Archive: Life Writing

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

Welcome to Craft. Each month we bring you one international writer, talking about one of their works, for about thirty minutes. This month, Uruguayan novelist Daniel Mella talks about his novel El Hermano Mayor. Winner of the Bartolomé Hidalgo Award, and translated as Older Brother by Megan McDowell…

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 Global Dispatches, author and academic Barbara Taylor responds to Katherine Agyemaa Agard’s ‘strangers, dreaming’, interweaving history and experience to interrogate solitude and Covid-19.

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.

Meet this year’s winners – Kate Carne (Fiction), Anne O’Brien (Life Writing), and Dipanjali Roy (Poetry) – who will receive £1,000, publication in Wasafiri 109, and mentoring from Nikesh Shukla of The Good Literary Agency. 

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.

An extract from a personal essay by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Wasafiri‘s new Writer-in-Residence for 2021-22, on environmental collapse, guilt, shame, and the body.