Advisory Board

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denise DeCaires Narain is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex and has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing. Her book, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing:

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

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

Abdulrazak Gurnah has contributed to the development of Wasafiri from the beginning, working as a contributing editor since 1987. Born in Zanzibar, he left in the late 1960s and migrated to Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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