Archive: life writing

Read an exclusive extract from Kayo Chingonyi’s introduction to More Fiya, an anthology of Black British poetry.  

Irenosen Okojie on the innovation of African artists and entrepreneurs working for a better future, in the latest of Wasafiri‘s Global Dispatches.

Read Usha Rungoo’s complex, searching essay ‘The Song of Life’, shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

In this exclusive extract from Wasafiri 109, Nat Raha, Sabah Choudrey, C N Lester, and Roz Kaveney discuss how in the face of racial capitalism, literature and community can act as a lifeline of connection and creative expression for trans and non binary people.

Writer Divya Ghelani reflects on the meaning she gained from starting a book club devoted to BIPOC authors, accompanied by beautiful illustrations from Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

For the latest instalment of the Global Dispatches series, author Katherine Agyemaa Agard writes on loneliness, touch, and isolation, examining the ways in which communication and intimacy has shifted under the ongoing pandemic.

Elizabeth Chakrabarty on trauma, recovery and whiteness in academia, and how writing a novel created space for recovery in the wake of a racist hate crime.

S J Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South. In this poetic extract from Wasafiri 107, Kim writes powerfully and candidly about the reality of work and survival in academia.

Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. In this extract from Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, a collection of vignettes of a girlhood spent growing up in Gaza, Hayek examines the weight of old memories and what it means to leave a place behind.