Wasafiri is the UK's leading quarterly magazine for international contemporary writing since 1984. Its name stems from the Kiswahili word for ‘travellers’ which reflects the magazine’s longstanding engagement with cultural travelling, diverse histories, and its continuing commitment to extending the established boundaries of literary culture. It is renowned for publishing some of the world’s most distinguished writers including Chinua Achebe, Sam Selvon, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Han Kang, and Bernardine Evaristo. Having pioneered a shift in the literary, cultural and critical landscape, the magazine draws widely across modern culture and the arts, publishing a lively and informed mix of fiction, poetry, interviews, essays and reviews. Wasafiri is dedicated to forging and mapping new literary landscapes by championing plural, often overlooked, perspectives and recognises the aesthetic, intellectual, and political importance of literature, and its power to inspire solidarities and connect disparate people and experiences across all kinds of borders.
English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations, championing the freedom to write and read. We are the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 130 centres in more than 90 countries. With the support of our members – a community of readers, writers, and activists – we protect freedom of expression whenever it is under attack, support writers facing persecution around the world, and celebrate contemporary international writing with literary prizes, grants, events, and our online magazine PEN Transmissions.
Zena Agha is a Palestinian Iraqi writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, 2022), and her short film, The Place that is Ours, was selected for several international festivals. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR, and El País. Zena was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to undertake a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and completed her doctorate on colonial cartography in Palestine at Newcastle University.
Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal trilogy and a recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the O. Henry Award. Her short story ‘Garments’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University and now lives in London.
lisa minerva luxx is a British-Syrian writer and political activist. In 2021 they published their debut collection, Fetch Your Mother’s Heart (Out-Spoken Press), a collection exploring tenderness and violence, set within the Lebanese revolution. luxx is also currently studying for a PhD in resistance literature, establishing a practical poetic for social movements. Their poetry, essays, and fiction have been published internationally, including by Poetry Review, New England Review, BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera, and PEN Transmissions. They have written three verse-plays, including an immersive installation opera on decolonial climate justice – what the dog said to the harvest – and a short film titled Lesbian. They believe in transnational community organising and grassroots action as a means of liberation.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths University and an associate lecturer in the Design School at University of the Arts London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (Peninsula Press, 2026), and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
