Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. In this extract from Sambal 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.

William Tham Wai Liang, Wasafiri’s Editor at Large based in Malaysia, reflects on Malaysia’s multilingual literary scene, where numerous languages intersect against a backdrop of complex colonial history.

‘A body is disobedient; it is a river flowing backwards and splitting off in many directions.’ Aotearoa New Zealand artist and writer Hana Pera Aoake writes about the waterways that make up their ancestry, their body, and their future.

‘I believe that everyone has a story inside them.’ Writer and poet Jennifer Wong reflects on her writing residency with Wasafiri and asks: what does it mean to re-write the canon?

As part of our Global Dispatches essay series, novelist C.A. Davids – writing from Cape Town – reflects on justice and inequality during the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘Little wild words thump in the mouth‘. Poet and academic Elizabeth-Jane Burnett on first drafts, the best writing advice she’s received, and the more-than-human in her poetry.