International Contemporary Writing
Chair
Florian Stadtler was formerly Wasafiri’s Reviews Editor. He currently works at the University of Bristol as a Lecturer in English with Migration Mobilities Bristol. He has also published extensively on South Asian British history, including the case of Udham Singh, Aubrey Menen, South Asian soldiers…
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Trustee
Kavita Bhanot is ECR Leverhulme Fellow at Leicester University. She wrote the landmark essay ‘Decolonise not Diversify’ in 2015. She has edited three short-story collections, including Too Asian, not Asian Enough and Book of Birmingham, and co-founded the Literature Must Fall collective and festival…
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Trustee
Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Phillipines before moving to England in 1971. He is the author of various novels and short stories. After the 1992 appearance of his first novel Monkfish Moon, he went on to publish Reef (1994) which was shortlisted for the Booker and The Sandglass (199…
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Trustee
J.A. Mensah is a prose and theatre writer and a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of York. She was a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Centre for Applied Human Rights and her plays have been produced by Pilot Theatre in York and Live Theatre in Newcastle, among ot…
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Trustee
Kimberly McIntosh is a writer and researcher and is currently Senior Policy and Research Officer at Child Poverty Action Group. Previously, she was Senior Policy Officer at The Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank, where she published extensively on race and inequal…
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Associate Editor
Rehana Ahmed is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in British Asian, black British, Muslim and South Asian writing, and her recent work has explored contemporary literary representations of multicult…
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Associate Editor
Lizzy Attree is the co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. She has a PhD from SOAS, University of London and Blood on the Page, her collection of interviews with the first African writers to write about HIV and AIDS from Zimbabwe and South Africa, was published by Ca…
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Associate Editor
Rachael Gilmour is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Much of her research focuses on issues of language, translation, and linguistic encounter in colonial and postcolonial contexts from 18th- and 19th-century South Africa to contemporary multilingual Britain. He…
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Associate Editor
Stephanie Jones is an Associate Professor in English at the School of Humanities, University of Southampton. She works on literature about marine and maritime worlds, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean. Her research spans the interdisciplinary fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies,…
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Associate Editor
Nick Makoha was Shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut poetry collection Kingdom of Gravity. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricot…
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Associate Editor
Zoe Norridge is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her research currently focuses on cultural responses to genocide in Rwanda. In April 2014 she curated the exhibition “Rwanda in Photographs: Death Then, Life Now” for the twentieth commemoration with Mark Seal…
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Associate Editor
Naomi Wells is a researcher at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (School of Advanced Study, University of London). She researches on migration and multilingualism in Spanish- and Italian-speaking contexts, with a particular focus on everyday practices of linguistic and cultural translation….
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Editor at Large
Nazry Bahrawi is a literary critic, translator and academic. He specialises in the comparative study of texts, thoughts and traditions between the Malay Archipelago and the Arab world. Nazry is Senior Lecturer of Comparative and World Literature at Singapore University of Technology and Design. He h…
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Editor at Large
Gopika Jadeja is a bilingual poet and translator, writing in English and Gujarati. Her literary writing and translations have been published widely. She is committed to translating writing from marginalised communities. Gopika is working on a project of English translations of poetry from Gujarat. S…
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Editor at Large
Anna Knox is a writer and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has lived and worked in the US, Middle East and Scandinavia and currently lives in Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington with her family. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
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Editor at Large
William Tham Wai Liang, based in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, was formerly Senior Editor at Vancouver’s Ricepaper magazine. His newest novel, The Last Days, is set in 1981 and covers the continuing legacy of the Malayan Emergency. His first book, Kings of Petaling Street, was shortlisted for the Penang…
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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. She has collaborated with…
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Advisory Board
Ashok Bery is Senior Lecturer in English at the London Metropolitan University where he teaches Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Twentieth-Century British and American Poetry, Romantic Poetry and Poetic Forms and Genres. In 2000 he published Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations (edite…
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Advisory Board
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: Networks of British Empire (2015) was the…
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Advisory Board
Margaret Busby OBE became the UK’s youngest and first black female publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby Ltd, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan Publications. She is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, consultant an…
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Advisory Board
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta and has published several prize winning novels as well as works of literary criticism.His work frequently appears in well known journals across the globe. His most recent publications include a collection of essays, Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literatu…
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Advisory Board
David Dabydeen is a writer, critic and historian who first became known for his prize-winning collection of Creole poems, Slave Song (1984). His first novel, The Intended, was published in 1991 followed by Disappearance (1993) and The Counting House (1996). A Harlot’s Progress (1999) continued Dabyd…
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Advisory Board
Denise DeCaires Narain is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex and has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing. Her book, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing: Making Style was published in 2001 and she is currently working on a monograph on the Jamaican…
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Advisory Board
Robert Fraser is the author of several monographs, including studies of Sir James Frazer, Proust, Victorian quest literature and postcolonial fiction. His critical portrait of Ben Okri, Towards the Invisible City (2002), was described in Wasafiri as ‘poetic psychobiography’ and The Chameleon Poet (2…
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Advisory Board
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’. Her seventh novel The White Family (2002)…
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Advisory Board
Abdulrazak Gurnah has contributed to the development of Wasafiri from the beginning, working as a contributing editor since 1987. Born in Zanzibar, he left in the late 1960s and migrated to Britain. His first novel Memory of Departure, was published in 1987 and was quickly followed by Pilgrim’s Way…
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Advisory Board
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. At the University…
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Advisory Board
Maya Jaggi was formerly Literary Editor of Third World Quarterly. She is a well known and highly respected feature writer and lead reviewer on international literature for The Guardian. She has written widely for publications including the TLS, The Observer, Financial Times and Index on Censorship a…
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Advisory Board
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. His publications include Jean Rhys (1978), Fiction for the Working Man…
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Advisory Board
David Johnson is senior lecturer at the Open University in English Literature. His publications include Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (principal author, 2001), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (co-editor, 2005) and Twenti…
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Advisory Board
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, grew up on the Isle of Wight and went to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Having worked both as an actor and director in Britain and Iran, Khalvati founded Matrix, a women’s experimental theatre group and was co-founder of Theatre in Exile. Mimi Kha…
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Advisory Board
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. He is currently Chair of the Poetry Archive and the recently created Poetry Translation Centre and is al…
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Advisory Board
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. Currently chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Priz…
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Advisory Board
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Advisory Board
Caryl Phillips is an internationally acclaimed writer whose work includes novels, television documentaries, and screenplays such as the adaptation of VS Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, for which he won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata Film Festival. His many novels include The…
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Advisory Board
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:…
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Advisory Board
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. An award-winning film critic for the Telegraph, he also writes for London Review of Books, New…
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Advisory Board
Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the reader’s ch…
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Advisory Board
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Kenya’s best known novelists and activists who campaigns for ‘cultural decolonisation’ in Africa’s educational institutions and the promotion of African languages — the subject of many of his essays including those that appear in Decolonising the Mind (1986) and Moving th…
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Advisory Board
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: Ess…
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Advisory Board
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. Her writing is published in numerous magazines…
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