and creativity take in response to local, national and global forces. We expect that papers will respond to the need to capture and illuminate the emerging texts, narratives, claims, and actions of Africans and Africa-descended peoples and communities at the interstices of simultaneously unfolding local and global events and forces.

As a cross-disciplinary meeting, the unique questions advanced by each paper?s empirical and theoretical materials should lead to engagements with aspects of the theme in ways that the author finds suitable. We hope to generate complementary, intersecting, and even contradictory insights on the meanings and functions of these terms. We anticipate lively, robust debates resulting from different critical engagements with the supposed given-ness of identities, modernities, cultures, and nationalities. Although the four organizing concepts form a coherent cluster, we recognize that they can also generate their own disparate discursive momentums and lead authors to radically divergent trajectories of inquiry. Authors are free to follow their analytical instincts and to pursue discursive paths that their materials impose on them in relation to our concepts.

In formulating the theme, we recognize the intertwining of historical, anthropological, sociological, literary, scientific, and philosophical questions that touch on some or all four of our sub-themes. These questions often require the deployment of multiple methodologies and processes of knowledge generation derived from disparate fields. Our formulation also takes into account the fact that these categories are crucial for exploring not just abstract questions about being and recognition but also debates about starkly economic, materialist, environmental, and scientific concerns. We therefore welcome, in addition to discipline-specific papers, presentations informed by multi-disciplinary methods of inquiry and theories. Approaches to the sub-themes and their various dimensions may be situated in the humanities, social sciences, and the applied natural sciences.

We solicit papers that analyze how our four concepts are implicated in or integral to political, social, economic, and environmental struggles. Debates about cultural propriety, nationalism, identity, and modernity often contain as many materialist claims as they do symbolic ones. Authors should feel free to explore the materialist dimensions of these concepts and not feel bound by their more obvious symbolic connotations. Authors are also free to approach any of the categories of our theme from any scholarly perspective and from empirical materials dealing with past or present events, people, and institutions in Africa and its Diaspora.

Seemingly divergent questions about identities, nationality, culture, and modernity seep into one another. They often interact productively and combustively to shape polemics, intellection, and lived experiences. Identity is often animated by cultural concerns, and problems and claims founded on nationality and nationalism sometimes begin from foundational assumptions and claims about identification, belonging, and personhood. Because of these symbiotic connections, we advance these categories only as guides and not as hard boundaries of knowledge, experience, or analysis. A further conceptual caveat here is that we understand these sub-themes broadly as individual fields of inquiry and analysis and as interrelated, shifty phenomena. Authors are at liberty to approach them in the same broad, elastic template rather than as fixed, essentialist notions.

Culture and notions of identity, nationalism, and modernity are subjective, malleable, and dynamic concepts, contested in both their theoretical and programmatic forms. We broach these concepts, then, to elicit lively conversations about how they are constituted, emptied, reconstituted, and put to instrumental use by Africans and Africa-descended and influenced peoples all over the world. The only advisory constant in our conceptualization is a belief that the four categories pivot, in the final analysis, on the lived experiences of the peoples and communities that are the subjects of our study, and that our inquiries into them should reflect the dynamism, indeterminacy, fluidity, and contestations of lived experience rather than the rigidity and fixity of academic descriptions and definitions. But culture, nationalist consciousness, identification, and modernity are also significant for their realness to those who use them to make sense of their lives. For these people, the fluidity of these concepts is immaterial, since they foreground concrete, life-altering political and economic aspirations. For this reason, presentations that consider these categories as foundational concepts in analyzing African and African Diasporic communities and phenomena and refuse to question their quotidian deterministic power are also welcome.

Papers may explore one or more of the following areas. This is however not an exhaustive list and is only suggested as a guide.

? Acculturation
? Afrocentricity
? Afropolitanism
? Atlantic Africa
? Blackness
? Circum-Atlantic Africa
? Citizenship
? Commodification of culture
? Contested identities
? Contested modernities
? Creolization
? Cultural Patrimony
? Cultural Power
? Cultural propriety
? Culture and ethnicity
? Culture of Politics
? Custom and the customary
? Diasporic African identities
? Ethnic identity
? Ethno-nationalism
? Ethno-religious identity
? Gendered identities
? Global Africanity
? Globalizing modernities
? Identity conflicts
? Indigeneity
? Indigenous Movements
? Internal Displacement
? Material Culture
? Migration
? Multiculturalism
? National consciousness
? Nationalities and trans-nationalities
? Neo-traditionalism
? Pan-Africanism
? Parallel modernities
? Politics of Culture
? Postcolonial dysfunction
? Postcoloniality
? Race consciousness
? Refugees/Returnees
? Regionalism
? Religious Culture
? Ritual
? Secessions
? Sociolinguistics
? Symbolism
? The modern in question
? Traditional modernities

Participants will be drawn from different parts of the world. Graduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers. The conference will provide time for scholars from various disciplines and geographical locations to interact, exchange ideas, and receive feedback. Submitted papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in theme, topic, discipline, or geographical location. Additionally, selected papers will be published in book form.
The deadline for submitting abstracts/proposals of not more than 250 words, is March 30, 2012. It should include the title, as well as the author's name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation. Please submit all abstracts to:

1. http://www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference/user/register
OR
2. Professor Ademola Dasylva (e-mail: dasylvang@yahoo.com)
a.dasylva@ibadanculutralstudiesgroup.org

3. Ms Lady Jane Acquah ljane26@gmail.com

A mandatory non-refundable registration fee (ICSG/TOFAC administrative charges)
Participants from Nigeria and other African countries: Eight thousand Naira (N8,000)
Participants from other USA, Europe and Asia: $100 must be paid immediately an abstract is accepted.

Hotel Accommodation & Lunch. There will be provision for free hotel room accommodation and free lunch for the first 70 registered participants for the entire period of the conference, on first-come-first-served basis.

It is expected that all participants will raise the funding for their air-ticket/transportation to attend the conference.

Keynote Speakers:
1. Barbara Harlow
Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature
bharlow@mail.utexas.edu

2. Prof. Tim Stapleton,
Director, History Graduate Program,
Department of History,
Trent University, Ontario,
Canada. tstapleton@trentu.ca

3. Prof. Michael Vickers
Prof. of Political Science
mvickers@mvickers.plus.com

Publication of Peer-reviewed papers: Africa World Press and the Carolina Academic Press will publish the best papers selected from the conference. Please visit TOFAC website www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference regularly, for update on further information on TOFAC 2012.

Shortlist announced for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2012

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

JABBOUR DOUAIHY, EZZEDINE CHOUKRI FISHERE, RABEE JABER, NASSER IRAQ, BASHIR MUFTI and HABIB SELMI are today, Wednesday 11 January, announced as the six shortlisted authors for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2012. Their names were revealed at a press conference in Cairo, Egypt.

This year’s shortlist includes a number of different themes, ranging from exile and questions of personal identity to social and political upheaval, both historically and in the present time. Three of the authors have been shortlisted for the Prize before: Jabbour Douaihy (June Rain, 2008), Habib Selmi (The Scents of Marie-Claire, 2009) and Rabee Jaber (America, 2010), whilst Ezzedine Choukri Fishere was longlisted for the Prize in 2009 for Intensive Care.

Caribbean Poetry Project - Call for papers

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Proposals invited on the following:

- Caribbean Poetry and the Word
- Origins and histories of Caribbean poetry
- Critical engagement with the work of individual Caribbean poets
- Re- reading Caribbean poetry
- Caribbean poetry and music
- Ecocriticism and Caribbean poetry
- Poetry as emancipation
- Caribbean British poetry
- Approaches to learning and teaching Caribbean poetry
- Gender in Caribbean peotry
- Caribbean poetry and postcolonial theory
- Caribbean poetry and the curriculum

Abstracts (300 words approx) should be sent to Bryony Horsley-Heather (bsjh2@cam.ac.uk) by the end of January 2012

Conference fees including lunch, dinner, tea and coffee will be £200. Day rates are available. Visit the conference website ate www.caribbeanpoetry.edu.cam.ac.uk

Shehan Karunatilaka awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Shehan Karunatilaka awarded the DSC Sri Lankan debut novelist wins prestigious US $50,000 prize for his book Chinaman

Jaipur, January 21^st 2012: The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012 was awarded to Singapore based Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his book Chinaman (Random House, India), a novel that explores cricket as a metaphor to uncover a lost life and a lost history. Chinaman skilfully uses sport and the notion of fair play to look at Sri Lanka in a fresh and exciting way.

The US $50,000 DSC Prize 2012 was awarded to Shehan Karunatilaka at a ceremony attended by eminent literary figures, renowned authors, international media and a diverse literary audience. The event took place at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the biggest literary festivals in the region. The DSC Prize was awarded to Shehan Karunatilaka by Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, Queen Mother of Bhutan.

A total of six authors were part of the Shortlist for the DSC Prize 2012 from which the winner was announced. The other shortlisted authors were U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura (Oxford University Press, India, Translated by Susheela Punitha), Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books, India, Translated by Manisha Chaudhry), Usha K.R: Monkey-man (Penguin/Penguin India), Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins-India), and Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told (Viking/Penguin India)

The DSC Prize was judged by a distinguished Jury chaired by Ira Pande along with Dr. Alastair Niven, Dr. Fakrul Alam , Faiza S Khan and Marie Brenner. The Shortlist was announced in October 2011 at the DSC South Asian Literature Festival in UK.

Speaking further about the winning book, she said, “The speech rhythms of smaller towns and indigent characters, so seldom seen and heard, are brought alive by a writer who handles character and speech with consummate ease. That world has long needed a suitable metaphor and he has discovered it: Cricket. Set in Sri Lanka, as an epic search for a lost player, Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilake is both a portrait of a lost way of life and a glimpse into the future this vast and vivid region is fated to occupy.”

Shehan Karunatilaka’s debut novel Chinaman (Random House, India) was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012, recognizing it as the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region, published in the last year in English, including translations into English.

Manhad Narula, Director DSC Limited and Founder of the DSC Prize, commented on the occasion saying:

“Congratulations to Shehan Karunatilaka for a book that represents the best South Asian writing and winning the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012. I thank the jury members who’ve had the difficult task of choosing a winner among several exceptional works submitted this year. Now in its second year running, the DSC Prize has built a strong and engaging platform for the recognition of South Asian writing. We are committed to showcasing the best writing in the region and bringing it to a larger global audience”

The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature was instituted in January 2010 to celebrate writing that highlights the South Asian region, its people, culture and diaspora. The DSC Prize, which has been envisioned as a unique and prestigious award, recognizes the literary works of authors across the globe writing on South Asia, transcending the origin or ethnicity of the author. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is one-of-its-kind in the region and aims at recognizing literary work that is redefining the understanding of South Asia across the globe. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2011 was awarded to HM Naqvi for his debut novel Home Boy (HarperCollins India). The DSC Prize is guided by an international Advisory Committee of eminent literary personalities comprising MJ Akbar, Urvashi Butalia, Tina Brown, William Dalrymple, Lord Meghnad Desai, David Godwin, Surina Narula, Senath Walter Perera, Nayantara Sehgal and Michael Worton.

Two doctoral fellowships have become available at the University of Muenster, Germany

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Marie Curie Fellowship
Early Stage Researcher in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies
Diasporas and the Literature of Globalisation

Applications are invited for the position of one early stage – or doctoral – researcher (36 months, full time) in Diaspora Studies to work on a project situated within the area of literary and film studies at the Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster, Germany.

Marie Curie Initial Training Network
“Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging” (CoHaB)

All over the world, stable concepts of home and belonging have, for a variety of reasons, become the exception rather than the rule, which has led to dramatic cultural, social and political changes and challenges. The study of diaspora and migration has evolved into a burgeoning field which sets an urgent research agenda for our time. The EU-funded trans-national network CoHaB comprises acknowledged Diaspora Studies experts from the universities of Muenster, Oxford, SOAS, Stockholm, Mumbai and Northampton, as well as several non-academic partners. Committed to excellence in facilitating research for scholars in the early phases of their careers, the network is united in the conviction that interdisciplinary and transnational training as well as international and inter-sectoral co-operation are key to any productive study of diaspora. Applicants must document research interests and expertise in relevant fields, especially literary studies, film studies and diaspora studies and be willing to network across academic and non-academic institutions as part of their research.

Research training within a variety of disciplinary environments, both academic and extramural, is central to the CoHaB network. Secondments to associated non-academic partners will help Marie Curie Research Fellows in Diaspora Studies to gain insight into specific diaspora-related, extramural fields of work, and also integrate the findings rising from their work experience with their academic work. Close co-operation within the network will allow researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds to join forces and develop their projects on a shared platform.

Applicants will be expected to engage in a continuing dialogue about the methodology, theory, and terminology of diaspora studies as a transdiscipline. In the context of the specific project, this entails literary/cultural studies, film studies, and sociology.

Project: Diasporas and the Literature of Globalisation

This project will combine the analysis of novels, plays and poems that deal with forms of contemporary globalisation and diasporic subjects with the critical reading of theorists of globalisation and diaspora and the discussion of contemporary films. In particular, it will focus on aspects on a local level that connect diasporic individuals around the globe. Which strategies - aesthetic, narrative, theoretical - do writers, artists and other diasporic agents use to refer to the dynamic relationship between global identity and rooted subjectivity? We invite applications suggesting specific corpuses for analysis.

Benefits

The researcher will be employed by the WWU Muenster on a full-time basis as a PhD student, with a gross salary of 37,392 € p.a. and full social security benefits. The position also includes a monthly mobility allowance as well as ample funds to participate in training activities of the CoHaB network and in international conferences.

Requirements

Applicants must:

· have a first class Master’s degree (or equivalent) in one of the following areas: literary studies or film studies

· have less than four years of research experience and must not yet have been awarded a doctoral degree

· not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Germany for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to their recruitment

· have previous experience (academic and/or extra-mural) in the field of diaspora studies, especially from a literary or film studies perspective

· have an excellent command of English (spoken and written)

· satisfy the eligibility criteria for fellowships in Marie Curie Initial Training Networks

Applications must include:

· a curriculum vitae (including information on nationality and place of residence for the past three years),

· academic record (including transcripts),

· letter of motivation,

· two written references,

· a short proposal (2,000 words) for a research project

Submit applications electronically, in a single PDF file, to:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer at stierstorfer@wwu.de

Formal evaluation of candidates will begin on February 29, 2012, and continue until the position is filled. The successful candidate is expected to join CoHaB by April 2012.

The CoHaB website can be found at www.itn-cohab.eu

Marie Curie Fellowship
Early Stage Researcher in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies
Literary Refractions of Migration Laws in Post-Colonial Novels

Applications are invited for the position of one early stage – or doctoral – researcher 36 months, full time) in Diaspora Studies to work on a project situated within the area of literary studies at the Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster, Germany.

Marie Curie Initial Training Network
“Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging” (CoHaB)

All over the world, stable concepts of home and belonging have, for a variety of reasons, become the exception rather than the rule, which has led to dramatic cultural, social and political changes and challenges. The study of diaspora and migration has evolved into a burgeoning field which sets an urgent research agenda for our time. The EU-funded trans-national network CoHaB comprises acknowledged Diaspora Studies experts from the universities of Muenster, Oxford, SOAS, Stockholm, Mumbai and Northampton, as well as several non-academic partners. Committed to excellence in facilitating research for scholars in the early phases of their careers, the network is united in the conviction that interdisciplinary and transnational training as well as international and inter-sectoral co-operation are key to any productive study of diaspora. Applicants must document research interests and expertise in relevant fields, especially literary studies, law, and diaspora studies and be willing to network across academic and non-academic institutions as part of their research.

Project: Literary Refractions of Migration Laws in Post-Colonial Novels

The project undertakes to examine, by the example of select works of contemporary post-colonial literature, representations of the impact of legal systems on migration and constructions of home and belonging in the diaspora. Drawing on legal theory and cultural studies, the focus will be on legal questions involving diasporic communities, especially processes of assimilation and integration and their representation in law and in literature. We invite applications suggesting specific corpuses for analysis.

Benefits

Requirements

Applicants must:

· have a first class Master’s degree (or equivalent) in one of the following areas: literary studies, law, postcolonial studies

· have less than four years of research experience and must not yet have been awarded a doctoral degree

· not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Germany for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to their recruitment

· have previous experience (academic and/or extra-mural) in the field of diaspora studies, preferably from a legal perspective

· have an excellent command of English (spoken and written)

· satisfy the eligibility criteria for fellowships in Marie Curie Initial Training Networks

Applications must include:

· a curriculum vitae (including information on nationality and place of residence for the past three years),

· academic record (including transcripts),

· letter of motivation,

· two letters of reference,

· a short proposal (2,000 words) for a research project

Submit applications electronically, in a single PDF file, to:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer at stierstorfer@wwu.de

Formal evaluation of candidates will begin on February 29, 2012, and continue until the position is filled. The successful candidate is expected to join CoHaB by April 2012.

The CoHaB website can be found at www.itn-cohab.eu

CoHaB is committed to equal opportunities and encourages applications from all sections of the international community worldwide.

Courttia Newland reviews Colour Me English by Caryl Phillips

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Colour Me English
Caryl Phillips
Harvill Secker, London, 2011, pb
352pp ISBN 1 8465 5305 9 £14.99
www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/imprint/harvill-secker

Caryl Phillips’ seventh collection of essays, Colour Me English, revisits the author’s chosen territories of ‘displacement, home/homelessness, race and identity’, as defined by Renée Schatteman, editor of Conversations with Caryl Phillips (2009). It is a volume heaving with insights, musings and ideology, some thirty-eight essays in all, each dissecting the notion of tribal belonging and its polar opposite, exclusion. Much of the collection details the travels Phillips has undertaken since he was first published by Faber and Faber in 1985, spanning countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belgium and France. The writings also map temporal journeys; essays such as ‘Water’ go back to 1993, while others like ‘Ground Zero’ and another on the Chinese-American novelist, Ha Jin, are clearly written more recently.

From his introduction, the title essay ‘Colour Me English’, Phillips’ flowing style and obvious passion shine. This sets the tone for a series of glaringly honest accounts of experiences which shape and guide a man of letters one New York Times reviewer called ‘one of the great literary giants of our time’. In precise, measured prose Phillips recounts his schooling at an all-boys grammar school in the centre of Leeds, as one of the only black boys until the arrival of his younger brothers. Then comes Ali, a ‘moon-faced brown boy in a brand new school blazer’, and thirty pairs of eyes take in this ‘oriental apparition’. The taunts soon follow, Phillips taking part in his schoolmates’ antagonism until they accost Ali on the bus home from school. He encourages the boy to report the incident to a member of staff. Of course, nothing is done, and this apathetic response from someone who could have played a supportive role renders Phillips and Ali exposed. They retreat into their former shells, do not speak to each other for the remainder of their school lives. This particularising of the disenfranchised, the humanisation of unseen life, makes way for a broader discussion later in the essay, that of Islamic immigration into European borders, the radicalisation of the 7/7 bombers and the reasons young Muslims might feel ambivalence towards the country they reluctantly call home.

At the close of the essay, Phillips states that he ‘believes passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows’. At that point I was fully with him. I was roused, eager for what might follow. Yet while I appreciate the honesty and skill of the remaining essays, I was disappointed by their omissions, frustrated by Philips’ failure to escape his own ideological burrows.

The publisher’s blurb for Colour Me English asks, ‘What do we mean by “English”?’ The title betrays a desire to wrestle with the notion of what it means to be a Caribbean immigrant, of African heritage, brought up in England. From a personal standpoint Phillips manages this admirably. He speaks of his decision, in 1978, to go to the United States, where he encounters Richard Wright’s Native Son and decides to write about African Americans. In ‘Northern Soul’, ‘Necessary Journeys’ and ‘Rude am I in my Speech’, he speaks repeatedly of his own disillusion with England. In a section named ‘Overtures’, he pays due homage to Black British literary forebears E. R. Braithwaite and the luminary John La Rose. But these writings are in the minority, and out of thirty-eight essays, only nine are concerned with Britain and its inhabitants, literary or otherwise, in the main or even remotely. It’s an omission I found startling in a collection titled as it is.

There is little Critical engagement with modern Britain; with the third generation of Caribbean descent, to whom Phillips gives fleeting mention as ‘commendably brash’, or those who came after, have become global icons, groundbreakers, rioters. Little mention of second generation South Asians today, or West Asians, or Africans and Europeans from across the continents, the myriad races and cultures of multicultural Britain. No white indigenous English, some of whom feel they’ve been infringed upon, or others who feel comfortable with relatively new arrivals. It might be true that twenty years of US living inspired his section on America, instead of, maybe, an examination of the rigours of being déraciné –uprooted from your natural environment – for Black Britons, what that might mean for our artistic output. I may be attempting to shoehorn Phillips in line with my own concerns, but for a collection with such a provocative title, such expectations are justified. Caryl Phillips is one of our literary greats, of that there is no doubt. If he wishes to continue writing about British identity he may be forced to stretch beyond his post-colonial notions, and engage with the country we have become, alongside what we were.

Courttia Newland’s six books include The Scholar, Society Within, Music for the Off-Key and A Book of Blues. He co-edited IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain and has also written plays and screenplays.

Wasafiri celebrated the launch of Issue 68 at a special event at the BBC's Bush House

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

BBC Special Correspondent Razia Iqbal chaired an evening of memories at Bush House in London. BBC World Service Writer-in-Residence Hamid Ismailov, former BBC World Service producer Vesna Goldsworthy, Caine Prize for African Writing winner Brian Chikwava and acclaimed novelist Merle Collins read from some of their favourite Bush House writers and talked about why they were so inspiring.

The evening marked a fitting tribute to the decades of remarkable world writing that has come out of Bush House.

Wasafiri also announced the winners of the New Writing Prize 2011.

Liliane Landor, Controller, Languages, Global News at the BBC introduces the event

Annabel Dilke, writer and widow of Georgi Markov

Hamid Ismailov, BBC World Service Writer-in-Residence

Susheila Nasta, MBE, founder of Wasafiri Magazine

Razia Iqbal and Brian Chikwava

Marie Gillespie, Guest Editor of Issue 68, 'Writers at Bush House'

Brian Chikwava with Michael Marett-Crosby, winner of the Wasafiri New Writing 2011 Prize for Fiction and Richard Scott, winner of the Poetry prize

Richard Scott, winner of Wasafiri's New Writing Prize 2011 for Poetry

Michael Marett-Crosby, winner of Wasafiri's New Writing Prize 2011 for Fiction

Susheila Nasta talks to Vesna Goldsworthy

Wasafiri's Assistant Editor, Nisha Obano talks to New Writing Prize runner up Mehran Waheed

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE, writer and Vesna Goldsworthy

Colin Grant, writer and radio producer at the BBC

Marie Gillespie and Zinovy Zinik, writer and broadcaster at the BBC

Merle Collins, writer

Brian Chikwava with Wasafiri's Deputy Editor, Sharmilla Beezmohun

Maggie Gee, writer and Ruth Fainlight, writer

Priyath Liyanage, head of the BBC's Sinhala Service, Gwyneth Williams, controller of BBC Radio 4 and Nick Rankin, writer and broadcaster

Razia Iqbal, Colin Grant

Daljit Nagra, poet and Brian Chikwava - both were judges for Wasafiri's New Writing Prize 2011 along with poet and novelist Jackie Kay

Gwyneth Williams and Hamid Ismailov

Wasafiri Reviews Editor, Florian Stadtler, Wasafiri Deputy Editor, Sharmilla Beezmohun and Kate Arthurs, British Council

Photographs are copyright of Wasafiri Magazine

Photographer: Graham Fudger www.grahamfudger.co.uk

What makes a good short story? Bernardine Evaristo shares her thoughts on Commonwealthwriters.org

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

"Linguistic flair, something fresh and original, depth, re-readability, stories that explore new ways of seeing, being, that surprise, provoke and even shock. The ‘quiet understated voice’ is sometimes overrated and writing that is too oblique can actually be deceptively weightless – the touch so light it really is all air. One hopes to find a wide array of styles, genres and unique voices. My own taste is eclectic and while I do appreciate the cleverness of understatement, I also like flamboyance, daring, writers who take risks and push the boundaries of form ..." Continue reading at http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/what-makes-a-good-short-story-by-bernardine-evaristo/

Call for papers - Special issue of Asiatic, June 2012

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Expatriation, Immigration and Return in Recent South Asian Fiction

Guest Editor: Professor Fakrul Alam, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

In the first phase of South Asian fiction written in English, its writers were rooted in India and wrote entirely about the subcontinent and its people based on their vision of the quotidian experience of Indians. In their very different ways, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao authored novels about people and places in colonial India to represent distinctive Indian ways of life. It was perhaps Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972) that began a phase of the South Asian novel in English where characters from the subcontinent are set in overseas locales to depict the complexities of acculturation, but it was only in the 1980s that a generation of writers emerged who were mostly bent on telling diasporic stories. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988) no doubt attracted disproportionate attention due to its controversial treatment of Asian immigrants in England, but many other novelists of the subcontinent preoccupied themselves with tales set in the West that dealt with what Bharati Mukherjee had characterized in one of her nonfictional pieces as either “the aloofness of expatriation” or “the exuberance of immigration”. Any numbers of writers from the subcontinent were now attracted to fictionalizing diaspora. For example, the peripatetic Amitav Ghosh in the The Circle of Reason (1986) told stories of the outward flow of dispossessed people to the Middle East or beyond while the Pakistani born Bapsi Sidhwa, now settled in the United States, combined her experience of continents in An American Brat (1994), or Monica Ali, a writer of Bangladeshi origin, juxtaposed immigrant lives withdeshi ones in Brick Lane (2003). In other words, there was great variety in the fiction of writers who had chosen to narrate stories of South Asian diasporas in their works.

A clutch of new novels that have been published in recent years, however, signal the arrival of a new phase of South Asian fiction in English where the novelists are fascinated by either the mythos of return or legendary tales of outward flows. Thus, Priya Basil’s The Obscure Logic of the Heart, Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers, Shilpi Somaya Goda’s Secret Daughter and Roma Tearne’s The Swimmer, all published in 2010, have a few things in common: they are novels by writers of South Asian origin who have settled overseas or moved to the West in their childhood or are descendants of Indian families who have become immigrants for some time now; they are all novels written from a desire to overcome feelings of aloofness and loss incurred by diasporas and by a longing for reconciliation with what was left behind; they all straddle cultures and attempt to unite families and people across space, time and political and racial borders. In this they differ from a novel of disgruntled return, Mohsin Hamid’s 9/11 inspired The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Finally, two novels published in 2010, Amitav Ghosh’s The Sea of Poppies (2008) and Tabish Khair’s The Thing about Thugs (2010) indicate that South Asian novelists are now also drawn to tell tales of the outward flow of their people that have been occluded for long or that have acquired legendary status at this time.

For this special issue of the Asiatic, we seek essays of around 5,000 words on the novels that have been published in recent decades on the themes of expatriation, immigration and return in South Asian Fiction. Papers can be on these and other related themes:

Fictions/Novelists of the South Asian Diaspora

South Asian Fictions of Transnational Migration

Aloofness and Expatriation in South Asian Novels

Immigrant Tales

The Mythos of Return in South Asian Fiction

Historical Fiction of the Outward Flow of South Asians

The themes listed above is meant to be suggestive and is no ways to be seen as exhaustive!

The deadline for submission is April 30, 2012. Please send email articles (using British spelling and the MLA Style) to the guest editor of the issue, Professor Fakrul Alam at falam57@gmail.com.

Inquiries could also be forwarded to the journal’s editor, Professor Mohammad A. Quayum at mquayum@gmail.com.

We also invite author interviews, review articles and book reviews on the subject for this issue.

Fakrul Alam is Professor of English at the University of Dhaka. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Associate Professor at Clemson University, USA, and has also been Visiting Professor at India’s Jadavpur University and Visva-Bharati. He was a member of the jury of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for 2003 (Eurasia region) and is currently an adjudicator for the DSC South Asian Prize for Literature, 2011. He is also the author of Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English(Dhaka: writer’s ink, 2007); South Asian Writers in English (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006); Jibananada Das: Selected Poems (Dhaka: UPL, 199); Bharati Mukherjee(Boston: Twayne’s Contemporary United States Authors, 1996) and Daniel Defoe: Colonial Propagandist (Dhaka: University of Dhaka Publications, 1989). He has been editor of Dhaka University Studies, Part A (Humanities) and the Asiatic Society Journal. His most recent work, which he has co-authored with Radha Chakravarty, is The Essential Tagore (Boston, Mass.: Harvard UP, April 2011 and Kolkata, Visva-Bharati, August, 2011). His translation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’sUnfinished Memoirs will be published in January 2011 by University Press Ltd. in Bangladesh and Penguin Books elsewhere.

Winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011 Announced

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Three winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011 were announced at a special event at Bush House in London. Our congratulations go to Richard Scott for 'Adin' (Poetry), Michael Marett-Crosby for 'Room 618' (Fiction) and Abeer Hoque for 'On Growing' (Life Writing). The prizes were awarded by Wasafiri Editor Susheila Nasta and judge Brian Chikwava (pictured in the middle with two of the winners). Brian's fellow judges were Daljit Nagra and Jackie Kay. The winning entries will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of Wasafiri.

Thank you to all those who entered their poems, short stories and life writing to our third New Writing Prize. We were impressed with the quality of entries this year and as always the selection process was difficult. The full shortlist is as follows.

Fiction

'The Last Round' by Carol Brick-Stock
'The Killing Sea' by Clare Girvan
'The North Africa American Cemetry' by Ali Khiari
'Room 618' by Michael Marett-Crosby
'The Teeth of Freedom' by Steve Wade

Life Writing

'Motherland' by Geraldine Anslow
'On Growing' by Abeer Hoque
'Love Letters From Transylvania' by Hugh Kiernan
'Lamount Hill' by Amorella Lamount
'Heist' by Katy McAulay
'List for Life' by Margaret Thurgood

Poetry

'Hive' by Polly Atkin
'Adin' by Richard Scott
'A Breton Girl Spinning, 1889' by Mary Whistler
'Clay Lady' by Margaret Wilmot

National Novel Writing Month

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

National Novel Writing Month is a fun approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of not great stuff. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and — when the thing is done — the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

In 2010, we had over 200,000 participants. More than 30,000 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To give yourself permission to write without obsessing over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To stop being one of those people who say, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” and become one of those people who can say, “Oh, a novel? It’s such a funny story – I’ve written three.”

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins 12:00:01 November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at 11:59:59. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Click here to find out more

Longlist for the International Prize fro Arabic Fiction

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

www.arabicfiction.org

The contenders for the leading literary prize were selected from 101 entries from 15 countries published in the last 12 months.

The longlisted authors come from seven countries, with four authors a piece from Lebanon and Egypt. Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia and Jordan are each represented by one author. This year a number of the longlisted novels deal with the theme of the Lebanese war, whilst other common themes include displacement – both for expatriate Arabs and those who have lost loved ones in childhood – and the challenge of rediscovering one’s roots and identity.

Youssef Ziedan, who won the Prize in 2009 with Azazel, makes it onto this year’s longlist with The Nabatean. He is joined by three other previously shortlisted authors: Jabbour Douaihy (June Rain, 2008); Habib Selmi (The Scents of Marie-Claire, 2009) and Rabee Jaber (America, 2010). Ezzedine Choukri Fishere was longlisted for the Prize in 2009 for Intensive Care

These books were selected by a panel of five specialists in the field of Arabic literature. The judges’ names will be announced in Cairo on Wednesday 7 December 2011, at the same time as the 2012 shortlist.

The 2012 longlist, with author names in alphabetical order, is as follows:

Title	Author	Nationality	Publisher
Sarmada	Fadi Azzam	Syria	Thaqafa
Paving the Sea	Rashid al-Daif	Lebanon	Riyad al-Rayyes
The Vagrant	Jabbour Douaihy	Lebanon	Dar al-Nhar
Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge	Ezzedine Choukri Fishere	Egypt	Dar al-Ain
The Druze of Belgrade	Rabee Jaber	Lebanon	Al-Markez al-Thaqafi al-Arabi
The Unemployed	Nasr Iraq	Egypt	Al-Dar al-Masriya al-Lubnaniya
Toy of Fire	Bashir Mufti	Algeria	Al-Ikhtilef
Under the Copenhagen Sky	Hawra al-Nadawi	Iraq/Denmark	Dar al-Saqi
Suitcases of Memory	Sharbel Qatan	Lebanon	Naufel
Nocturnal Creatures of Sadness	Mohamed al-Refai	Egypt	Dar Merit
The Women of al-Basatin	Habib Selmi	Tunisia	Dar al-Adab
The Amazing Journey of Khair al-Din ibn Zard	Ibrahim al-Zaarur	Jordan	Dar Fada'at
The Nabatean	Youssef Ziedan	Egypt	Dar al-Shorouq

Authors, Publishers and Readers: Selling and Distributing Literary Cultures 1880 - 1940 - Call for papers

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Saturday 24th March 2012, Special Collections, University of Reading

Confirmed speakers: Dr Mary Hammond, Dr Nickianne Moody and Dr Shafquat Towheed

CALL FOR PAPERS

This one day symposium will examine the role of publishers, readers and the distributing agents of fiction on literary culture and the history of the novel from 1880-1940. It will investigate the impact that the literary marketplace had on the production of fiction in this period and consider the role that it played in the minds of authors and their publishers. How far were publishers and authors consciously seeking to produce fiction that would be acceptable to the market, and what constraints did this involve? To what extent did changes in reading patterns and in the cultural status of fiction influence what was written and produced? What contribution can the analysis of changes in distribution and reading patterns make to a new understanding of one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of English fiction?

Key areas that we suggest will be covered include:

- commercial circulating libraries and the rise of the public library movement

- bookshops and new retail outlets

- serialisation

- reading, genre and the stratification of the fiction market

- audience and literary censorship

- the development of new reading groups and book clubs

- the colonial market

- the impact of cheap paperbacks

- using publishers’ and book trade archives

As with the AHRC project which the symposium is designed to mark, the day aims to be interdisciplinary and will bring together publishing experts, book historians and literary critics. It will be held at the University of Reading Special Collections, where the nationally designated archive of British printing and publishers is held. The significance of publishers’ archives lies in the insight they can give into the network of relations between author, publisher, retailer and consumer; the publishers’ archives held at Reading have been used extensively as part of our project. The potentialities for research and the use of publishers’ and book trade archives in literary studies will form part of the day’s focus.

Proposals for papers should be emailed to Dr Nicola Wilson, n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk no later than 16 December 2011. Proposals should be about 250 words in length. Please include your telephone and e-mail address on your proposal.

Narrating the Caribbean Nation: A Celebration of Literature and Orature - Call for papers

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Narrating the Caribbean Nation: A Celebration of Literature and Orature
Convened by Peepal Tree Press at Leeds Metropolitan University

14^th – 15^th April 2012

Peepal Tree Press is pleased to announce that a two-day conference, Narrating the Caribbean Nation: A Celebration of Literature and Orature, will be held on 14-15^th April 2012 at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. The conference will celebrate the Silver Anniversary of Peepal Tree Press and highlight the contribution of its own authors and other Caribbean and Black British writers to contemporary world literature.

We are also delighted that Kwame Dawes has confirmed his participation as a keynote speaker. Widely recognised as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers, Kwame is also Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and Associate Poetry Editor at Peepal Tree Press.

The conference aims to bring together writers, academics, students, teachers and people with an interest in Caribbean literature to discuss the rich body of both Caribbean and Black British writing and to explore the relationship between the two. Our investigation into the ‘narration of nation’ centres around a definition of the Caribbean nation as one rooted in a rich, unique and plural community which transcends physical borders and extends across the Caribbean and the Caribbean Diaspora.

We will examine culture, politics, identities, childhood, performance and many other topics in the context of the Caribbean and its diasporas and discuss how the past 25 years of Caribbean writing connects to, and builds on, classic texts of Caribbean literature. Moreover, the conference will offer opportunities to hear the ideas of new and established writers and to watch them perform.

The conference will juxtapose academic papers with less formal presentations from activists and practitioners in the field in order to raise the profile of writers of Caribbean heritage. Over the course of the conference, Leeds-based Peepal Tree Press, which has been the home of the best in Caribbean, Black British and South Asian literature for 25 years, will showcase new and classic works in print and in performance by its authors from around the world.

Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to:

·                Caribbean identities

·                Diasporic Caribbean identities

·                Resistance, politics, racism

·                Publishing writing from the Caribbean and its diaspora

·                Gender and sexuality

·                Indo-Caribbean literature

·                Classic Caribbean texts

·                Discovering new Caribbean writers

·                Oral narratives and storytelling

·                Auto/biography, memoir, life writing

·                Caribbean texts in translation

·                Caribbean women writers

·                Caribbean poetry

·                Teaching Caribbean writing

·                Caribbean short story

·                Intersections between Caribbean literature, orature, and visual arts

·                Writing for children

·                Sport and pastimes in the Caribbean and its diaspora

Please send abstracts of 200 words and brief biodata (via Word attachment) to Claire Chambers, Emily Marshall, and Emma Smith on narratingnation@gmail.com with ‘Abstract’ in the subject line by 23 December 2011.

We also welcome poster presentations (for examples http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/presentations_poster.html)

Further details about the conference are available on
http://narratingthecaribbeannation.eventbrite.co.uk/

Or contact Kadija George: narratingnation@gmail.com

Selected papers will be published in a journal special issue and/or an edited collection.

Convenors:

Kadija George, Inscribe/ Peepal Tree Press    Kevin Hylton, Leeds Metropolitan University
Dorothea Smartt, Inscribe/Peepal Tree Press                Claire Chambers, Leeds Metropolitan University
Emma Smith, Peepal Tree Press                                        Emily Marshall, Leeds Metropolitan University

Free access to works by and about author Zo� Wicomb on the Taylor and Francis website

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb has been described as a writer of rare brilliance, having written two novels, two collections of linked stories, and a number of insightful essays on South African literature and culture.

Routledge are offering free access to works by and on Zoë Wicomb, including 'In Search of Tommie' published in Wasafiri in 2009. This is in conjunction with the publication of the latest special issue of Safundi, a Routledge journal, entitled 'Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan' which collects together a number of papers presented at the colloquium of the same name, held at the University of Stellenbosch in 2010. TThe articles are free to access, by simply clicking the links below. Free access will be available until the end of 2011.

Bernardine Evaristo reviews One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina's compelling memoir

Wed, 9 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Book Review by Bernardine Evaristo

One Day I Will Write About This Place
Binyavanga Wainaina
Granta, London, 2011, pb
272pp ISBN 1 8470 8021 9 £15.99
www.grantabooks.com/

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2002 with his short story ‘Discovering Home’. He resurfaced three years later with his scathing, satirical essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ (Granta, 2005). This contained such directives as, ‘Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari” in your title’; ‘In your text treat Africa as if it were one country’; ‘Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book … An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these’; ‘Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws of Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.’

For those of us tired of the West’s perpetuation of a sub-Saharan Africa solely defined by war, corruption, despotism, deprivation, criminality and famine, the essay was a witty relief. It heralded a bolshie voice raging against the colonial mentality and racist idiocies that often remain unchallenged today. With the publication of this memoir, his first book, Wainaina continues his project of responding to these reductive perceptions and projections.

One Day I Will Write About This Place deals with the particulars of a middle-class Kenyan boy living an ordinary, middle-class Kenyan life. It is shockingly normal. Wainaina does not end up witnessing his mother being raped, his father beheaded and his childhood stolen by warlords. Instead, the memoir explores the safe world of adolescence in his home town of Nakuru, beginning in 1978, when the author is 7, and taking us through to adulthood. Wainaina is raised in a polyglot society by a Kenyan father who speaks Gikuyu and a Ugandan/Rwandan mother who speaks Kinyarwanda, Luganda and Kiswahili. His parents speak to each other in English. Not surprisingly, he is attuned to the resonances of language from an early age. The foggy years of early childhood are rendered imaginatively, strangely, through his fascination with the ways in which experience can be transmuted through imagery, and the sounds and sensations of words: ‘Thirst … is … a sucking absence, a little mouthing fish out of the water … It is a step below hungering, which comes from a solid body, one that can smell, taste, see, and need colours. Yes!’

The real world is always filtered through this child’s fertile imagination. At his mother’s hairdressing salon,

The hair-dryer spaceman has a grey plastic head. His face is a huge hole gaping at me, and the hole is a flat round net for him to blow hot air. I stick my own head into his helmet and play Six Million Dollar Man.

As soon as he is able, he loses himself in reading books which eventually develops into a love of writing and later an ambition to write books himself.

We learn of his special relationship with his much-admired, clever, younger sister, Ciru; experiences at boarding schools; the day he discovered the family servant, Cleophas, having sex with a woman in his private quarters; and the arrival of the rebellious, larger-than-life nanny, Wambui, aged 15, whose parents are potato farmers but who wants to one day be rich. His flights of fancy cast her as multiple personas such as a ‘Gikuyu Scottish strumpet’; ‘a woman in long skirts from a Barbara Cartland book cover’; Millie Jackson; and a disco queen, her clothes glinting with sequins: ‘Little droplets of disco light are spinning gently around Wambui as she turns.’ In his realm of metaphor and metamorphosis, everything becomes something else.

Snapshots of childhood experiences are set against the backdrop of the wider picture of social and state life in Kenya which takes in tribal nepotism and governmental corruption, but the touch is light-handed, the emphasis on the personal rather than the political. Musings on history and colonialism also prevail and the influence of American culture is omnipresent.

In 1993 Wainana goes to study at the University of Transkei in South Africa and comes unstuck. As Kenya implodes with ethnic clashes, electoral vote-rigging and economic meltdown, and South Africa is enduring civil unrest on the brink of the first universal election that will lead to the end of apartheid, he has his own breakdown. He opts out of university and spends his days shut up in his room, reading:

I have failed to let myself disappear into the patterns of a school where there is no punishment, no bell, no clear timetable, no real shame, for I am not at home, and don’t much care for the approval of the people here.

Very few memoirs or autobiographies by black Africans are published and this one is a radical departure from the usual tragic narratives. One hopes it will open the doors for other such books. We need the full spectrum: from the dramatic-extraordinary to the quotidian-ordinary. Wainana’s personal odyssey is compelling and provides insights into the making of this talented writer; and it certainly bodes well for future books.

Bernardine Evaristo’s six books include Blonde Roots, Hello Mum, Lara and The Emperor’s Babe. She co-edited the Wasafiri issue Black Britain: Beyond Definition in 2009 and the poetry collection of ten new black and Asian poets Ten (Bloodaxe 2010). She received an MBE in 2009.

Enter the Escalator Literature Fiction Competition

Tue, 1 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

The Escalator Literature is a unique writing competition which offers you much more than the usual cash prize.

Deadline: 29 November 2011

About the Competition

Open now, the Escalator Literature Competition 2011 is for you if you are a novelist from the East of England who wants to get professional. Enter now if you think you would benefit from:

• One-To-One Mentoring

A year’s worth of support from professional writers (Tobias Hill, Joanna Hines, Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine McMahon and Michelle Spring) – invaluable.

• Supported Applications For Grants

You will be coached through an application for an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts award.

• Professional Development Workshops

A tailored range of workshops designed to give you the information you need to get ahead in the writing world.

• Introductions To Agents and Publishers

Your work will be introduced to agents, publishers and other industry professionals and you will take part in a special London reception at the end of the year promoting you and your work.

• Peer Support

Across 2012, ten winning fiction writers will be supported through Escalator Literature. Many of our Escalator graduates are still in touch with their group and find it of invaluable benefit to go through the year talking to each other.

When?
The Escalator Literature Fiction Competition is open now. Submissions must reach us by Tuesday 29th November.

It Works

Escalator Literature is an Arts Council funded initiative and has been running for six years. Many Escalator Literature prize winners have gone on to find agents and get published: Guy Saville, Helen Ivory, Susan Sellers and Nicola Upson are all graduates of the scheme.

Guidelines for Entry

Poetry Towards Peaceful Coexistence - Report on the London Forum

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

On 19th October, poets, editors, translators and journalists descended on London's Mosaic Rooms for an evening discussion of poetry and its role in promoting peaceful co-existence between civilisations. The event was hosted by The Al Babtain The Foundation of Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain's Prize for Poetic Creativity hosted

The London Forum was programmed to complement the subjects debated at the intellectual symposium "Poetry towards a Peaceful Co-Existence which took place in Dubai 17th - 18th October. The two events were linked by author and broadcaster Paul Blezard, who flew from Dubai to London, to participate in both Forums.

In his opening speech in Dubai, Abdul Aziz Saud Al-Babtain, Chairman of The Foundation, highlighted the role of poetry in promoting dialogue between civilisations and said that the decision to hold the event in Dubai reflected the Emirate's leading role in bringing about peaceful coexistence and understanding between people from different cultural backgrounds.

Speakers who took part in the London event were:

• Rosie Goldsmith, journalist and broadcaster, chair
• Sarah Ardizzone, award winning translator
• Sharmila Beezmohun, deputy editor Wasafiri magazine
• Paul Blezard, Literary director, The Firebird Poetry Prizes
• Christina Patterson , writer and columnist, The Independent
• Rhona Wells, assistant editor, The Middle East magazine

Watch the discussion on YouTube.

The London panellists discussed issues of translation and interpretation, poetry and performance, as well as debating the role poetry can play in today's world, and its impact on different cultures globally.

Arabic poetry has a long and illustrious tradition dating back to the 6th century and is the earliest known form of Arabic literature. There was a revival of Arabic poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century. In light of this, Abdul Aziz Saud Al-Babtain established The Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Prize for Imam AlBukhari Grandchildren, an annual prize of U.S. $100,000 to restore the genuine cultural bridges between the Arab Nation and the recently independent Asian Islamic states.

Rosie Goldsmith, who chaired the London event, said: "Poetry Towards Peaceful Co-Existence was an incredibly ambitious topic to debate, and a hugely ambitious aim for all of us who both love poetry and long for peace. Poetry can and should play a part in developing a broader understanding between different cultures, but this is a subject for a much longer debate."

Sharhah International Book Fair launches new translation centre

Wed, 5 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

The SIBF Translation Rights Centre, which is sponsored by etisalat, the largest telecommunications company in the UAE, and supported by American University of Sharjah (AUS), will offers grants for deals done or initiated at the Fair, and it will include books being translated between any two languages. In its first year it will have a translation fund of $300,000.

This new initiative is a reflection of the international reach and influence of SIBF and is driven by the vision of its Director, Mr Ahmed Al Amri.

Crucially, the launch of the SIBF Translation Rights Centre is supported by a hugely expanded professional programme, which will take place on Monday 14 and Tuesday 15 November, prior to official opening of SIBF on Wednesday 16 November.

The professional programme, which will include individual meetings, networking and talks, is bringing together hugely influential professionals from across the international rights community to do business at the Fair.

Already over 50 international publishers have confirmed attendance from over 16 countries as far afield as Japan, Russia, US, Romania, UK and Mexico. The programme will also be attended by Arab publishers from across the region keen to build their networks with international publishers. All attendees will receive a list of books currently available in Arabic that are recommended for translation, and the opportunity to meet their Arabic publishers.

The Fair itself will also be attended by Arab authors, booksellers and wholesalers, and key English Language book buyers from major institutions such as universities and libraries.

The translation grant will be available to any attending publisher or agent. The full guidelines for 2011 will be announced shortly via www.sharjahbookfair.com

Shortlist announced for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011

Tue, 4 Oct 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Thank you to all those who entered samples of their poetry, fiction and life writing to our third New Writing Prize. We were impressed with the quality of entries this year and after much deliberation the judges, Brian Chikwava, Jackie Kay and Daljit Nagra, have decided upon the following shortlist:

Fiction

'The Last Round' by Carol Brick-Stock
'The Killing Sea' by Clare Girvan
'The North Africa American Cemetry' by Ali Khiari
'Room 618' by Michael Marett-Crosby
'The Teeth of Freedom' by Steve Wade

Life Writing

Poetry

'Hive' by Polly Atkin
'Adin' by Richard Scott
'A Breton Girl Spinning, 1889' by Mary Whistler
'Clay Lady' by Margaret Wilmot

Our congratulations go to the shortlisted writers and the winners will be anounced at a special event in November.

Free access to Zoe Wicomb's Short Story 'In Search of Tommie' first published in Wasafiri's 25th Birthday Issue

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoe Wicomb has been described as a writer of rare brilliance, having written two novels, two collections of linked stories and a number of insightful essays on South African literature and culture.

Routledge have put together a virtual issue with free access to articles and short stories by South Afrrican author, Zoe Wicomb as well as further reading on contemporary South African literature. Of particular note is Andrew van der Vlies' analysis of Zoe's story 'In Search of Tommie' first published in Wasafiri's 25th Anniversary issue.

The articles are free and access is available until the end of 2011.

Click here to view the free content on Routledge's website.

Content

Articles on Zoë Wicomb

Introduction – Zoë Wicomb: Texts and Histories
David Attwell and Kai Easton

Zoë Wicomb, the Cape & the Cosmopolitan: An Introduction
Kai Easton & Andrew van der Vlies

Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb
J U Jacobs

Secular Blackness in Zoë Wicomb's Short Stories
Sope Maithufi

The "necessary silence" of realism in Zöe Wicomb's David's story
Ken Barris

Zoë Wicomb interviewed on writing and nation
Stephan Meyer & Thomas Olver

Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms
Andrew van der Vlies

Articles/stories by Zoë Wicomb

In Search of Tommie
Zoë Wicomb
Wasafiri

My name is HannaH: Arthur Nortje Memorial Lecture
Zoë Wicomb

Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing
Zoë Wicomb

Setting, Intertextuality and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author 1
Zoë Wicomb

October 19 - Watch out for the Chimurenga Chronic - for one day only!

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Chimurenga’s new publishing project takes the form of a once-off, one-day-only edition of a fictional newspaper to be released on “Black Wednesday”, October 19th 2011 – a historic day in South Africa that marks the banning of numerous Black Consciousness organisations and independent newspapers by the apartheid regime.

Titled the Chimurenga Chronic, the project is an intervention into the newspaper as a vehicle of knowledge production and dissemination. Editor Ntone Edjabe explains, “Knowledge produced by Africans is always curtailed towards simplicity because we are trapped in the logic of emergency. At Chimurenga we’re constantly trying to create beyond this shut hole of relevance. There is indeed famine and war but there is also life. There is also innovation, thinking, dreams – all the things that make life. Our project is to articulate this complexity.”

In order to do this, the Chimurenga Chronic takes a step back. Locating itself directly inside the emergency, the newspaper is backdated to the period of May 2008, a time marked by the outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa.

“Our sense of history, of what is relevant, is marked by the newspaper medium,” notes Edjabe. By embracing this form, the Chimurenga Chronic seeks to provide an alternative to mainstream representations of history, on the one hand filling the gap in the historical coverage of this event, whilst at the same time reopening it.

“The objective is not to revisit the past to bring about closure,” says Edjabe, “but rather to provoke and challenge our perception, in order to imagine a new foundation from which we can think and act within our current context.”

The newspaper

The result is both a bold art project and a hugely ambitious publishing venture that gives voice to all aspects of life on the continent. The 96-page multi-section broadsheet features news, analysis and longform journalism by award-winning writers and journalists. Its content ranges from in-depth investigations into xenophobia, border politics, the business of migration and ethnic economics, to innovative coverage of sports, arts, health, technology and more.

The stand-alone 56 page Chronic Life Magazine features photography, essays, guides, games, columns and more, and the Chronic Book Review Magazine is a self-contained 96 page magazine packed with interviews, analysis and over 92 pages of book reviews, as well as new fiction and poetry.

Of course, as Edjabe notes, “it isn’t a Chimurenga project if there isn’t music.” With this in mind the Chronic also comes packaged with a free audio CD supplement in the form of a “mixtape” composed, arranged and performed by celebrated musician and composer Neo Muyanga.

A Pan African Collaboration

In an effort to shift the perspective away from the confines of nation-states, The Chimurenga Chronic is a Pan African production, created in cooperation with independent publishers Kwani? in Kenya and Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press. It brings together journalists and editors, writers, theorists, photographers, illustrators and artists from around Africa and the world to create a platform for imagination and dialogue.

The Chimurenga Chronic is realised with the kind support of Glänta, Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, Heinrich Böll Stiftung and lettera27.

For more information about the Chimurenga Chronic please contact Terry Ayugi at:

Email: info@chimurenga.co.za

Tel: +2721 4224168

Or visit the project’s website at:

www.chimurenganewsroom.org.za

October 19 - Watch out for the Chimurenga Chronic - for one day only!

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

The newspaper

A Pan African Collaboration

The Chimurenga Chronic is realised with the kind support of Glänta, Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, Heinrich Böll Stiftung and lettera27.

For more information about the Chimurenga Chronic please contact Terry Ayugi at:

Email: info@chimurenga.co.za

Tel: +2721 4224168

Or visit the project’s website at:

www.chimurenganewsroom.org.za

Interview with Marius Kociejowski, essayist and poet.

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Following on from Marius Kociejowski’s contribution to Wasafiri (an interview with Brian Chikwava in issue 67) we interview the writer in a special online feature.

Marius Kociejowski is a Cheltenham Prize-winning poet, essayist and travel writer living in London. His four collections of poetry include Music’s Bride and So Dance the Lords of Language- Poems 1975-2001. Most recently, he published The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey, an anthology, Syria Through Writers’ Eyes and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. Currently he is working on a new book, God’s Zoo, a record of a world journey through London’s exile and émigré artists, writers and musicians.

Wasafiri When did you begin to write literature as a serious pursuit? Are there any artists you particularly admire (literary or otherwise) that have influenced your writing?

Marius Kociejowski I think I’ve always written seriously, which is not to say I’ve always written well. It took me years to find my voice, with a hundred failures behind every success, only for those successes to be later seen by myself as failures. At times I’m so self-critical I wonder if I will ever arrive at that imaginary goal I carry within me. The list of writers I admire is long, although not nearly as long as the list of those I do not admire, but to suggest they have influenced me would be to put myself in their esteemed company, which makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it is best to say they have inspired me. Among poets of recent times I can cite Zbigniew Herbert, W S Graham, Ivan V Lalic, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Middleton and many others; in the travel genre, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Tim Robinson, Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s A Cure for Serpents (but not his subsequent work), and, in a slightly different vein, Gustaf Sobin.

Wasafiri Your book The Pigeon Wars of Damascus depicts your trip to the country five years after your last visit was documented in The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool. Do you intend to revisit the Middle East during this time of political upheaval in the Arab world? Also, having visited the region firsthand, are you optimistic that a people’s revolution can successfully bring about political and social change?

MK I dare not return any time soon simply because I do not want to compromise my friends and acquaintances. It is too risky to even write to, or phone, them. I am not greatly optimistic about change but then, a few months ago, I could never have predicted the massive protests that are now taking place. The question as to whether any revolution brings about the desired changes is a complex one because almost always there are also dark forces at work. If, for example, the Islamicists were to seize power in Syria it could spell catastrophe for the many religious minorities and sects living there. The one thing that can be said for the Asad regime is that it enforced religious tolerance. Mind you, it did so in its own self-interest. The lifting of any lid, and here I am thinking of the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989, is that it brings to the surface any number of simmering prejudices. The fate of the Roma is a case in point.

Wasafiri You have given talks on the subject of ‘European Travellers to Syria and the Question of Orientalism’. Could you elaborate on your thoughts regarding the topic of Orientalism, for those that are unfamiliar with your discussion of Edward Said’s thesis?

MK I wonder if there is any thinker of modern times who having brought into the intellectual forum a valuable discourse has had such a pernicious effect on the thinking or, rather, the unthinking of his many admirers. What he has given us is yet another ism, another lens through which students and critics, with their prescribed narrowness of vision, deprive themselves of the larger picture. As right as he may have been in general when it came to the particulars Said falsified almost everything he touched. Students read him rather than the works he so casually demolishes.

Wasafiri God’s Zoo, the book you are currently working on, depicts London’s exile and émigré artists. Furthermore, you write in your interview with Brian Chikwava of a sentence in his novel Harare North that ‘captures perfectly the disillusion that sets in when people who come to London’. As you were born and raised in Canada and now reside in London, to what extent has your own background influenced your representation of people who have moved here from elsewhere?

MK So many of the people about whom I write have come from deeply traumatic circumstances. I would never put myself amid their company, even though I do conclude the book with a chapter describing my own experiences of coming to London. This said, I grew up in a condition of exile, with a father who, after the war, was unable to return to his homeland. I grew up with, and breathed daily, that deep pain. I think, too, I gravitate naturally towards ‘outsiders’. I suppose most artists and writers do.

Wasafiri As somebody who has published four poetry collections thus far, has this form of writing complemented your other roles as an essayist and travel writer?

MK Somewhere Baudelaire writes that a poet should always be a poet, even when he is writing prose. This is not an argument for ‘poetic prose’, which I normally despise, but I do like to think of myself as being governed by a poetic perception of things, which is why I think my two ‘travel’ books do not fit easily into any genre.

Marius's interview with Brian Chikwava appears in the latest issue of Wasafiri

Aournd the World in 80 Wickets - follow author, Merryn Glover, around the world with her family and a plastic cricket bat

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

On the 15th of September, Merryn Glover set off on a seven-month amble around the world with her family and a plastic cricket bat. The story has already begun, follow her journey via the link to her blog:

http://aroundtheworldin80wickets.wordpress.com/

DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012 - Longlisted announced

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Omair Ahmad: Jimmy the Terrorist (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)
In Moazzamabad, Uttar Pradesh, a place that is too large to be a town and too backward to be a city, a young man stabs a police inspector and is beaten to death. The last words he speaks are, ‘My name is Jimmy the Terrorist.’ Journalists descend on the town, ‘like shrill birds’, and a long-time resident decides to tell a story that none of them will know. Jimmy was once Jamaal, son of Rafiq Ansari of Rasoolpur Mohalla, a Muslim neighborhood in a Hindu town. His story goes back a long way: to the time when Moazzamabad was named, after Aurangzeb’s son; when Rafiq was seduced by the wealth and refinements of Shabbir Manzil and married Shaista; when the Hanuman temple grew 10 storeys high and the head priest was elected mayor; when Shaista died, a mosque was brought down in Ayodhya and Rafiq became a mullah.

Omair Ahmad grew up in India and Saudi Arabia, and has worked as an analyst, reporter and political adviser in New Delhi, London and Washington. His published work includes the novels Encounters and The Storyteller’s Tale.

U.R. Ananthamurthy: Bharathipura (Oxford University Press, India, Translated by Susheela Punitha)

Perhaps the most significant work in caste literature since Premchand’s Godan (1936), Bharathipura reveals U.R. Ananthamurthy’s preoccupation with moving beyond caste and class interests. First published in 1973, Bharathipura is about the practice of untouchability in a traditional society that is evolving into modernity through new economic forces brought in by a certain class of people. When the town’s wealthiest landlord returns home, multiple realities unfold. Violent and unexpected events follow Jagannatha’s attempts to revolutionize everyone and everything by linking his own transformation to the changes he wishes to orchestrate.

U.R. Ananthamurthy, a teacher of English literature and one of India’s leading contemporary writers, does all his creative writing in Kannada. A Jnanpith awardee and author of five novels, including the widely acclaimed Samskara (English translation, OUP 1976), he has six collections of short stories, five collections of poems, a play, and sixteen volumes of critical writings. He was Vice-Chancellor, Mahatma Gandhi University (Kerala) and President, Central Sahitya Akademi.

Susheela Punitha has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in English language and literature. Her publications include children’s fiction for UNICEF and course books in spoken English.

Chandrakanta: A Street in Srinagar (Zubaan Books, India, Translated by Manisha Chaudhry)

Srinagar, capital city of the famed ‘paradise on earth’, Kashmir. Ailan Gali, a deep, dark narrow lane that lies at its heart, where houses stand on a finger’s width of space and lean crookedly against each other, so deep, so narrow, so closely connected that even thieves do not dare enter. Yet people live and love here, they cling on to their old ways, they share stories and food, joys and sorrows, sufficient unto themselves. But the outside world beckons, youngsters begin to leave, and slowly change makes its way into Ailan Gali only to find its hitherto hidden mirror-image – the change that has insidiously been working its way into the lives of those who are the gali’s permanent residents. This funny, poignant, evocative story of a Kashmir as yet untouched by violence – but with its shadows looming at the edges – is a classic of Hindi literature, available in English translation for the first time.

Chandrakanta Studied in Srinagar and Rajasthan and published her first story in 1967 in Kalpana. She has since written and published many novels and short story collections as well as a volume of poetry.

Manisha Chaudhry has translated stories, novels and documents for a range of publishing houses and organisations, from both Hindi and English. She is currently Head, Content Development with Pratham Books.

Siddharth Chowdhury: Day Scholar (Picador/Pan Macmillan, India)

Zorawar Singh Shokeen of Chandrawal is one of those Delhi musclemen who run its politics from the shadows. He owns a house in the environs of the University North Campus, which he lets out as a hostel for boys. Occasionally, he uses the hostel to host his mistress, Madam Midha. Otherwise, he recruits from among his young tenants the footsoldiers for his campus campaigns; their leader, a scrawny MA (Previous) student from Bihar -- the legendary Jishnu da. It is 1992, and at this aggressively male world, ordered along the simple principles of caste, class and region, arrive two kids from Patna. The fresh-faced Pranjal Sinha and his up-for-it best friend, and the narrator of Day Scholar, Hriday Thakur. In the twilight years between adolescence and adulthood, the Shokeen Niwas boys are concerned with elections, girls and examinations. And Hriday, who hopes to be a writer some day, is drawn, like moth to flame, irresistibly to the material they provide. Forsaking his first love, he becomes trapped instead by a series of misjudgements that lead him finally to the doorstep of Madam's house and, in it, her fourteen-year-old apple-cheeked daughter Sonya. If Hriday can be saved, it is only by the act of reading and writing.

Siddharth Chowdhury is the author of Diksha at St. Martin’s and Patna Roughcut. He studied English Literature at Zakir Husain and Hindu Colleges in Delhi University. In 2007, he held the Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Part of Day Scholar was written there. He lives in Delhi and works as Editorial Consultant with the house of Manohar.

Kishwar Desai: Witness the Night (HarperCollins/HarperCollins-India)

Durga. A fourteen-year-old girl, found all alone in a sprawling farm house tucked away in a corner of Punjab. Silent, terrified, and the sole suspect in the mass murder of thirteen members of her family. Simran. Whisky-swigging, chain-smoking unmarried social worker from Delhi. She is Durga’s sole hope, for Simran is the only one who believes that Durga may be more a victim than a suspect. As Simran tries to unravel the mystery of what really happened that night of the multiple murders, she comes in close and often uncomfortable contact with Jullundur and its people, from Durga’s enigmatic tutor Harpreet and his disfigured wife to the picture-perfect high-society Arminder and her superintendent husband Ramnath. The prejudices she encounters are deep seated and the secrets manifold. And Simran knows she cannot rest until she has uncovered the whole truth.

Kishwar Desai has worked in print and broadcast media as journalist, scriptwriter, TV anchor, producer and the head of a TV channel in India. Her first book, Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, was published by HarperCollins India in 2007. Kishwar lives between London, Delhi and Goa. This is her first novel; it has won the 2010 COSTA first novel award and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2009.

Namita Devidayal: Aftertaste (Random House, India)

Diwali 1984. Mummyji, the matriarch of a prosperous mithai business family, lies comatose in a Bombay hospital. Manipulative, determined, and seemingly invincible, Mummyji has held together her family through bribes of money, endless food, and adoration.Surrounding her are her four children: the weak and ineffectual Rajan Papa who is desperately in need of cash; Sunny, the dynamic head of the business with an ugly marriage and a demanding mistress; Suman, the spoilt beauty of the family who is determined to get her hands on Mummyji’s best jewels; and Saroj, Suman’s unlucky sister, who has always lived in her shadow. Each one of them wants Mummyji to die. Aftertaste tells the story of one business family and its bitter dynamics: of resentful bahus, emasculated sons, controlling mothers-in-law, and rapacious siblings. For at the heart of the family lies money, not love. Full of rare period detail and insights into the world of Baniya families, Aftertaste is worldly, astute, and utterly riveting.

Namita Devidayal was born in 1968 and graduated from Princeton University. The Music Room, her first book, was a winner of the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Popular Book Award and was named an Outlook book of 2007. A journalist with The Times of India, Namita lives in Mumbai.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: One Amazing Thing (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India)

A group of nine are trapped in the visa office at an Indian Consulate after a massive earthquake in an American city. Two visa officers on the verge of an adulterous affair; Jiang, a Chinese–Indian woman in her last years; her gifted teenage granddaughter Lily; an ex-soldier haunted by guilt; Uma, an Indian–American girl bewildered by her parents’ decision to return to Kolkata after twenty years; Tariq, a young Muslim man angry with the new America; and an enraged and bitter elderly white couple. As they wait to be rescued—or to die—they begin to tell each other stories, each recalling ‘one amazing thing’ in their life, sharing things they have never spoken of before. Their tales are tragic and life-affirming, revealing what it means to be human and the incredible power of storytelling.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of fifteen books including the award-winning short story collection Arranged Marriage, the novels Sister of My Heart, The Mistress of Spices and The Palace of Illusions. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages, and two of her novels have been made into films. Her writings have appeared in various publications including The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and have been published in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Divakaruni also writes for children. She is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Manu Joseph: Serious Men (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, India)

Ayyan Mani appears to be just another man in Bombay, stranded in the rot of a good marriage, an unremarkable life and a dead-end job as personal assistant to an insufferable astronomer called Arvind Acharya at the Institute of Theory and Research. To entertain himself and to give his wife the hope that they are heading towards a spectacular future, he embarks upon a secret game, weaving an outrageous fiction around his ten-year-old son. As he builds the small plots to promote the myth, he sets in motion a chain of events that soon threatens to overtake him. When the formidable reputation of Arvind Acharya, who is obsessed with the theory that microscopic extraterrestrials are falling on Earth all the time, plummets after a major scandal, and he is rocked by the vicious office politics in the institute, Ayyan sees in the crisis an opportunity to further his own game and make his son a national celebrity. But in the exhilaration of the game lurks danger.

Manu Joseph is a journalist based in Bombay. Serious Men, his first novel, is being published simultaneously in India, Britain and the US. It has also been translated into Dutch, German, French and Serbian. The author was listed among the top new novelists of 2010 by The Daily Telegraph.

Usha K.R: Monkey-man (Penguin/Penguin India)

3 January 2000. It is the start of the new millennium. On Ammanagudi Street in Bangalore, a strange

creature is spotted. As the beast seizes the imagination of the city, the first people to sight it—Shrinivas

Moorty, a teacher in a local college, Pushpa Rani, who works in a call centre, Neela Mary Gopalrao,

secretary to an influential man, and Sukhiya Ram, her office boy—are invited to talk about it on Bali

Brums’s hugely popular radio show. What was it that they saw? A bat? A malevolent avatar? A sign of the

displeasure of the gods? The grotesque mascot of a city that is growing too fast and crumbling too soon?

Or merely a monkey that has lost its way?

Usha K.R. is the author of the novels Sojourn, The Chosen and A Girl and a River was shortlisted for the

Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, 2008, and won the Vodafone Crossword Award, 2007.

Shehan Karunatilaka: Chinaman (Random House, India)Why am I chasing a man who only played four test matches for Sri Lanka? A man who denied me interviews, delighted me on occasion, disappointed those he played with, and disappeared three years ago.’ Retired sportswriter, W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, upsetting his wife, ignoring his son and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, an elusive spin bowler he considers ‘the greatest cricketer to walk the earth’. On his quest to find this unsung genius, W.G. uncovers a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, an LTTE warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself. Ambitious, playful and strikingly original, Chinaman is a novel about cricket and Sri Lanka – and of Sri Lanka through his cricket.

Shehan Karunatilaka has written advertisements, rock songs, travel stories and basslines. Chinaman is his first novel.

Tabish Khair: The Thing About Thugs (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins-India)

Amir Ali leaves his village in Bihar to travel to London with an English captain, William Meadows, to whom he narrates the story of his life – the story of a murderous thug. While Meadows tries to analyse the strange cult of the Indian Thug, a group of Englishmen sets out to prove the inherent difference between races by examining their skulls – with bizarre consequences. Set in Victorian London, this story of different voices from different places draws intricate lines of connection from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, between England and India, across individual and cultural differences.

Tabish Khair is an acclaimed poet and novelist whose recent novels have been shortlisted for the Encore Award (UK) and the Crossword Prize (India). Translated into various languages, his works include Where Parallel Lines Meet, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels, The Bus Stopped, Filming: A Love Story, The Glum Peacock and The Gothic Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere.

Jill McGivering: The Last Kestrel (Blue Door/HarperCollins-UK)

Ellen Thomas, experienced war correspondent, returns to Afghanistan's dangerous Helmand Province on assignment, keen to find the murderer of her friend and translator, Jalil. In her search for justice in a land ravaged by death and destruction, she uncovers disturbing truths. Hasina, forced by tradition into the role of wife and mother, lives in a village which is taken by British Forces. Her only son, Aref, is part of a network of underground fighters and she is determined to protect him, whatever the cost. Ellen and Hasina are thrown together—one fighting for survival, the other searching for truth—with devastating consequences for them both.

Jill McGivering has worked in journalism for 25 years. She is currently a senior foreign news journalist with the BBC having previously held the position of South Asia Correspondent (based in Delhi). Now based in London, she travels extensively for the BBC including assignments to Afghanistan and China. She has already written non-fiction, short fiction and plays. The Last Kestrel is her first novel.

Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told (Viking/Penguin India)

Simon Jesukumar, an ageing widower, aspires to do something worthwhile with what remains of his circumscribed, frustratingly blameless, cocooned middle-class life. His aspirations are stirred by his nagging guilt about the slum next door—incongruously and deludedly named ‘Sitara’. The well off residents of his colony use the inhabitants of Sitara for menial jobs but ignore their real needs. Simon’s friendship with his errand boy Velu, and the strangely gifted Thatkan, propels him towards others from the slum—Swamy, the schoolteacher who is also the butcher; ‘Doctor’ Prince who has no medical degree; the belt-buckle factory owner who employs children to melt brass for buckles; Tailorboy, who has thirteen fingertips to please women; the bizarre and inscrutable Baqua; and Nayagan the Leader, optimistically called ‘Merciful Diamond’, whose party bosses consider Sitara to be nothing more than a captive vote bank. As the story plunges into the heart of the slum—bringing the most unlikely individuals to the brink of collision—Simon begins to understand that good intentions and small acts of kindness achieve little when faced with the problems of a stratum of humanity he knows next to nothing about. Simon’s dilemma is ours: how can, and how should the rich (and the not-so-rich) help the poor?

Kavery Nambisan graduated from St John s Medical College, Bangalore, and did her surgical training and FRCS in England; since then she has devoted a large part of her working life to practice in rural India. She is the author of several novels including The Scent of Pepper and Hills of Angheri. She lives in Lonavla with her husband Vijay Nambisan.

Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone (Chatto & Windus/Random House-UK, Translated by Polly McLean)

A young woman prays at her husband’s bedside as he lies in a coma with a bullet in his neck. From outside come the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying of all, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. Even as her mind appears to unravel, she becomes intensely clear-sighted. Now is her chance – her first ever – to speak without being censored. Her husband's body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes, and finally, spurred to new heights of daring, she spills out her most explosive secret.

Born in Afghanistan in 1962, Atiq Rahimi fled to France in 1984. There he has made a name as a writer, film- and documentary- maker of exceptional note. His first novel, Earth and Ashes, was widely acclaimed and his film of the book was in the Official Selection at Cannes, 2004. He is adapting his second novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, for the screen. Since 2001, he has returned to Afghanistan many times to set up a Writers' House in Kabul and offer support and training to young writers and film-makers. He was the winner of the Prix Goncourt Prize 2008 for The Patience Stone (Syngué Sabour), his first novel to be written in French. He lives in Paris

Kalpish Ratna: The Quarantine Papers (HarperCollins-India)

That first Sunday in December, while the Prime Minister in India dozed in Delhi, lesser things happened to lesser people in Bombay. Mohammad Yunus doused his clothes with kerosene and struck a match. Balkrishna More leaned out over the frenzied maha-aarati in the street and jumped to his death. In a shuttered room in Girgaum, three old men waited for an answer. Enraptured, Radhika and Anwar were oblivious to the nasal monotone on BBC. Who saw it first? It was there, happening right before them. A saffron ant crawled up the black dome. Then one more. Then another. Then a swarm of them. And then madness spilled every which way. In 303, Nandanvan Apartments, Ratan Oak looked out of the window and discovered he'd been living in the wrong house all his life.

So begins, The Quarantine Papers, a story of love and death in Bombay, Kalpish Ratna weaves history and medicine, passion and betrayal, music and murder in a novel where the palimpsest that is Bombay gets written over and again in hate and is sometimes redeemed in love.

Ishrat Syed & Kalpana Swaminathan are surgeons. The anonym Kalpish Ratna is an almost-anagram of their first names. The Quarantine Papers is their first Ratan/Ramratan Oak novel.

Samrat Upadhyay: Buddha’s Orphan (Rupa Publications, India)

Called “a Buddhist Chekhov” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Samrat Upadhyay’s writing has been praised by Amitav Ghosh and Suketu Mehta, and compared with the work of Akhil Sharma and Jhumpa Lahiri. Upadhyay’s new novel, Buddha’s Orphans, uses Nepal’s political upheavals of the past century as a backdrop to the story of an orphan boy, Raja, and the girl he is fated to love, Nilu, a daughter of privilege. Their love story scandalizes both families and takes readers through time and across the globe, through the loss of and search for children, and through several generations, hinting that perhaps old bends can, in fact, be righted in future branches of a family tree. Buddha’s Orphans is a novel permeated with the sense of how we are irreparably connected to the mothers who birthed us and of the way events of the past, even those we are ignorant of, inevitably haunt the present. But most of all it is an engrossing, unconventional love story and a seductive and transporting read.

Samrat Upadhyay is the author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, a Whiting Award winner, The Royal Ghosts, and The Guru of Love, a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He has written for the New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay directs the creative writing program at Indiana University.

Exclusive offer: purchase Ananda Devi's Indian Tango from Wasafiri. Not yet available in UK bookshops

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Ananda Devi's latest book, Indian Tango, has just been published by Host Publications in the US. It is not yet available in the UK, but you can purchase a copy directly from Wasafiri for only £15 (includes postage and packaging). We only have five copies on offer. Email wasafiri@open.ac.uk for further details.

An interview with Ananda Devi and her short story 'Wedding Cake', feature in the latest issue of Wasafiri, Indian Oceans, guest edited by Stephanie Jones.

Indian Tango is set in Delhi in 2004, during the general election that would see Sonia Gandhi briefly head a coalition government. A visiting writer becomes obsessed by Subhadra, a woman glimpsed on the street, and as this unconventional relationship develops, the cost of pursuing passion and desire in a vibrant but deeply conservative society comes into sharp focus. Jean-Claude Perrier has praised Indian Tango as 'a hymn to female sensuatlity, to individual freedom, to understanding and companionship between sexes, cultures, religions'. While J-M G Le Clezio says of Devi that 'here is a truly great writer, since when we finish Devi's book we are unlikely to know what has motivated her to write such a story, such a cry of protest'.

Farewell to Ulli Beier and M F Husain, two great ambassadors for cultural difference

Thu, 12 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

It is with great sadness that the month of June saw the passing of Ulli Beier, a lover and promoter of African art and literature, and M F Husain, one of India's finest contemporary artists.

Numerous obituaries have been published in the media, a selection of these can be accessed via the links below:

Ulli Beier

Guardian (UK)

Telegraph (UK)

Tribune (Nigeria)

M F Husain

Guardian (UK)

Telegraph (UK)

The Hindu

Business Today (india)

BBC

The Australian

Big Picture street photography competition - 1 June - 31 August 2011

Thu, 12 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

New charity the Citizen Journalism Educational Trust (CJET), which is supported by The-Latest.Com, has launched with its Big Picture street photography competition. This exciting event has won backing from Time Out magazine, Olympus, who have donated a prize worth almost £300. Guardian News & Media donated an iconic image, taken by a citizen photographer, of Ian Tomlinson, the innocent bystander killed by a police officer at the G20 protest of April 2009.

The competition offers entrants from the UK and abroad the opportunity to win the brand new Olympus LS-20M pocket camcorder and the title of “CJET Street Photographer of the Year” by using their mobile phone to take a winning picture.

Judges are award-winning photographer Eamonn McCabe, former Picture Editor of The Guardian, renowned publisher Dr Margaret Busby, a CJET Trustee, Martin Shaw, chair of the Trustees, Allyce Hibbert, Picture Editor of Time Out, and Brian Usher, Picture Editor of The-Latest.Com.

Martin Shaw said: “CJET recognises that ordinary citizens not only consume news but make it too. Think of the image of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson who was unlawfully killed at the G20 protest, the 7/7 terrorist attack and Asian tsunami photographs that have come from camera phones. We are doing the Big Picture competition to celebrate this important new citizen journalism.”

CJET is a UK charity that inspires and encourages the personal development of disadvantaged young adults through journalism, writing, literacy, photography and video. It produces educational material that includes college standard online out-reach materials and tutorials for contributors interested in a career in journalism, photography or broadcasting. It also aims to assist the public to find a better connection with the sometimes mystifying world of media, journalism and current affairs that is so influential in all our lives.

The competition runs from June 1 2011 to August 31 2011 and the winner notified on October 3 2011. Full details can be viewed here:http://www.the-latest.com/photographer-year-competition.

The Future Face of Publishing: How diverse will it be? Listen to the debate, which took place at the 2011 London Book Fair

Tue, 10 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

On Monday 11 April, Wasafiri's Deputy Editor, Sharmilla Beezmohun, joined authors and publishing professionals Bidisha, Nikesh Shukla, Abu Bundu-Kamara and Richard Mollett for a lively discussion about the role of diversity in the future of the publishing industry at the 2011 London Book Fair. The event was chaired by Shreela Ghosh, Director of Free Word.

You can listen to the discussion via the links below:

PART ONE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F69wma0CUcY&feature=youtu.be

PART TWO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AgfITQrOj8&feature=youtu.be

PART THREE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-wm1Mwsc94&feature=youtu.be

PART FOUR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUBLUf2Wez4&feature=youtu.be

Robin Yassin-Kassab reviews Leila Aboulela's Lyrics Alley

Wed, 4 May 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Book Review by Robin Yassin-Kassab

Lyrics Alley
Leila Aboulela
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2010, hb
320pp ISBN 0 2978 6314 4 £18.99
www.wnfiction.com

It’s the mid twentieth century, and British control over north east Africa is failing. Sudanese cotton tycoon Mahmoud Abuzeid, awarded the title Bey by Egypt’s King Farouk, is pulled between his two wives:

They belonged to different sides of the saraya, to different sides of him. He was the only one to negotiate between these two worlds, to glide between them, to come back and forth at will.

The two wives share a compound. Sudanese Waheeba in her hoash – a traditional living space half open to the air – represents ‘decay and ignorance … the stagnant past’ to gregarious, multi-lingual Mahmoud. Egyptian Nabilah, much younger, better educated, attempts to recreate Cairo in her Italian-furnished modern salon. She represents ‘the glitter of the future … sophistication’. But events question such easy distinctions.

Mahmoud’s hope lies in his brilliant son Nur, who he sends to a British boarding school in Egypt. Bright, outward-looking Soraya, Mahmoud’s niece, also centres her hopes on Nur, her fiancé and ‘link to the outside world, that world that was not for girls’.

Each half of the novel is introduced by the illness of a key male, first Mahmoud the patriarch, then Nur, paralysed in a diving accident. These dramatic devices serve to gather the extended family and also act as pivots in the struggle between the two wives. Nur’s illness gives his mother Waheeba the edge over the Egyptian wife.

Two grand divorces, of Egypt from the Sudan and Britain from Egypt, provide a resonant backdrop to Abuzeid family politics. Aboulela excels in the evocation of time and place, between World War Two and the Free Officers’ revolution in Egypt. She depicts a Sudan tentative on the brink of independence, whose ‘potential was as huge and as mysterious as the darkness of its nights’.

Scenes shift from Umdurman, where echoes of the Mahdi’s rising still reverberate, to Khartoum, then a city of seven churches and two mosques; from Alexandria in its cosmopolitan days to a Cairo of dwindling fezzes, where the ladies dress competitively. There’s a hospital trip to London with its war-wounded, and the TV in the hotel lounge, the first Nabilah has ever seen.

Aboulela confidently draws her wonderfully rich characters, neither purely virtuous nor evil but beautifully human. Her fine touch reaches down even to minor figures such as Jack the bad-tempered ex-soldier, or the Harrisons of Khartoum’s Barclays Bank, wined and dined by a calculating Mahmoud.

This certainly isn’t airport orientalism. Many of the push-button ‘Muslim world’ issues are here – not least female circumcision – but they emerge naturally, in context, and are not distorted by displacement or magnification. Whether traditional or liberal, Aboulela’s women are spirited fighters, always seeking to extend their influence within the family and out in the wider world.

Rather than a cultural sob story, Aboulela offers the warmth and deep meaning of Muslim family life, and of Islam’s great usefulness to many. In case the reader had forgotten, Lyrics Alley reminds us of the beauty of the Quran, and of Sufi poetry, and the shahada, ‘starting with no, and ending with the grandest word, Allah’.

The positive role of faith is illustrated most clearly by Badr, an Egyptian teacher seconded to the Sudan. Badr lives crammed in a small hoash with his wife, children, senile father and delinquent cousin. Mahmoud Bey, who knows the backgrounds of important men, can never remember Badr’s name. It’s a recipe for resentment, but by spiritualising his struggles the teacher becomes the novel’s most positive figure, the sort who prays in the presence of angels. It’s Badr who helps Nur to see his illness as a trial rather than a curse. This passage follows a remarkable stretch of present-tense writing, in which Aboulela examines Nur’s inner turmoil as he prefers death to impotent paralysis, his rage at the loss of privacy and control.

‘My fictional worlds reflect Muslim logic’, the author writes on her website, and the world of Lyrics Alley is one in which bad things happen ‘for pedagogical reasons’, in which almost everybody sees the light in the end, almost everybody reforms. But it’s a Tolstoyan sort of moralising, not prudish or preachy but compassionate, even wise.

Islam originally understood itself as a middle path, for a middle people, as a balance between legalism and enthusiasm. The notion of balance penetrates the Quran’s imagery, diction and rhythm. And Aboulela describes Ramadan with her trademark insistence on balancing extremes: ‘how rigorous it was, and at the same time buoyant; solemn, and at the same time merry’. In Aboulela’s writing, human life is balanced between trial and reward, burden and bliss. Her insights and characterisation are as balanced as her sentences, which are subtle, nuanced, well-rhythmed, sometimes intricate. They are quiet and sensitive, not showy, yet they can aspire to poetry. One sentence calls a woman’s body ‘a multitude of orbs, pliant, narrow, convex and intriguing’.

This is a novel, finally, about language and writing. Nur’s discovery that he is ‘blessed with literacy’ is a key stage in his spiritual cure. For him, ‘The words on the page are a mirror. They reflect his secrets and his beauty.’ The words on Aboulela’s page, one feels, are intended to reflect the secrets and beauty of a greater He.

Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, a novel published by Penguin. He co-edits www.pulsemedia.org. His political writing, book reviews and stories can be read at www.qunfuz.com.

Susheila Nasta in Conversation at the Jaipur Literary Festival 2011

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T41T3Uu7CYA

ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION ANNOUNCES 2011 LONGLIST

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION ANNOUNCES 2011 LONGLIST

Aminatta Forna, Tishani Doshi, Leila Aboulela and Lola Shoneyin among the authors longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for fiction.

Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist announcement: 12 April

Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist readings: 6 June

Awards ceremony: 8 June

London, 16 March 2011: The Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK's only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, today announces the 2011 longlist. Celebrating its sixteenth anniversary this year, the Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing throughout the world.

Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Sudanese; 3rd Novel
Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate) - British; 10th Novel
Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador) - Irish; 7th Novel
The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury) - Indian; 1st Novel
Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber) - British; 6th Novel
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) - American; 4th Novel
The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury) - British/Sierra Leonean; 2nd Novel
The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) - British; 4th Novel
Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) - British; 1st Novel
The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair) - American; 1st Novel
The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber) - British; 2nd Novel
Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking) - American; 3rd Novel
The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus) - American; 3rd Novel
The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Serbian/American; 1st Novel
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking) - American; 1st Novel
Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent's Tail) - British; 1st Novel
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus) - American; 1st Novel
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent's Tail) - British/Nigerian; 1st Novel
The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press) - British; 4th Novel
Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape) - Canadian; 1st Novel

The judges for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction are:

Bettany Hughes, (Chair), Broadcaster, Historian and Author
Liz Calder, founder-director of Bloomsbury Publishing and Full Circle Editions
Tracy Chevalier, Novelist
Helen Lederer, Actress and Writer
Susanna Reid, Journalist and Broadcaster

The Black Atlantic - A New Online Resource for researchers

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic

http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/

This exciting new resource is a collaborative project between the University of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool originally constructed on the occasion of Tate Liverpool's exhibition "Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic".

This resource seeks to promote the study of black Atlantic cultures by providing a hub for access to current research, debates and online materials and a space for scholarly exchange.

The Black Atlantic Resource provides free access to current research, artworks, chronological and bibliographic information in this area. We are happy to publish posts about new publications in relevant fields of study, as well as book reviews, and information about other online resources. If you would like to contribute your research or take advantage of this opportunity to publicise please contact Wendy Asquith: w.j.asquith@liv.ac.uk<mailto:w.j.asquith@liv.ac.uk>

We also provide information on key historical and current figures working within the flows of the Black Atlantic.

Check out our recent profiles on Marcus Garvey:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic/information/people%20D-J/Marcus_Garvey.htm

and Renee Cox:
http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/renee-cox-if-you-dont-ask-you-dont-get-then-you-get-kicked-to-the-curb/

There are a number of platforms through which to access the Black Atlantic Resource. Our main site which is updated with new content regularly: http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic

Alternatively you can subscribe to our blog and receive updates each time we post up new material here: http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/

Or you can follow us on Twitter, where we'll keep you updated with new online research, resources and debates as well as updates on our own new material. Find us: @blackatlantic1.

The Arch and the Butterfly and The Doves' Necklance annouced as Joint Winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

www.arabicfiction.org

Moroccan author, Mohammed Achaari, and Saudi Arabian author, Raja Alem, share prestigious Arab fiction prize

The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari and The Doves’ Necklace by Raja Alem are today, Monday 14 March, announced as joint winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011. This is the first time the Prize has been split between two novelists.

The winners were announced by this year’s Chair of Judges, the celebrated Iraqi poet and novelist Fadhil Al-Azzawi, at an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi.

Fadhil Al-Azzawi comments: “The Judging Panel decided to give the Prize equally to two novels, which are The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari and The Doves’ Necklace by Raja Alem. They are two wonderful novels with great literary quality and they both deal with important and realistic problems in the Middle East, problems which have been reflected on banners during the recent protests that have shaken the Arab world, demanding change.

“The first novel, The Arch and the Butterfly, deals with Islamic extremism and terrorism and its destructive effect upon Arabic society itself, rather than on the West. The second, The Dove’s Necklace, reveals the true face of Mecca: behind the city’s holy veil there is another Mecca, where many crimes are committed and there is also corruption, prostitution and mafias of building contractors who are destroying the historic areas of the city, and therefore its soul, for commercial gain.”

This year’s winners were chosen from a shortlist of six titles, which was announced in Doha, Qatar, in December 2010 by Al-Azzawi and the four other Arabic literature specialists on the 2011 Judging Panel: Bahraini academic, researcher and critic Munira al-Fadhel; Italian academic, translator and critic Isabella Camera d’Afflitto; Jordanian writer and journalist Amjad Nasser, and Moroccan writer and critic Said Yaktine. The winner, shortlist and longlist of 16 titles were selected solely on the basis of literary quality and without regard to nationality, region, religion, gender or age.

During today’s awards ceremony, each of the shortlisted finalists was congratulated by the Judging Panel and representatives from the Prize’s two main supporters, the Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy and the Booker Prize Foundation, before being awarded 10,000 US Dollars by HE Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoun Al Nahyan, the Foundation’s Managing Director and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority.

Traditionally the winner is awarded a further 50,000 US Dollars but, as this year sees two winners, the prize money will be split between them. Both winners are guaranteed an English translation of their winning novels. Winners of the Prize can look forward to increased book sales and international recognition.

Jonathan Taylor, the Prize’s Chair of Trustees, commented: “These are interesting times for Arabic fiction, which are reflected in today’s exceptional announcement. For the first time the Judges decided that the Prize should be shared between two extraordinary books selected from an outstanding shortlist.”

Salwa Mikdadi, Head of the Arts and Culture Programme at the Emirates Foundation, added: “We are proud to acclaim two worthy winners – and the first winning female novelist! We have continued as primary funder of the Prize; however I must stress that the Foundation plays no part in managing the award or selecting either judges or winning novels. We are happy to help preserve the Prize’s independence.”

The Prize was established in 2007 to address the limited international availability of high quality Arab fiction. Based on the successful model of the Man Booker Prize, it recognises the very best of contemporary Arabic writing over the past year and, by doing so, aims to encourage recognition of high quality Arabic fiction, reward Arab writers and lead to increased international readership through translation.

Now in its fourth year, the Prize has had a significant impact on the Arabic literary scene. It has become the preeminent international prize for Arabic literary fiction and is widely followed internationally. The first two winners of the Prize – Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (2008) and Azazel by Youssef Ziedan (2009) – have not only secured English publications of their novels, through Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) and Atlantic Books respectively, but also a number of other international translations as a result of the Prize. News of an English translation of last year’s winner, Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles by Abdo Khal (2010), is imminent.

The 2011 winner announcement took place on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2011.

The Latest issue of Wasafiri is now out. Wasafiri interviews Bina Shah, author and contributor, online

Mon, 7 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Award-winning Pakistani author, Bina Shah's short story, 'Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan', features in the latest issue of the magazine. Bina talks to Wasafiri about her writing, her journalism, the influence of Karachi and the growing tension in Pakistan upon her work.

Nisha Obano Bina, you are a writer and journalist, have you always written fiction or did journalism come first? And how much does journalism influence your novels and short stories?

Bina Shah For me, fiction and journalism have always been intertwined. In high school, where I really started concentrating on writing, I wrote essays and short fiction pieces - vignettes, really. My first writing class in college was a class in journalism. My second (and last) college writing class was a poetry seminar. I started my career working as a technical writer for a startup IT company producing medical software; but then I came back to Pakistan and became an IT journalist. At the same time, I wrote essays for Chowk and then my first short stories. I’ve managed to nurture the two, like twins.

Some literary editors - especially European ones - used to complain that my fiction was too journalistic and not literary enough; five years ago I was still wobbling back and forth between the two genres without much control. But journalism has helped me to be a better writer: to ask the right questions, to investigate and research, and to ferret out important details about a story. Still, I don’t define what I do as strict journalism. I write op-eds with a literary style and essays with a journalistic bent, so it’s a hybrid of the two disciplines.

NO In both ‘Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan’ and your recent novel, Slum Child, the city of Karachi plays a major part in the narratives; it is confusing, divided and full of secrets – not all of them pleasant. What do you find so intriguing about Karachi and how, if at all, is it different perhaps to any other major city in which cultures, religions and classes mingle and collide?

BS Karachi is not just a city, it’s an existence - and an overwhelming one at that. It’s a city in a constant state of flux. People from all over the country come here all the time - and other countries too. They integrate into the city, into its communities, its economy, its culture. There’s no place in Pakistan quite like Karachi: it’s the most cosmopolitan of all Pakistan’s cities. There’s constant hustle. Everyone’s on the street, trying to make it. We don’t have one mafia, we have twenty. Everything is exaggerated here: good and bad, rich and poor, peace and chaos. Trying to figure out your place in it is like trying to leap on to a horse in mid-gallop. It won’t slow itself down to wait for you. You have to hit the ground running, so to speak, when you come to Karachi. I don’t know any other place in the world as frustrating, as frightening, and as exciting, as Karachi. My favorite quote about this city comes from Humphrey Bogart: “You’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi”.

NO One of the things that I loved most about your story, ‘Peter Pochmann Goes to Pakistan’, is the dark humour which creates a false sense of security, for the story becomes increasingly sinister. Peter is an American who resents having to travel to Pakistan on business, to him Karachi is an alien city, but what I found interesting was the way in which he finds himself in a kind of Western noir fiction in the city – Peter is still brooding over his ex-wife; there are the seemingly innocuous yet unnerving waiters and, of course, the femme-fatale – was this a conscious use of a particular genre or did it organically emerge through Peter’s story?

BS Everything I ever do in fiction that seems like a sophisticated technique is completely unconscious. I consider myself very illiterate in the area of literature: I never got an MFA; I majored in psychology, not English literature in college - literary criticism confused me and seemed to go against every instinct I ever had as a fledgling writer. Even today I’m still learning about concepts like “intertextuality” and “verisimilitude”. I wasn’t aware of the noir fiction connection in Peter Pochmann until you made it just now for me. I just wanted to write a very funny story about an American who comes to Karachi totally afraid of one thing unique to this country, but then gets in trouble for something that could happen anywhere in the world. But some aspects of Karachi are so surreal that they become markers for my stories, landmarks for the absurdity of life here.

NO Slum Child on the other hand is a very different story – tragic and told through the eyes of a young girl. I was wondering if you could comment on your use of different genres and voices in your writing?

BS I enjoy playing with voice, with perspective, with character. And then different stories lend themselves to varied genres and voices. I’m a bit like a ventriloquist or a psychic medium, channeling these voices and these people. They have unique ways of speaking, of thinking, of looking at the world. A middle class, middle aged American man traveling to Karachi for the first time versus a little Punjabi Christian girl growing up in a slum - it’s a challenge to see if I can pull it off each time.

I did have some criticism for the voice of Laila, the protagonist of Slum Child: she sounded too educated, too aware, too worldly to some editors and readers. But I always intended her story to be told from the perspective of a more adult Laila looking back at her childhood. It was a bit of a gamble to make her sound so intelligent and aware, but I thought to myself, “Just because she comes from a slum, I don’t need to make her voice uneducated and dull.” I think that would have been a condescending decision. =

NO There are, of course, references to recent events which are currently affecting Pakistan – the murder of Daniel Pearl and the trouble in Afghanistan in ‘Peter Pochmann’ for example. These events coincide with an increased interest in writing coming out of Pakistan or by Pakistani writers, could you comment on this? I was particularly struck by the religious views expressed by some of your characters, and also the hostility towards Laila who is Christian. I just so happened to be reading the novel when I heard in the news about the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minister for Minorities and also a Christian. Are the prospects for minorities in Pakistan becoming increasingly grave?

BS They certainly seem to be getting worse and worse. But I wrote Slum Child in 2006 - almost five years ago now. The attitudes towards minorities were always poor; I’ve written about things that I heard or observed throughout my life, not just in recent years. The issue of minorities is getting more media attention now as these high-profile murders - Salmaan Taseer, Shahbaz Bhatti - are coupled with people’s growing awareness that there is huge inequity in our society between Muslims and non-Muslims. Only recently did these prominent government figures attempt to take up the blasphemy laws and get them amended so that they couldn’t be used to harass religious minorities. In a different climate, perhaps they would have succeeded, but with the situation in Afghanistan and our own problems with the Taliban, this is a very harsh, if not impossible, climate in which to enact any kind of change in a moderate or liberal direction.

NO Congratulations on the success of your latest novel, A Season For Martyrs, which won the Il Mondo Di Bambini international prize in 2010. Slum Child was also a bestseller in Italy. Could you say a bit about the international literature scene in Italy – is it thriving? Is there a greater reception in the Italian market to translations than there currently is in the UK?

BS I’m not an expert, but I see tons of titles from different parts of the world on my publishers’ Web site, which leads me to conclude that Italians are working much harder than UK publishers to get translated fictions on the bookshelves. Compare this to my experience trying to get published in the UK in the original English versions of my books: unsuccessful so far - so translated fiction doesn’t seem to have much of a chance beyond a few specialist imprints from a very small number of publishers. I wouldn’t like to make any generalizations about the international literature scene, but I get a sense of the Europeans being open to many different languages, many different writers, whereas the UK scene is much more insular, less open to risk. It’s probably a reflection of the national climate: of a pulling-in, a drawing-in, that’s related to the recession and the financial and political woes of your country. I hope things swing the other way again sooner rather than later

'Finger Food for the Imagination': Launch of the Poetry Translation Centre's Poem Postcards.

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

After successfully launching its weekly poem podcast on iTunes last year, the Poetry Translation Centre has now created a set of dual-language Poetry Postcards. The postcards feature poems by seven of their most popular poets. Described by W N Herbert as 'finger food for the imagination', these beautifully designed postcards act as a perfect introduction to the growing wealth of poetic riches being brought into English by the PTC.

The dual-language postcards feature extracts from 'Lamps' by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, 'Flute Player' by Farzaneh Khojandi, 'The Fruit-Seller's Philosophy' by Kajal Ahmad, 'Seer' by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac 'Gaarriye', 'Your Name' by Víctor Terán, and the complete small poems 'A Change of Season' and 'My Voice' by Partaw Naderi.

The postcards are available in bookshops, libraries, arts venues and online at http://www.poetrytranslation.org/news/122/'Finger_Food_for_the_Imagination':_Launch_of_our_new_Poem_Postcards

Wasafiri brings 'The Books That Made Me' to the Jaipur Literary Festival 21-25 January 2011

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri presented ‘The books that made me’ at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2011. Hosted in the beautiful gardens of the Diggi Palace heritage hotel, the Jaipur Literature festival has become a major event in the cultural calendar and attracts several thousand visitors over a period of five days. This year’s headline events featured, among others, Booker prize winning authors J M Coetzee and Kiran Desai, as well as James Kelman, who was brought to the event by Wasafiri along with Commonwealth Prize winning writer Pauline Melville.

‘The books that made me’, chaired by Wasafiri editor Susheila Nasta, united Githa Hariharan, James Kelman, Pauline Melville and Ahdaf Soueif to discuss the books that impacted on them as writers. The session highlighted their own pleasure of reading and also offered fascinating insights into how their own reading practices inform their work.

Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif raised the importance of oral storytelling traditions, in particular the stories told to her by her nanny, which provided her with her first lessons in the art of storytelling. She also recalled English writers such as Dickens, who she first read as a child in London while her mother studied for her PhD. Githa Hariharan spoke about the influence of translations of Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata and A K Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva, as well as the impact of the Russian novel on her work. James Kelman talked about his love of Dostoyevsky’s novels, which helped him to tackle the important question of finding a voice that could reflect fully the Glaswegian working class experience.

Pauline Melville’s evocative reading from Toni Morrison’s Beloved highlighted the power of storytelling. Recalling a newspaper story of a young pregnant girl in prison for theft and her child subsequently being taken into care, she suggested that experiences from everyday life, as much as other reading, give her the impulse to write.

The panel showcased how reading fires creative energies and how our reading and writing experiences have the capacity to transcend geographical and imaginative boundaries, turning us all into global cultural travellers.

Press links to 'The books that made me':

Times of India

LiveMint.com/blogs

DNA India

Correction to Story in the Sunday Herald - James Kelman is Wasafiri's guest at the Jaipur Literary Festival

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Wasafiri, The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, would like to correct a story which appeared in the Sunday Herald on 16 January 2011. The article claimed that author James Kelman is to participate in a week-long Arts and Trade mission to India organised by the British Council, where Directors of the Edinburgh Festivals will meet with Indian government officials. James Kelman is not and has never been part in any such mission to India. He was invited as a writer to the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival by Wasafiri's Editor, Susheila Nasta, last summer. This was to take part in a Wasafiri literary panel jointly agreed with the Festival that includes Pauline Melville, Ahdaf Soueif and Githa Hariharan. James Kelman's visit to India has therefore been wholly funded and organised by the distinguished literary magazine, Wasafiri. He may well take part in other events at the Jaipur Festival as agreed between and festival and Wasafiri but he has not agreed, nor been invited to participate in any meetings or events for anyone else.

Professor Susheila Nasta, Founding Editor of Wasafiri, awarded an MBE for services to literature in the New Year Honours List

Tue, 4 Jan 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

A commitment to black, Asian and minority literatures was celebrated over the New Year weekend as three pioneering voices were acknowlegded in the 2011 Honours List. Professor Susheila Nasta, the Editor of Wasafiri, who founded the magazine in 1984, received an MBE for services to black and Asian Literature. Ellah Allfray, now Editor at Granta Magazine, was awarded an MBE for services to the publishing industry and Lakshmi Holstrom, writer and translator, received an MBE for services to literature.

Black Britain: Beyond Definition, guest edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Karen McCarthy Woolf: Jay Bernard, graphic artist and contributor, talks about her pictures, poetry and politics

Wed, 8 Dec 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Jay Bernard came to comics via poetry; her first pamphlet, Your Sign is Cuckoo Girl (2007), was followed by a graphic poem in City State (2009). In the interim she produced graphic reviews for culturewars.org.uk and penned a strip entitled Budo. Most recently, she was artist-in-residence at StAnza and will be presenting her first exhibition in March 2011. Her graphic work, 'Land Narrative', features in the special issue of Wasafiri, Black Britain: Beyond Definition, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Karen McCarthy Woolf, which is out now and includes contributions by Diana Evans, Jacob Ross, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Catherine Johnson, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Maggie Gee, Jackie Kay, Kwame Kwei Armah, Yemisi Blake, Inua Ellams, Sheree Mack, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Warsan Shire, Kayo Chingonyi, Leone Ross, Jenneba Sie-Jalloh and Sarah Lapido Manyika.

Nisha Jones How did you begin creating comics? Did the words or the images come first, and who inspired you or were your main influences (both in and outside of the comic world)?

Jay Bernard I think I’ve been influenced by every single comic I’ve ever read: Archie, The Beano, The Dandy when I was really young — plus my uncles had a vast collection of He-Man, Conan The Barbarian, Thundercats and Masters of the Universe. Then when I got a bit older I read a cool webcomic called Writhe and Shine; got into The Sandman, Dr Seuss (belatedly) and Lenore; then I discovered Alison Bechdel, Robert Crumb, and George Herriman. I’ve never been a typical fanatic but the genre has always moved me — not just the marriage of words and images, but the overall resemblance to film, which I also like.

NJ Your graphic tale, ‘Land Narrative’, tells the story of a traveller who ‘once had an address. Stayed somewhere. Called [herself] English occasionally’, she is accompanied by two ghostly figures and together they explore the freedom of travel and then encounter the authority figures who are increasingly imposing restrictions on movement. How concerned are you about these restrictions and what do they mean to you?

JB Very concerned. Like most people in this country I’ve noticed the way we are steadily being boxed in. You only have to look at the attitude to the recent student protests to see that the concerns raised in the latter part of the comic are applicable; the feelings of anger and suspicion people felt in 1981 were justified and prescient. I mention Isaac Julien’s fantastic film Territories which is all about the anxiety the government has about people gathering in public, following their own agenda, organising amongst themselves.

There is also Blood ah goh run, which is about the attempts by the police to abort a massive protest organised after the death of thirteen black kids during what many suspect was an arson attack. The police couldn’t be arsed to investigate properly and then tried to quash the subsequent public outburst. There is no difference between that and what we’ve recently seen: Simon Harwood pushes Ian Tomlinson to the ground during a public protest. The man is dead at the end of it. Consequence: potentially faces charges of gross misconduct. Student throws fire extinguisher off building, narrowly misses police officer. Cue hysterical shouts of attempted murder. Obviously the dynamics are different – the scenario in 1981 is explicitly about race – but the mentality is the same: people on the streets are one step away from criminality, so police actions are always justified, and anything against them is murderous and violent in intent. Never mind democracy or the fostering of community. We are being pushed in to ever narrower channels of political/public expression and most people don’t care. What’s really funny is that people will respond to these concerns by pointing out China, Afghanistan, Iran — as if we should only be interested in our freedom when it gets that bad.

I think freedom of movement is caught up in many things – it’s caught up in the two fundamental rights – to vote and to strike, but also our relationship to our environment. We walk down the road and Coca Cola, Top Shop and M&S etc have more right to it than us with their massive billboards; go to any town centre in Britain and you’ll find the same fifteen stores dominating everything. Every street corner has a Sainsbury’s Local or Tesco Metro. You appreciate the convenience, but you wonder why there’s a monopoly on convenience – whatever happened to the convenience store? – and why is convenience more important than diversity and integrity? It’s like we’re standing in a zoetrope with the same images whizzing past us giving us the illusion of movement, when in fact we’re tightly controlled. I went in to a Tesco the other day and there was a ‘community billboard’. It was so half-hearted and self-conscious I had to laugh. Because Tesco isn’t about community, it’s about monopolistic, manipulative rule from above. Even if you shop there, that much is obvious.

NJ During the journey in ‘Land Narrative’ you return to the 1970s and 80s in Britain, a time of stop-and-search, heavy-handed policing and of course a Conservative government. The comic seems to suggest that despite the efforts to stamp out institutional racism in later decades, authorities are reviving the prejudicial tactics of earlier decades. Do you feel that’s the case? As you've just recalled, we are seeing similar scenes with the current student protests around the UK.

JB Yes. The police learned a lot from those riots. They promised that they’d never again be crouching behind bin lids. The aim now is to diffuse political energy and encourage people to speak via the long, laborious, jargon-heavy and class-ridden system of the courts. Of course people have done the opposite and now speak in less than 140 characters. But the police know they can never, ever win if people band together – as demonstrated by the 60s, 70s and 80s – so yes, you’re right in a way – the prejudice is not just aimed at black kids, but anyone who shows the kind of street-level fervour they had. It’s why I think Pride and Carnival are important. They may be a little sterile, but it’s important that we have them — that sterility can change, but imagine attempting a new political street party now.

NJ Caryl Phillips, in his most recent novel In the Falling Snow, seems to be exploring the generational differences between young Black Britons today and their parents. Your narrative seems to highlight the connections, and that the struggles of the older generation still exist for the young, who now face added pressures following 9/11 and 7/7.

JB I think there is a huge difference between the black kids of today and those of thirty years ago. But I think that difference is based on the activities of the latter. It’s like a parent who grew up poor giving everything to their child. It really bothers me when older people say that nothing has changed and pin that responsibility on the younger generation because a) they’re essentially denying all progress that’s obviously been made and b) they’re blaming the next generation for it. It’s a weird conflicted relationship. But at the same time, I really respect the generation before me. I think there is so much to be learned. It’s why I find my degree so frustrating for example — I thought studying literature from the year dot to the present would be enlightening. Actually it’s just a distraction from all the brilliant stuff people did that is still sitting in boxes, that is not deemed worthy of academic enquiry — but the omission of a word in a bad quarto is; and surely that’s exactly the kind of cultural and historical myopia people were sick of. I have come to understand this quite late — I’m precisely the kind of kid who believed Oxford symbolised a kind of freedom. Actually I just feel removed — it’s a lot farther than the eighty miles on the map. So I can sort of understand why people in their forties and fifties are dissatisfied: their original movement has been diffused and compromised, but they don’t see that we’re trying to take up the mantle in other ways.

NJ The restriction on movement and travel is not just a physical concern in ‘Land Narrative’, it is also about the freedom people have to represent themselves. Even the term ‘Black British’ is something the contributors to the issue find problematic, including the editors themselves. But there is an episode in ‘Land Narrative’ where the protagonist meets a queen in New York, here there is a sense in which identity and difference seem to matter, it’s how we can recognize and understand one another and what lies behind our ‘names’? On the other hand the ghostly figures are faceless and inconspicuous, they seem to live a half-life, with an inability to connect until it is too late. I found that loss particularly moving in your work.

JB Well 'Land Narrative' isn’t set in a world where people are restricted, which is the sort of society most of us think we live in. No-one gives a damn where she goes or who she is. She’s a wanderer. I had in mind a line from the film Before Night Falls (2000), in which the protagonist describes his childhood as a state of ‘absolute poverty, absolute freedom’. In New York, the narrator and the Queen gel because they’re nobodies. They can kind of do what they want, identify as anything they want, be attracted to who they want. But this is obviously a position without any power. So yes, it seems to be a trade-off. Remain underground, hidden, impoverished, powerless and behind closed doors and you can identify as anything. Go in to the public realm and that’s impossible. It’s the message we’re sent every day: keep your politics and your criticism to yourself. No-one cares. You’re free to say and do what you like as long as we can’t see you and you don’t try to affect any change.

NJ ‘Land Narrative’ also deals with representation and language. Words are not just visible signifiers, they are also integrally aesthetic and phonic signs which find movement and freedom in your artwork. For example, the line ‘I think I could Roll with you …’ writ large on a page in which the narrative twists and coils, carrying the images with it. It reminded me of the interview with poet Yemisi Blake in this issue where he says ‘I’m not sure how yet, or where the lines between poetry and art will cross, but that’s all part of its energy’. Do you find the breaking of boundaries between art forms liberating or necessary?

JB I find it inevitable. Nothing stays pure for long.

Nisha Jones is Assistant Editor at Wasafiri

Indian Bites - Celebrating 25 Years of Wasafiri

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Marking 25 years of Wasafiri this ‘Indian Bites’ booklet brings together some of the best Indian Writing published in the magazine. The twenty pieces showcased reveal the diversity and range of creative work Wasafiri magazine has published over the past 25 years.

This wonderful volume of Indian literature includes:

Ganeswar Mishra’s fable ‘The Democratic Crabs’

Mridula Koshy’s story ‘Romancing the Koodawallah’

Jeet Thayil’s Poem ‘The Eye’

Vikram Seth’s Poem ‘The Comfortable Classes at Work and Play’

Satyendra Srivastava’s Poem ‘The Ticket’

Debjani Chatterjee’s Poem ‘Visiting E M Forster’

Keki Daruwalla’s Poem ‘Among Friends’

And much more …

Purchase your copy now for £3*.

Please pay via paypal to Wasafiri@open.ac.uk or

Send a cheque made payable to Wasafiri Ltd

Address: Wasafiri, The Open University, 1-11 Hawley Crescent, London, NW1 8NP

Please email Wasafiri@open.ac.uk for any further enquiries

*Includes post and packaging

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.

The Bookseller	The Guardian	The Telegraph	BBC
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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.'

Wasafiri News - wasafiri

New Award to Recognise Excellence in Caribbean Literature for Young Adults

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Chike Unigwe wins the prestigious NLNG Literary Prize for On Black Sisters' Street

Get your poems published for free on the UK Poetry Library website

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Jeet Thayil shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize with his first novel Narcopolis

A New Network - Diasporic Literary Archives

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The 2012 Wasafiri New Writing Prize is now open! Submissions are welcome from new writers anywhere around the world.

The shortlist for the 2012 Caine Prize revealed

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Michael McMillan reviews - Migrations: Journeys into British Art - Tate Britain 31 Jan - 12 Aug 2012

PoD Residency: Call for application for Points of Departure - creative exchange between the UK and Palestine

Applications invited for early stage researchers in Diasporic Literary Theory, Literary Cultures and Cinema at the University of Mumbai

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Wasafiri Board Member, Maggie Gee is awarded an OBE for services to Literature in the 2012 New Year Honours List

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Khaled Mattawa wins the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

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Shortlist announced for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2012

Caribbean Poetry Project - Call for papers

Shehan Karunatilaka awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012

Shehan Karunatilaka awarded the DSC Sri Lankan debut novelist wins prestigious US $50,000 prize for his book Chinaman

Two doctoral fellowships have become available at the University of Muenster, Germany

Marie Curie Fellowship Early Stage Researcher in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies Diasporas and the Literature of Globalisation

Marie Curie Fellowship Early Stage Researcher in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies Literary Refractions of Migration Laws in Post-Colonial Novels

Courttia Newland reviews Colour Me English by Caryl Phillips

Wasafiri celebrated the launch of Issue 68 at a special event at the BBC's Bush House

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Winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011 Announced

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Authors, Publishers and Readers: Selling and Distributing Literary Cultures 1880 - 1940 - Call for papers

Narrating the Caribbean Nation: A Celebration of Literature and Orature - Call for papers

Free access to works by and about author Zo� Wicomb on the Taylor and Francis website

Bernardine Evaristo reviews One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina's compelling memoir

Enter the Escalator Literature Fiction Competition

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Shortlist announced for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011

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Free access to Zoe Wicomb's Short Story 'In Search of Tommie' first published in Wasafiri's 25th Birthday Issue

October 19 - Watch out for the Chimurenga Chronic - for one day only!

October 19 - Watch out for the Chimurenga Chronic - for one day only!

Interview with Marius Kociejowski, essayist and poet.

Aournd the World in 80 Wickets - follow author, Merryn Glover, around the world with her family and a plastic cricket bat

DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2012 - Longlisted announced

Exclusive offer: purchase Ananda Devi's Indian Tango from Wasafiri. Not yet available in UK bookshops

Farewell to Ulli Beier and M F Husain, two great ambassadors for cultural difference

Big Picture street photography competition - 1 June - 31 August 2011

The Future Face of Publishing: How diverse will it be? Listen to the debate, which took place at the 2011 London Book Fair

Robin Yassin-Kassab reviews Leila Aboulela's Lyrics Alley

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ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION ANNOUNCES 2011 LONGLIST

The judges for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction are:

The Black Atlantic - A New Online Resource for researchers

Marie Curie Fellowship
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Marie Curie Fellowship
Early Stage Researcher in the field of Transdisciplinary Diaspora Studies
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