Aba Amissah Asibon 

Aba Amissah Asibon was born and raised in Ghana. Her short fiction has been published in Guernica, The University of Chester’s Flash Magazine and The Johannesburg Review of Books. She was also longlisted for the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize for Short Fiction and featured in the prize’s anthology Migrations. Aba currently lives in Malawi and is working on her debut novel. 

Rifat Abbas

Born in Multan, Rifat Abbas is a Seraiki poet and is a retired assistant professor from the Punjab Education Department. His literary work, spanning 40 years, consists of 10 poetry collections and a novel. Rifat received a National Award thrice from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. He is interested in postcolonial discourses on indigeneity. […]

Buke Abduba

Buke Abduba was born in 1998 in Sololo and raised in Moyale, Kenya. An unpublished writer, Buke began writing in 2015, shortly after losing her father to cancer.

Farah Abey

Farah Abey is an Egyptian writer, born in 1998, who graduated from the Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University. She writes short stories and reviews books and films. Her work has featured in many popular Egyptian newspapers and magazines including Akhbar Aladab, El Masry Al Youm, Al Ahram gate, (Egyptian Minisrty of Culture publications: El Thaqafa El Gdida Magazine and Al Kahera Magazine), Al Maqal, Rosaelyoussef, Forga. Her short story ‘Everything is Fine’ has been translated into English and published in a collection named The Best Egyptian Short Stories 2019, edited by the travel writer Salwa El Hamamsy. 

Dalle Abraham

Dalle Abraham is a writer based in Marsabit, Kenya. He has published stories in literary magazines and journals like Jalada, kwani?, Chimurenga Chronic and a Caine prize anthology.
Twitter: @Dalle22

Claire Adam

Claire Adam is originally from Trinidad & Tobago. She took an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths (University of London), was a 2016 Word Factory Apprentice, and her novel, GOLDEN CHILD, was published by Faber in 2019. It won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK, the Authors’ Club Best […]

Som Adedayor

Som Adedayor is a Nigerian writer and finalist at the English department of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state. Longlisted for the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction, his works have been published on, or are forthcoming from, Lolwe, The Offing, Transition Magazine, adda, Dgeku and Olongo Africa, among others. His writings can also […]

Boluwatife Afolabi

Boluwatife Afolabi is the author of ‘The Cartographer of Memory’ an electronic poetry chapbook published by the Sankofa Initiative. His works have appeared in Saraba Magazine, Arts and Africa, Expound magazine, African Writers etc. He is also the poetry editor at agbowo.org. He lives and writes from Ibadan, Nigeria.
Twitter: @oluafolabi

Farah Ahamed

Farah Ahamed’s short stories and essays have been published in Ploughshares, The White Review, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, and The Massachusetts Review amongst others. She is working on her novel Days without Sun, a story about friendship and survival in the backstreets of Lahore. She is the editor of the anthology Period Matters: Writing and Art on Menstruation Experiences in […]

Salmah Ahmed

Salmah Ahmed is an accountant living in London. She oscillates between her two great loves—her mischievous daughter and creative writing. She’s taken a fiction writing course from Faber Academy and is working on her first novel. Her work has been published in TMYS June 2022 Review, a print anthology by the literary magazine Tell Me […]

Madiha Aijaz

Madiha Aijaz is photographer and a filmmaker. Her photographic work on the Hindu temples in Pakistan was published by Niyogi Books in New Delhi (Abbasi, Aijaz, Historical Temples in Pakistan – A Call to Conscience). Her photographs and short films have been shown in India, Pakistan, United States, South Korea and South Africa.
Twitter: @madihaaijaz

Caleb Ajinomoh

Caleb Ajinomoh is a freelance journalist, playwright and novelist. His short stories have been featured on The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Three Penny Review, One Throne magazine, Africanwriter.com and Thenakedconvos.com. He was a finalist for the Book Doctors’ 2016 Pitchapalooza for his debut work of fiction. He is the editor-at-large for The Mustard Magazine, Africa’s leading hip hop conscious quarterly info-letter.
Twitter: @queerpants

Saba Ajmal

Saba Ajmal is an academic, researcher and practitioner in literary and culture studies, with more than 10 years of professional experience. She is currently affiliated to one of the oldest universities – UET, Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has been read at various conferences and forums in the UK, Turkey, France, Germany and Pakistan. Creative writing […]

Akpa Arinzechukwu

Akpa Arinzechukwu is an English Grad Fellow at Chapman University. A 2023 Oxbelly Writing Retreat Fellow, and a winner of the 2021 Poetry Archive Worldview Prize, a Best of the Net nominee, Pushcart, and Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, shortlisted for the FT/Bodley Head Prize, and a finalist for the 2020 Black Warriors Review Fiction Prize, his […]

Najwa Ali

Najwa Ali writes fiction, non-fiction and sometimes poetry. Trace is part of a forthcoming book-length project on Zanzibar. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, Warscapes, Wasafiri and Room. She has received a Hedgebrook residency, Room’s Creative Non-Fiction Prize and was short-listed for the Canadian National Magazine award. She was born in Zanzibar. Twitter: @Najwa_Layla

Topher Allen

Topher Allen is a poet and fiction writer from Clarendon, Jamaica. His work explores Jamaican geography and the island’s cultural and historical experiences. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow whose work appears in Montreal Writes, Pree, Poetry London, Magma, Ambit and elsewhere. Allen won the Poet Laureate of Jamaica: Louise Bennett-Coverley Prize in 2019 and […]

Widyan Almasarani

Widyan Almasarani was born in 1982 in Syria. She studied veterinary medicine and has always had a passion for literature. She started writing children’s stories after the birth of her daughters Laila and Alma. After her experience writing a short story for the Goethe-Institute workshop she began working on her first novel.

Peter-Adrian Altini

Peter-Adrian Altini is a South African novelist, screenwriter and university lecturer based in Paris, whose short stories have been published in the Fish Anthology (2019), Iron Horse Literary Review (2021) and Storgy Magazine (2021). His short story ‘Hanna. With 2 Ns’ will appear in the upcoming South African anthology, Short, Sharp, Stories (2023). Gentleboys, his […]

Leticia Alvarez

Leticia is a trilingual, twenty-two-year-old Canadian-Colombian living in New Zealand, studying law, English and politics. Her fiction draws on questions that emerged from living in two post-empire countries and from reckoning with the colonial past and the religious society of her Hispanic origin. She is interested in themes of memory, migration, identity and the power […]

Isaac Otidi Amuke

Isaac Otidi Amuke lives and writes in Nairobi, Kenya. His reportage/nonfiction has appeared in the literary journal Kwani?, on the Commonwealth Writers blog, in Wasafiri and the New African Magazine. He contributed the title piece for Safe House; Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic), an anthology of nonfiction from Africa edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. He is a finalist for the 2016 CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards.
Twitter: @IsaacOtidiAmuke

Harriet Anena

Harriet Anena is a Ugandan writer and author. In 2018, she was joint winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa for her debut poetry collection, A Nation In Labour.    

Ber Anena

Ber Anena is a Ugandan writer. Her poetry and prose have been published in The Atlantic, adda, the Caine Prize anthology, Brittle Paper, The Plentitudes, Isele, New Daughters of Africa anthology, and The Kalahari Review, among others. Anena’s debut poetry collection, A Nation in Labour, won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2018. She’s a 2021 graduate […]

Cybonn Ang

Cybonn Ang is a Filipino-New Zealand writer currently based in Montreal. Her work has appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, the Philippines Graphic Magazine and is forthcoming in an anthology called New Asian Voices from Auckland University Press. She is currently at work on her first novel.  

Vincent Anioke

Vincent Anioke was born and raised in Nigeria, studied Computer Science at MIT in the United States and now lives in Canada. By day, he is a software engineer. By night, he voraciously reads and writes short stories. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as Carve, Split Lip Magazine, Pithead […]

Erica Sugo Anyadike

Erica Sugo Anyadike works in television. She also writes short stories and has been published by Kwani, Writivism, Femrite and Karavan. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Whether she is writing for television or writing prose, Erica’s stories place African women at the centre of her narratives. She is particularly interested in complex representations […]

Sharmini Aphrodite

Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Borneo. She was raised in, and still lives between, the cities of Johor Bahru and Singapore. Her short fiction has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (2015); Smokelong Quarterly (2015); this is how you walk on the moon: an anthology of anti-realist fiction (Ethos Books, 2016); Australian Book Review Jolley Prize, Second […]

Huda Armosh

Huda Armosh was born in 1998 and is from Nablus, Palestine. She has a BA in Law from Al-Najah University, is a trainee lawyer and researcher at the Palestinian Affairs Center while preparing for the Bar exam. 

H. B. Asari

H B Asari is a student at the University of Lagos. Her short fiction has been published in The Voyage Journal.

Emma Ashmere

Emma Ashmere was born in South Australia. She has a PhD from La Trobe University Melbourne on the use of marginalised history in fiction. Her novel The Floating Garden was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Press Network MUBA award. Her short story collection Dreams They Forgot will be published in 2020 by Wakefield Press.   

Sowmiya Ashok

Sowmiya Ashok is a journalist based in New Delhi. She writes on politics, immigration, race, religion, social justice and gender. She is a graduate of the political reporting programme for working journalists at Columbia Journalism School. She has been a political reporter for The Hindu and has also reported for Mint. She currently reports for The Indian Express.
Twitter: @sowmiyashok

Upekala Bhagyanie Athukorala

Upekala Bhagyanie Athukorala is currently a teacher at a government school in the Western Province, Sri Lanka. Since her school days, her poems have appeared in the local newspapers. Her debut poetry collection, Paratharaya (Distance), was published in 2012, her second book, Sankranthiyaka Sanakeli (Carnival of Transition), in 2015, and her third collection, Irthu aga Shesha path (Remnants of the Seasons), in […]

Wan Nor Azriq

Wan Nor Azriq was born in Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia. He is the author of six novels, D.U.B.L.I.N., Boneka Rusia Guido, Soneta Roda Basikal, 86, Dompet Kulit Buaya, Di Kala Bulan Bermain Biola and one short story collection, Mana Dadu Darjeeling? His first novel won First Prize in the ITBM-PENA-BH Writing Competition in 2014 and he is the […]

Mac Donald Dixon

Mac Donald Dixon was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies. At sixteen, browsing through shelves at the St. Mary’s college library, he stumbled on ‘Twenty-Five Poems’ by Derek Walcott and knew from that moment he would write. Despite having written several short stories and plays and novels, he is best known for his poetry. He is […]

Alari (Abdul Latif Mohammad Ribaz)

Alari (Abdul Latif Mohammad Ribaz) is a Muslim Tamil poet who has published four collections of poetry in Tamil. He lives in the east of Sri Lanka. அலறி (அப்துல் லத்தீப் முஹம்மது ரிபாஸ்) தமிழ் முஸ்லிம் கவிஞராவார். இதுவரை நான்கு கவிதைத் தொகுப்புகளை வெளியிட்டுள்ள அவர் கிழக்கிலங்கையில் வசித்து வருகிறார்.

Rolli

Rolli is a Canadian author, cartoonist, and songwriter. He’s the author of the new book of poems and drawings, Plumstuff. His work can be read on rollistuff.com. @rolliwrites

وديان المعصراني

ولدت وديان المعصراني عام 1982 في سوريا ، درست الطب البيطري وكانت دائما شغوفة بالأدب. بدأت في كتابة قصص الأطفال بعد ولادة ابنتيها ليلى وألما. ، بدأت العمل على روايتها الأولى التي تكتبها حاليًا , و ذلك بعد تجربتها في كتابة قصة قصيرة لورشة عمل معهد جوته

Andre Bagoo

Andre Bagoo is a writer and poet from Trinidad. His essay collection on literature and art, The Undiscovered Country, won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. His short story collection, The Dreaming, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press.

Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. Her book Coolie Woman, a narrative history about indenture, was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize. Bahadur, currently a DuBois Institute fellow at Harvard, has won fellowships for creative nonfiction from the MacDowell Colony, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. ‘The Stained Veil’ is her first work of fiction.
Twitter: @gbahadur

Vidya Balachander

Vidya Balachander is an Indian journalist currently based in Colombo. Formerly the features editor of BBC Good Food’s India edition, based in Mumbai, her writing has appeared in publications such as NPR’s The Salt, Roads & Kingdoms, National Geographic Traveller, Indian Express, Mint Lounge, Harper’s Bazaar India, The City Story and others.
Twitter: @vidya83

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of Singapore: A Biography (2009), and co-editor of the literary collection, In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel (2016). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2014) and selected for Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories (2013 and 2015).
Her website is: www.toomanythoughts.org
Twitter: @bubblevicious

Vrinda Baliga

Vrinda Baliga is a writer based in Hyderabad, India. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary magazines such as New Asian Writing, Muse India, Reading Hour, Out of Print, India Currents and Temenos. She has won prizes in the Unisun Short Story Competition 2011 and the Katha Fiction Contests 2010 and 2012.

Carey Baraka

Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. His writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Jalada Africa, Popula and Guernica. He is a founding member of Enkare Review. He sings for a secret choir in Nairobi.

Shumaila Bari

Ms Shumaila Bari is a teacher of English language and literature. Besides English, she is fond of Punjabi and Urdu literature. She has written numerous poems and short stories in the past few years. Most of her writings challenge the socio-cultural norms imposed on women by a religiously patriarchal society. She is a keen observer […]

Heather Barker

Born in the UK, Heather Barker writes fiction about girls and women in the Caribbean and the African diaspora while exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Her short story, African Burial Ground, was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition while her collection manuscript, The Plundering, was the top entry in the […]

Tahnia Barrie

Tahnia Barrie is a Sierra Leonean poet and writer, currently based in her country’s capital city, Freetown. Her work has been published in the literary magazine adda, Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine. TSBarrie

Jenny Bennett-Tuionetoa

Jenny Bennett-Tuionetoa is a human rights advocate who seeks to use writing as a means of raising awareness about LGBTQIA issues in the Pacific Islands. She was born and raised in Samoa where she currently lives with her two young daughters. She won the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Pacific region with ‘Matalasi’.

Dipen Bhattacharya

Dipen Bhattacharya was raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and now resides in Southern California. He has published seven works of fiction in Bengali: four novels and three short-story collections. His work looks at the social dynamics of imagined future societies—interwoven with scientific principles— and are often set in Bengal. Dipen holds a PhD in Astrophysics.

Santanu Bhattacharya

Santanu Bhattacharya grew up in India and studied at Oxford University and National University of Singapore. His debut novel, One Small Voice, will be published by Penguin UK in 2023.  He is the winner of the 2021 Mo Siewcharran Prize, Life Writing Prize and London Writers Awards. His works have been nominated for the 4thWrite Prize, Blue Pencil Agency […]

Tuhin Bhowal

Tuhin Bhowal’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry City, The Night Heron Barks, Bacopa Literary Review, Nether Quarterly, RIC Journal, mutiny!, Red River (India) and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Editor at Bengaluru Review, Sonic Boom Journal and Yavanika Press. Tuhin tweets poems @secondhandsins.

Baka Bina

Baka Barakove Bina, or Baka Bina, is 60 years old and works at the Waigani National Court in the capital city of Port Moresby as a Registry Clerk. He has submitted to the Commonwealth Short Story Prize a few times and was shortlisted for the first time in 2022. He translated ‘What Happened to Mama?’ from […]

Marcus Bird

Marcus Bird is a writer, filmmaker and photographer who was born in Kingston Jamaica. He received his B.A in Film Production from Howard University in 2008.  He has written three books, which all draw from his time as a photographer, filmmaker and world traveler, to take his readers into social scenes and places often unvisited. He […]

Shakirah Bourne

Shakirah Bourne is a Barbadian writer and filmmaker. Her stories have been featured in several literary journals including The Caribbean Writer, Arts Etc, POUI, and Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Her first collection of short stories, In Time of Need, won the prestigious Governor General Award for Excellence in Literary Fiction in 2015. She has written four feature films: PAYDAY (writer/producer), Two Smart (writer/co-director), Next PAYDAY (writer/producer) and A Caribbean Dream (writer/director). She is currently at work on her first novel. You can find out more about her here: www.shakirahbourne.com
Twitter: @shakirahwrites

Michael Boyd

Michael Boyd grew up in Southern Africa before attending the University of Kent in the UK. After working at a number of film festivals, he decided on a career in teaching, and return to Africa. He now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing, during which he […]

David Brookshaw

David Brookshaw is an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol who has published widely on postcolonial literatures in the Portuguese-speaking world. He has translated a number of authors, including Mia Couto and Paulina Chiziane from Mozambique, and has organised or participated in anthologies of short stories and poems from Portugal, Brazil, Angola and Macao. […]

Natascha Bruce

Natascha Bruce translates from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong and, with Nicky Harman, A Classic Tragedy by Xu Xiaobin. She is the recipient of two English PEN awards, the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Prize, and a 2020 PEN/Heim grant for her forthcoming translation of Owlish by Dorothy Tse.

Shelley Burne-Field

Shelley Burne-Field (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Rārua) is a fiction writer and graduate of both Te Papa Tupu and the MCW at the University of Auckland. A finalist in the 2021 Voyager Media Awards, Shelley is a regular writer for e-Tangata. Her short fiction has appeared on Radio New Zealand, the Newsroom site and in various […]

Guest Editors Brenda Lee-Browne, Beatrice Lamwaka, Rifat Munim & Peter Sipeli

Brenda Lee Browne was born in London to Antiguan parents. She studied journalism and started her career in the Black British media before moving to Antigua in the mid-1980s. There, she wrote and published short stories and poetry as well as worked in the local media, both print and television. Browne returned to the UK […]

Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo is a Trinidadian British freelance writer and researcher with interests in cross-genre and collaborative work, multilingualism, performance, and place. Her most recent book, Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, 2016) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She writes a regular report for PN Review and is a contributing adviser for Blackbox Manifold.

Antoine Cassar

Antoine Cassar is a Maltese poet, translator, editor, and cultural organiser, and a creative activist for migrants’ rights and universal freedom of movement. In 2009, his composition ‘Merħba, a poem of hospitality’ was awarded the United Planet Writing Prize. For more information about Antoine visit his website: antoinecassar.wordpress.com

Leela Chakrabarty

Leela Chakrabarty is an educator and lecturer. Her last teaching post was at Sultan Idris Education University. She has published numerous school reference books and her fiction writing appears in several anthologies. She has a certificate in translation awarded by the Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books in 2008 and has translated textbooks and other […]

Calpernia Nicole Charles

Calpernia Nicole Charles is a native of the beautiful country of Belize and has lived in Conyers, Georgia since 2017. Calpernia received her master’s degree in Human Resource Management from Galen University in Belize, and her doctoral degree in Education from Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Calpernia is also the author of four bilingual children’s […]

Catherine Chidgey 

Catherine Chidgey is an award-winning New Zealand writer whose six novels have attracted international acclaim, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (South East Asia and South Pacific). She has won the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize – New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Her […]

May Chong

May Chong is a bi Malaysian poet and speculative writer with previous verse published in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Apparition Literary, Banshee and Bending Genres. Away from the keyboard, she enjoys birdwatching, video games and terrible puns. Her chapbook of nature poetry, Seed, Star, Song, is available on Ghost City Press as part of their […]

Arman Chowdhury

Arman Chowdhury is a writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. His work has been supported by the Loft Literary Center based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tin House Summer Workshop based in Portland, Oregon. @armanchowdhuree @armanrchowdhury

Ahmedur Chowdhury

Ahmedur Chowdhury (Tutul) is the publisher and editor of Shuddhashar, a magazine about free speech. He started Shuddhashar as a little magazine in 1990 and opened a publication house in 2004. He survived an assassination attempt against him by Islamist extremists in Bangladesh and currently lives in self-imposed exile. He is the winner of the Shahid […]

Morgan Christie

Morgan Christie’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Room, Prairie Fire, The Hawai’i Review, Sports Literate, and Prism International, as well as other publications. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a short story collection, and recipient of the 2022 Arc Poetry Poem of the Year prize, 2022 Digging Press Chapbook Series […]

Lynda Clark

Lynda Clark is a writer and former videogame producer. She’s currently combining these two interests by undertaking a PhD in interactive narrative at Nottingham Trent University. Her short stories often get described as ‘strange’ and have appeared in several collections from small independent presses. Most recently, her story ‘Grandma’s Feast Day’ was shortlisted for the […]

Christine Coates

Christine Coates holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has three collections of poetry. Her debut collection Homegrown (Modjaji Books, 2014), received an honourable mention from the Glenna Luschei Prize. Her short stories have been highly commended and anthologised: Short.Sharp.Stories anthology, Short Story Day Africa anthology, The Short Story […]

Christy Ann Conlin

Christy Ann Conlin is a writer, storyteller and end-of-life doula, focusing on vigil, companioning and legacy work. She is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Speed of Mercy. Heave was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. Her short fiction collection, Watermark, was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and her stories have been longlisted […]

Trevor Corkum

Trevor Corkum lives on Prince Edward Island, along Canada’s East Coast. His fiction, non-fiction, and journalism have appeared widely in Canada’s leading periodicals, including Walrus, Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. In Canada, his work has been previously recognized with nominations for the CBC Short Story Prize, the CBC Nonfiction Prize, the Journey Prize, […]

Mia Couto

Mia Couto was born in 1955 in Beira, Sofala province, Mozambique. He lived there until he was 17, when he went to Lourenço Marques to study Medicine. He interrupted the course to start a journalistic career that went on till 1985. On his own initiative, he returned to university to study biology, graduating in 1989. […]

Sally Craythorne

Sally Craythorne lives on a smallholding in Norfolk with her family.  She is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing at UEA.  Her first novel, How You See Me, was published in 2015 by Myriad Editions.  She is working on her second.

Yakima Cuffy

Hailing from the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean, Yakima Cuffy is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright. A lawyer by profession, the prominent themes in her writing are patriotism, West Indian identity, migration, faith and sensuality.  Ms Cuffy’s work has been published in The Caribbean Writer (Volume 35), Midnight and Indigo […]

Commonwealth Writers

Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, helps develop, support and connect writers across the world. It was founded on the belief that well-told stories can help people make sense of events, engage with others, and take action to bring about change. Commonwealth Writers is committed to the promotion of linguistic diversity and […]

Lloyd D’Aguilar

Lloyd D’Aguilar is a well-known human rights activist in Jamaica. He stood out as a defender of the people who were brutally attacked in Tivoli Gardens by the security forces in 2010. He has for several years been campaigning against police extrajudicial killings for which Jamaica has a high rate as noted by several international […]

Smriti Daniel

Smriti Daniel is a journalist based in Colombo. An Indian national, she has spent the last decade as a features writer for The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. Her work has appeared in publications including Al Jazeera online, The Hindu, Scroll.in, Roads & Kingdoms, BusinessLine and Open. She manages social media for the South Asian edition of SciDev.Net.
Twitter: @smriti_daniel

Shyam Darihare

Shyam Darihare (also known as Shyam Chandra Jha) worked with the Government of Jharkhand, India as Divisional Commandant. He has published five novels, three poetry collections and three story collections and has received awards from Shitya Akademi of India, among others. He passed away in June 2021, just before his work was published on adda. […]

Bijoyeta Das

Bijoyeta Das is a journalist and photographer. She has reported from Asia, Africa, USA and worked as a media trainer in South Sudan. Her work is available at www.bijoyetadas.com

Unbroken Rice is her first work of fiction.

Namita Das

Namita is a techie turned author, blogger, content creator and a mom to a toddler. She has a knack for writing fiction, especially in the humour genre, and short stories, as well as picture-book stories for tiny tots. She was awarded Young Achiever by the High Commissioner of India in Kampala.  After her debut It’s […]

Riddhi Dastidar

Riddhi Dastidar is a neuroqueer journalist and researcher in Delhi. They work on disability justice, public health, climate and culture. They hold an MA in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi. In 2020 they won the TFA Award for Creative Writing for their poetry. Riddhi is working on their first book—a work of climate fiction […]

Sagnik Datta 

Sagnik Datta lives in Bangalore, and is working on his first novel. His works have appeared in Granta, Cha, adda, and a few other places. He was the Asia regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018. 

Gail Davey

Gail Davey is a medical epidemiologist who spent ten rich years living and working in Ethiopia. She is now based in Brighton, UK, but continues to do research on neglected diseases in East Africa. Her short stories mainly centre on experience gained in Ethiopia.

Ritu Monjori Kalita Deka

Ritu Monjori Kalita Deka was born and brought up in Assam, India. ‘Greetings from a Violent Homeland’ is her first work of fiction published in an international journal. She is still learning the craft of writing and does not feel qualified to call herself a writer, although she would love to be called a reader. She lives in Pune with her husband and her son.

Dinesh Devarajan

Dinesh Devarajan is a 37 year old project manager in an IT services firm in India. His short stories have been published in the Times of India’s Write India Stories, Season 1, and the short story collections Two is Company and City of Gods (both UNISUN Publishers). His story ‘Dead Heat’ won the Sunday Herald short story competition 2015. 

Ananda Devi

Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi has been writing for over four decades and is considered one of the major French language writers of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean. Her body of work includes novels, short-stories and poetry. She has received several literary awards.

Gitan Djeli

Gitan Djeli is a Mauritian writer and researcher in cultural studies. Her poems appear in The Funambulist, Poetry, Doek!, and in the anthology We Mark Your Memory by Commonwealth Writers among others. @gitandjeli   

Michael Theophilus Dom

Michael Theophilus Dom is of Simbu origin and was born in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. He lives in Lae, Morobe Province and is an agriculture research scientist. He has published six collections of poetry, of which the most recent was 26 sonnets (2020, JDT Publishing). His poetry has been given glowing reviews by ‘first-wave’ […]

phill doran

Phill doran was born in Liverpool, England, but has lived the past 40 years in South Africa, where he runs a training business. Married with three children, he has written for personal pleasure, with varying degrees of success (and of pleasure) for many years. He lives, works and writes under his given name, but prefers […]

Kiran Doshi

Kiran Doshi is a retired Indian diplomat and educationist. His last novel, Jinnah often came to our House, received The Hindu Prize for the best work of fiction published in India, 2016. His earlier published works include a satirical novel set in the world of India-Pakistan-USA relations, and a collection of diplomatic tales written in comic […]

Lance Dowrich

Lance Dowrich is a learning and development professional who has been teaching and training for over 28 years. He is the Principal and CEO of a post-secondary technical school in Trinidad and Tobago. He credits his passion for reading to his father Learie Dowrich and to a wonderful home where many clowns resided and where there was non-stop chatter.
Twitter: @LRDowrich

Dera Duru

Dera Duru is a Nigerian writer and laboratory scientist. He thinks of the world as one ripped-up thing held together by the glue of human stories. An alumnus of Purple Hibiscus Workshop, his works appear or are forthcoming in Litro UK, Make-a-Dream, and elsewhere.   

Kanya D’Almeida

Kanya D’Almeida is a Sri Lankan writer. Her fiction has appeared on Jaggery and The Bangalore Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and hosts The Darkest Light, a podcast exploring birth and motherhood in Sri Lanka. She is working on a book of short stories about mad […]

Chike Frankie Edozien

Chike Frankie Edozien was raised in Lagos, Nigeria. His work as a reporter has appeared in the New York Times, The Times (UK), Quartz, Vibe magazine,Time Magazine, Out Traveler, the Advocate, and on various broadcast news outlets. He co-founded the AFRican magazine in 2001 to tell African stories overlooked by international media. In 2016 he contributed to Safe House; Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic), an anthology of nonfiction from Africa edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. When he is not teaching journalism at New York University, he’s travelling across Africa.
Twitter: @FrankieEdozien

Eljae

Eljae’s writing has broached different topics on loving and building: how we make ourselves, our relationships and each other. Published in collections and magazines (Azza fi Hawak, Sawti Zine, The Colour of Madness, and Propel Magazine), she has also been commissioned and featured across different platforms (Dispatch FMI, Publicis Groupe Ltd, Poetry and Shaah, Boomerang, […]

Keisha Lynne Ellis

Keisha Lynne Ellis lives and writes in Nassau, Bahamas. She holds a Master’s degree in International Political Economy and is a member of the Bahamas National Reparations Committee. She can be contacted at klynne.ellis@gmail.com

Mostafa Eltelwany

Mostafa Eltelwany is an Egyptian writer and storyteller born in Qalyubia in 1991, and has published two collections of poetry in vernacular Egyptian, the first titled Laughter of the Visa Student (2014) and the second Arabesque (2016). He is currently working as a literary editor and content producer for an audiobook company.  

Akwaeke Emezi

Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo/Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria, Akwaeke holds two degrees, including an MPA from New York University. The Miles Morland Foundation recently awarded her a 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship for her second novel The Death of Vivek Oji, currently in progress. Her debut novel, Freshwater, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic (Winter 2018). Read more of her work at www.akwaeke.com
Twitter: azemezi

Deborah Emmanuel

Deborah Emmanuel is a Singaporean writer, performer, and four-time TEDx speaker. Her work and dialogue has featured at festivals like the Makassar International Writers Festival, the Singapore Writers Festival, and the Queensland Poetry Festival. Her work has shown in places like Bali, Berlin, Kathmandu, London and Melbourne, and she has toured alongside poets like Sarah Kay and Anthony Anaxagorou. Deborah’s first collection, When I Giggle In My Sleep, was published by Red Wheelbarrow Books early 2015. Her foray into creative non-fiction, Rebel Rites, launched in 2016. When not in the poetry scene, Deborah makes music with her bands Wobology and The Ditha Project, and performs as an actor on stage and screen. Her most recent work experiments with moving poetry into her physical body.

Kelesitse Eternity

Kelesitse Eternity is a poet and writer from Gaborone, Botswana. Her work explores the human condition and its complexities through her annual theatre showcase, Kelesitse & Friends, that merges poetry, music and theatre – telling authentic stories with the purpose of creating safe spaces for conversations by Africans for Africans. Her work has straddled the […]

Christopher Evans

Christopher Evans is a writer and editor, based in Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in The New Quarterly, The Literary Review, Going Down Swinging, The Moth, Joyland, Takahe, EVENT, and others, and he is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. Christopher has recently worked as the Prose Editor of PRISM international magazine, and […]

Sarah Evans

Sarah Evans has had many short stories published in anthologies, literary journals and online. Prizes have been awarded by, amongst others: Words and Women, Stratford Literary Festival and the Bridport Prize. Her work is also included in several Unthology volumes, Best New Writing and Shooter Magazine. She started her career as a theoretical physicist before moving into […]

Kevin Eze

Kevin Eze was born in Nigeria where he began writing and learning the piano at the age of seven. His stories have appeared in Writers, Writing on Conflict, Wars in Africa, Long Journeys, and in the magazine Actu’elle. He is the author of The Peacekeeper’s Wife (Amalion Publishing, 2015). He lives and writes in Senegal.

Ifeanyichukwu Peter Eze

Ifeanyichukwu Peter Eze worked in the United Arab Emirates for four years. He writes about migrant workers, human/sex trafficking, sexual awakening, and religious conflicts. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in: Fresh Ink, Red Coyote, Tiny Essays, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Pangolin Review. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Currently, he is […]

Fui Can-Tamakloe

Fui Can-Tamakloe is a fiction and film writer based in Ghana. In 2017, he co-authored Made in Ghana: A Collection of Short Stories. His poetry, short stories and articles have appeared both in print and online. He enjoys cold beers, great books and slow travelling. He writes in English and Ghanaian Pidgin.

Batoul Fahs

Batoul Fahs is an author and journalist from Lebanon. She works in the media, including television, and is currently presenting a youth programme called ‘Step’ in Arabic. She writes for literary magazines and her aim is to connect cultures and literatures between nations, particularly between young people.

Hai Fan

Hai Fan (born 1953) entered the rainforest in 1976 as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party and spent the next 13 years carrying out jungle guerrilla warfare near the Malaysia-Thai border. He now lives in Singapore.       海凡 （1953）曾参与马共领导的武装部队，1976年开始转战雨林十三年。现居新加坡，曾出版小说集《可口的饥饿》、《野径》。

Pauline Fan

Pauline Fan is a writer, literary translator and cultural researcher. She is Creative Director of cultural organisation PUSAKA and Director of the George Town Literary Festival. Pauline’s translation of poems by Sarawak poet Kulleh Grasi, Tell Me, Kenyalang, was shortlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry and longlisted for the Best Translated Book […]

Roopa Farooki

Dr Roopa Farooki is a writer and internal medicine doctor for the NHS. She is the author of six novels with Macmillan and Headline that have been translated into over a dozen languages, a series of middle-grade medical-themed children’s books for Oxford University Press, and a memoir on pandemic medicine for Bloomsbury. Her writing has been awarded […]

Jean Flynn

Jean Flynn lives in Australia. Jean spent most of her childhood sitting inside, writing. Her debut novel, Lovesick, won the inaugural XO Romance Prize in 2016. She has had short stories published in various anthologies.

Ho Sok Fong

Ho Sok Fong is the Malaysian author of two award-winning short story collections in Chinese, Maze Carpet and Lake Like a Mirror. She is currently working on a novel, The Forest in Full Bloom, supported by a Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation grant. She was born and grew up in Kedah, Malaysia; in the summer of 2020, […]

Liang Wern Fook

Liang Wern Fook is an iconic singer-songwriter of Singapore and was voted ‘Person Who Best Represents the Xinyao Spirit’ in a public poll (2003). Dr Liang has received both the Young Artist Award (Literature, 1992) and the prestigious Cultural Medallion (Music, 2010) across different arts genres. He has over 15 literature publications and has over […]

Jean-Pierre Forget

Jean-Pierre Forget is a Canadian writer published in Glass Buffalo and Rural Route magazines. He resides in rural Ontario surrounded by songbirds and other interesting creatures. You can read more of Jean-Pierre’s work at www.tenebrism.ca.

Omer Friedlander

Omer Friedlander grew up in Tel-Aviv and currently lives in Brooklyn. He has a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MFA from Boston University where he was the Saul Bellow Fellow in Fiction. He was awarded first place in The Baltimore Review Winter Contest and the Shmuel Traum Literary Translation […]

Pauline Fan and Bilal Tanweer

Pauline Fan is a writer, literary translator and cultural researcher. She is Creative Director of cultural organisation PUSAKA and Director of the George Town Literary Festival. Pauline’s tranislation of poems by Sarawak poet Kulleh Grasi, Tell Me, Kenyalang, was shortlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry and longlisted for the Best Translated Book […]

بتول فحص

بتول فحص هي كاتبة وصحفية لبنانية, تعمل في مجال الاعلام, بما في ذلك التلفزيون. تقدم بتول حاليا برنامج شبابي باللغة العربية يسمى “خطوة”, وتكتب في المجلات الأدبية و هدفها هو الربط بين ثقافات وأدب الأمم, خاصة الشباب منهم.

Sunila Galappatti

Sunila Galappatti has worked with other people to tell their stories as a dramaturg, theatre director and editor. She started her working life at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Live Theatre, Newcastle and is a former Director of the Galle Literary Festival. She has worked with Raking Leaves on its Open Edit project and at Commonwealth Writers, where she was non-fiction editor at adda for the first year of the site. She is the author of A Long Watch, retelling the memoir of a prisoner of war. She lives in Sri Lanka.
Twitter: @Sunilagala

Meera Ganapathi

Meera Ganapathi is the founder and editor of the independent publication, The Soup. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in various publications including Scroll.in, FirstPost, Juggernaut, Whetstone, Out of Print and The Dirty Magazine. Her writing focuses on personal histories, often drawing from photography and personal narratives. She is currently working on a book […]

Jacob Garrett

Jacob Garrett is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. He is quite new to publication, having recently co-authored a paper on our pressing moral need in the light of Climate Change to reclaim lives of material sufficiency, rather than unsustainable affluence (published in two forms: first as “The Moral and Ethical Weight of Voluntary Simplicity: A […]

Sheera Ghafar

Sheera Ghafar is a writer for one of Malaysia’s major political organizations. She writes on a wide range of topics and is particularly interested in writing about social issues such as poverty and oppression. Sheera Ghafar ialah penulis untuk salah satu parti politik terbesar di Malaysia. Dia menulis tentang pelbagai topik, dan mempunyai minat khusus dalam isu […]

Basma Ghalayini

Basma Ghalayini’s previous translations have been published by Deep Vellum Press and Comma Press, most recently Zaher Omareen’s ‘Beginners’ Guide to Smuggling’ (in Banthology edited by Sarah Cleave). She has also worked as a freelance translator and interpreter (Arabic to English). She has previously worked in various administrative roles in both the commercial and not-for-profit sectors, most recently as Global Operations and Logistics Manager at Cellusys Limited. 

Elizabeth Gibson

Elizabeth Gibson is a poet based in Manchester, UK, whose work often discusses the city, nature, sexuality, body image and changes in identity. Having graduated from the University of Manchester with an Integrated Professional Masters in Languages, Elizabeth has spent time living in France, Spain and China. She has won a Northern Writers’ Award and has been shortlisted for The Poetry Business’ New […]

Caroline Gill

Caroline Gill is a British-born aspiring author. The daughter of Vincentian emigrants, she and her family moved to Toronto in the 1970s. A love of words sparked a public relations career. She is currently working on her debut novel. Caroline holds Creative Writing Certificates from the University of Toronto and Humber School for Writers. She received the 2015 Marina Nemet Award, was published in the top three chapbook for the 2015 Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize out of 6,000 submissions from forty nine countries.
Twitter: @tweetsweetc

Priscilla Ametorpe Goka

Priscilla Ametorpe Goka has published with the Ghanaian Mirror and the Active Muse Journal and contributed to Narratives on Women’s Issues Volume 2: Women Power, an anthology published by the International Human Rights Festival. In 2007 she won a writing competition organized by the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) based on the theme HIV/AIDS. She […]

Varun Grover

Varun Grover is a screenplay writer, stand-up comedian and short-fiction writer based in Mumbai, India. ‘Masaan’ (2015), his debut screenplay, played in the section Un Certain Regard at 68th Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Jury prize. His first short story collection in Hindi, Paperchor, was published by Ektara’s Jugnoo Imprint in 2019.

Tse Hao Guang

Tse Hao Guang 謝皓光 is the author of Deeds of Light which was shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize. He co-edits the cross-genre, collaborative e-journal Of Zoos, and is a 2016 fellow of the International Writing Program. Find more of his work here: tsehaoguang.com

Tania Haberland

Tania Haberland is a poet, artist and teacher. Half Mauritian, half German, born in South Africa, she has lived in the US, UK, Germany, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Her first book Hyphen won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. She is looking for a publisher for her second collection, Other. Tania currently works between Mauritius, Milan and Cape Town as part of CreatiVita, offering services in the art of wellbeing. Like her Facebook page here: taniahaberland

Helon Habila

Helon Habila is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University, USA. He worked in Lagos as a journalist before moving to England in 2002. His novels include Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007), and Oil on Water (2010).
Twitter: @helonhabila

Mbozi Haimbe

Mbozi Haimbe was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. She completed an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge in 2018, and is currently working on a collection of African inspired short stories. Mbozi lives in Norfolk with her family. Mbozi Haimbe’s Madam’s Sister is the Africa regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth […]

Lokman Hakim

Lokman Hakim is an author of several books, comprising of novels, collections of short stories and poetry, with genres spanning from science fiction, thriller, young adult and fantasy written in the Malay language. His short stories have been published in local newspapers, literary websites and national literary magazines. He works as an infrastructure engineer for a construction company.

Ola W. Halim

Ola W. Halim writes fiction and poetry and also teaches English Language and Literature in Edo State, Nigeria. He seeks to tell stories not frequently told, themes rarely explored. As a teacher, he has been shortlisted for the TFCN Teacher’s Prize for Literature 2019. He edits prose for ARTmosterrific, a literary platform publishing young African […]

Katharine Halls

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s  The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival.   

Wendy Hara

Wendy Wongani Hara is a Malawian writer and photographer. Born and raised in Blantyre, Malawi, she is currently based in Zomba, where she is pursuing a degree in Political Science at the Chancellor College – University of Malawi. She is currently the president of the Writer’s Workshop at the University. She has two self-published digital books namely Poesia and 4YM – #keepittogether. Both can be obtained for free and the links to them can be found in the bio section of her social media, as listed below:
Twitter: @wokepotato
Instagram: wendyhara

Jack Hargreaves

Jack Hargreaves is a literary and academic translator of Chinese, whose work has appeared on Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, LitHub, and LA Review of Books China Channel.  He translated Shen Dacheng’s Novelist in the Attic for The Book of Shanghai and, with Yan Yan, Li Juan’s Winter Pasture. He is translating Chia Joo Ming’s […]

Ridzuan Harun

Ridzuan Harun was born in 1975, in the northern Malaysian state of Kedah. He graduated from the Universiti Putra Malaysia. To date he has published 5 books of poems, and a book of verse for children. Some of them have been translated into English. Ridzuan has won several national literary prizes, including the Hadiah Utama. […]

Simone Haysom

Simone Haysom is the author of The Last Words of Rowan du Preez: murder and conspiracy on the Cape Flats. She is a previous recipient of ANFASA funding, and of the Miles Morland Scholarship for African Writing. Her essays, creative non-fiction and short stories have been published in adda, Prufrock, and Africa is a Country. She works as a Senior Analyst for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, based in Geneva.

Twitter: @simonehaysom

Lynette Hazel 

Tobago-born writer-in-training, Lynette Hazel is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the UWI St Augustine Campus. She is the winner of the 2015 UWI Faculty of Humanities and Education Award for Creative Writing (Prose and Poetry) and the Kamau Brathwaite Bursary Awardee (2021). She wishes to contribute to the literature of Tobago and […]

Brian S. Heap

Brian S. Heap is the retired Senior Lecturer, Staff Tutor in Drama and Head of the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He has worked in Drama and Education in Jamaica for over forty years. With Pamela Bowell he co-authored Planning Process Drama: Enriching Teaching […]

Harley Hern

Harley Hern is a writer, artist and editor whose fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in various anthologies and journals. She has a Master of Creative Writing (Auckland University), is administrator for the Academy of NZ Literature (Te Whare Mātātui Aotearoa), senior editor of Geometry journal and for two years was administrator for NZ National […]

Joanne C. Hillhouse

Joanne C. Hillhouse is the author of the novellas The Boy from Willow Bend and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight; the children’s picture books Fish Outta Water and With Grace; the novel Oh Gad!; and the teen/young adult novel Musical Youth, a finalist for the Burt Award for teen/young adult Caribbean literature. Her writing has appeared in several Caribbean and international journals and anthologies. She freelances as a writer, editor, writing coach and workshop facilitator; and founded and coordinates the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize to nurture and showcase the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda.
Visit her website here: jhohadli.wordpress.com

Majdal Hindi

Majdal Hindi, born in Jerusalem, holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Birzeit University and a second degree in European studies from the Hebrew University, where she is currently studying for a second degree in data analysis. Her story ‘Eternal Prison’ won the Al-Razi Association competition in 2007, her story ‘A Very Long Night’ was published in 2018 in a booklet produced by the Khalili Sakakini Center.  

Rawiya Hosein

Rawiya Hosein is a Trinidadian author currently residing in Canada. She holds a BA in Literatures in English with Linguistics from the University of the West Indies and is awaiting examination of her MFA Creative Writing thesis. Rawiya is the winner of the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction (2021) and the Bocas Lit Fest Youth […]

Kevin Jared Hosein

Kevin Jared Hosein currently resides in Trinidad and Tobago and is the Caribbean regional winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His first book, Littletown Secrets, was published in 2013. He also fiction published in magazines and anthologies, such as Lightspeed Magazine, Moko Magazine, Pepperpot, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. His latest book, The Repenters, was published in 2016.

Tao Howard

Tao Howard’s passion for words has been her companion since childhood. She developed her writing practice as a student of art, languages and literature. Three poems received NIFCA literary awards and were published in the Winning Words Anthology. In 2021, she self-published a 24-Day Advent Devotional, A Holy Invitation: Reflections on Home, Hope & Hospitality. […]

Daniel Hurst

Daniel Hurst is an Australian freelance journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. His news and feature articles about Japan have been published by The Guardian, NBC News, The Times of London, Smith Journal, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Diplomat among others. Before relocating to Japan in 2016, he was a political correspondent for The Guardian’s […]

Camellia Hussein

Camellia Hussein was born in 1986. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. She writes short stories and is a columnist for a number of Arabic websites. She won third place in the 2018 Cairo Short Stories workshop organized by the Goethe-Institute in Cairo. She is currently working on her first short story collection. 

Rola el Hussein

Rola el Hussein is a Lebanese writer currently living in Loubieh. She has worked as a script writer for Al Rayyan TV and a producer for Dubai TV. Three of her poetry books have been published by dar al jaded / dar al ghawoun. Her creative writing and feature writing has been published by o2publising.com and several Lebanese newspapers. Rola plans to keep working in a variety of creative fields to develop her writing.

William Maynard Hutchins

William Maynard Hutchins is an American academic, author and translator of contemporary Arabic literature. He is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

كاميليا حسين

ولدت كاميليا حسين عام 1986. تخرجت من كلية الآداب بجامعة القاهرة. تكتب قصصًا قصيرة و هي كاتبة مقالات في عدد من المواقع العربية. فازت بالمركز الثالث في ورشة عمل قصص القاهرة القصيرة 2018 التي نظمها معهد جوته في القاهرة. تعمل حاليًا على أول مجموعة قصصية لها.

Sarah Ijangolet

Sarah Ijangolet is a Ugandan illustrator and graphic designer based in Kampala. After graduation, she freelanced and developed her skills in digital illustration. She explores the topics of afro-futurism and contemporary womanhood, African mythology, specifically Ugandan myths and legends, in her storytelling and artwork.

Eric Illayapparachchi

Born in a suburban village close to Negombo, a coastal township, Eric Illayapparachchi is a well-known poet, novelist and short story writer in Sri Lanka. Tailorbird is the English translation of his novel Pradeshi.  He also wrote the opera Agni for a Sri Lankan maestro and adapted Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Asian cinema. මීගමුවට ආසන්න වෙරළබඩ ගමක උපන් […]

Innocent Chizaram Ilo

Innocent Chizaram Ilo is an Igbo writer from Nigeria. Their works interrogate gender, class, memory, and sexuality and have been published in literary magazines across four continents. They are a finalist of the Gerald Kraak Award, Short Day Africa, and Wilbur Smith Author Of Tomorrow prizes. They have also won the Africa YMCA and Oxford […]

Erato Ioannou

Erato Ioannou is a novelist and short story writer. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary journals internationally. Her short story ‘Something Tiny’ was featured in So Many Islands Anthology and, most recently, ‘Deserted’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is the author of Cats Have it All, a collection of short stories, […]

Nafisa A. Iqbal

Nafisa A. Iqbal was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. As a storyteller, her choice of mediums include visual art, animation, and writing. Through her writing, Nafisa aims to highlight strands of personal experience in the greater tapestry of the Bangladeshi narrative, one that has been obscured time and time again by dominant cultural dogmas. […]

Breanne Mc Ivor

Breanne Mc Ivor is a Trinidadian author who co-founded People’s Republic of Writing (PROW), a populist group created out of the belief that writing belongs to everyone. She has been shortlisted for writing prizes including the Derek Walcott Writing Prize in 2005 and the Fish One-Page Prize in 2010. In 2015, her story ‘Kristoff and Bonnie’ won The Caribbean Writer’s David Hough Literary Prize. Her work has appeared in Origami Journal, Rock Bottom Journal, Akashic Books’ Duppy Thursdays series, and elsewhere.

Hend Ja’far

Hend Ja’far was born in 1985, she is a writer and academic from Ismailia. She currently works in the Manuscripts Department at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. She most recently published a short story called ‘The Soul at Rest’ in The Book of Cairo collection of short stories published by Comma Press in 2019, which was a story from her first collection published in 2015 by Merit. She shared second place in […]

Sarah Jackson

Sarah Jackson is a poet and academic living in Nottingham, UK. Her poetry collection Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012) won the Seamus Heaney Prize and was the readers’ nomination for the Guardian First Book Award. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. 
Twitter: @drsarahjackson1

Vaishali Jain

Vaishali Jain is an illustrator based in Bangalore, India. She is currently pursuing her passion for film-making and creative writing at Srishti Institute Of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore.

Laishram Jamuna

Laishram Jamuna is from Singjamei Oinam Thingel Ningthoujam Leikai, Imphal, Manipur. Her poems, short stories, travelogues and essays have been published in several Manipuri magazines and journals. She is committed towards working for a fair society and is interested in the promotion of mother tongues to ensure that diverse and multiple languages flourish next to […]

Anushka Jasraj

Anushka Jasraj is a fiction writer from Mumbai. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin and was a regional winner of the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Twitter: @anushkajasraj

Maham Javaid

Maham Javaid is a journalist from Karachi, Pakistan. She reports on politics surrounding ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, and the stories she can’t tell in black and white are translated into fiction. She is the inaugural winner of the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women 2019.  Her winning story was published by Eos Magazine at Dawn.com.  Her journalistic stories have been published in The Nation, Al Jazeera […]

Aravind Jayan

Aravind Jayan is a writer based in Kerala. His work has been published in Out of Print, The Bombay Literary Magazine and Helter Skelter, among others. He is the 2017 Toto Funds the Arts winner for Fiction in English.

Sheela Jaywant

Sheela Jaywant is a Goa-based humour columnist, humour-verse and short-fiction writer whose most recently won prize was the Pallium India Best in Print Media (2019). She has written for the Indian Quarterly, RHiME and other Indian publications. Her favourite Marathi-English translation is Ward No. 5, K.E.M. She works as a school administrator and can be […]

Meredith Jelbart

Meredith Jelbart was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1950, and has lived there all her life. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Max, and other stories, and the novel, Free Fall. Her poetry, essays, memoir pieces and short stories have appeared in various Australian magazines. She is currently working on a […]

Ashutosh Jha

Ashutosh Kumar Jha teaches translation at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi. He has translated novellas, short stories and poems from Maithili, Hindi and Bhojpuri into English and vice versa, for Sahitya Akademi. One of his works has been prescribed by the University of Delhi.

Ramya Jirasinghe

Ramya Jirasinghe is an award-winning poet, fiction and non-fiction writer from Sri Lanka. She is the author of There’s an Island in the Bone, which won the Sri Lanka State Literary Joint-Award in 2011, Rhythm of the Sea, Trinity, When Life Touches Life and Love Poems from a Frangipani Garden. Ramya was longlisted for the Fish […]

Jason Jobin

Jason Jobin was born and raised in the Yukon, northwest Canada. He completed a BA and MFA in writing at the University of Victoria, British Colombia. His stories have won a National Magazine Award and been anthologized in the 2018 and 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. His stories have also been published in […]

Jay T. John

Jay T. John is a nonbinary Trinidadian poet who uses art to contextualize and highlight the nuanced experience of otherness. Their poetry has appeared in the 2018 anthology Unwritten: Caribbean Poems after the First World War, and they have been shortlisted for both the 2021 Johnson & Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize as well as […]

Punarvasu Joshi

Dr. Punarvasu Joshi has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, USA. A nanotechnology researcher turned translator, he has translated 40 selected Hindi short stories, covering the last 125 of Hindi short story writing, into English for a 1000-page-long, two-volume anthology titled A Journey In Time I & II (2019). He has also […]

Gitanjali Joshua

Gitanjali Joshua is a perennial student, who enjoys skipping across disciplines. She is exploring the intersection of law, religion, and gender for her doctoral thesis at the University of Hyderabad. She loves dinosaurs, the sea, and things that give her a sense of scale. She somehow manages to find cats to befriend wherever she goes. […]

Josiah Mbote

Josiah Mbote is a Kenyan Writer studying Pharmacy at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. His central drive for writing has been to express himself, although he is currently compiling his debut collection of short stories. @josiahelite1

هند جعفر

  ولدت هند جعفر عام 1985 ، وهي كاتبة وأكاديمية من الإسماعيلية. تعمل حاليًا في قسم المخطوطات في مكتبة الإسكندرية. قامت مؤخرًا بنشر قصة قصيرة بعنوان “النفس المطمئنة” في مجموعة “كتاب القاهرة” من القصص القصيرة التي نشرتها كوما بريس في عام 2019 ، والتي كانت قصة من مجموعتها الأولى التي نشرت في عام 2015 من […]

Mubanga Kalimamukwento

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian storyteller and a lawyer. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana Media, 2019), listed among the fifteen most notable books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. She won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, the Kalemba Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2022, Bristol Short […]

Mrinal Kalita

Mrinal Kalita, born in Bamundi, Assam, India, is a short story writer and a novelist who writes in the Assamese language. He has three short story collections, one novel, two collections of essays, one collection of tales for children and a book on popular mathematics to his credit. He teaches Mathematics in Pandu College, Assam. […]

Mai Kaloti

Mai Kaloti is from Jerusalem. She studied journalism and sociology at Birzeit University, and earned a master’s degree in modern media from the Jordanian Media Institute in Amman. She has worked for Al-Quds newspaper as a reporter, and in various cultural institutions as a media coordinator. In 2011 she published a joint book titled Hamlet, […]

Nimisha Kantharia

Nimisha Kantharia is a mother, surgeon and writer from Nagpur, India. She writes about the Indian health-care system, parenting, childhood trauma and neurodiversity. Her writing has been published by the literary magazine Lunch Ticket and by the Preservation Foundation on www.storyhouse.org. Her creative non-fiction essay, ‘The Girl with the Turquoise Eye-Shadow’, won the Diana Woods […]

Karan Kapoor

Karan Kapoor is a poet. They have been awarded or placed for James Hearst Poetry Prize, Rattle Annual Prize, Ledbury Poetry Prize, Julia Darling Memorial Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize, John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, Orison Anthology Award, and Literary Taxidermy Competition. Their manuscript ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic as a Father’ was a semi-finalist […]

Mehdi M Kashani

Mehdi M Kashani lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. His fiction has appeared in many Canadian and American literary journals, notably Epiphany, Southern Humanities Review, EVENT, and Bellevue Literary Review. Two years ago, one of his stories was a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Awards. He’s currently revising his debut novel, tentatively titled If You’re […]

Manav Kaul

Manav Kaul is an Indian theatre director, playwright, author, actor and filmmaker. He has published several works. Amongst his notable plays are Ilhaam, Park and Shakkar ke Paanch Daane, which was his first outing as playwright and director in 2004. His seventh publication, Karta be Karm se, a collection of poems in Hindi has been […]

Simar Preet Kaur

Simar Preet Kaur’s writing has appeared in a range of publications including National Geographic Traveler, COLORS and Papercuts. She began as a travel writer and was the editor of in-flight magazine JetWings in Bombay before moving to the mountains. Simar received a Sangam House Fellowship in 2015. In 2016 she was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She is working on a fiction set in the Himalayas.

Umair Kazi

Umair Kazi is a lawyer, writer and translator from Urdu. He studied law at the University of Iowa and received his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. His translations of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have appeared in Circumference, Brooklyn Rail’s In Translation, Inventory and Pleiades. Born in Karachi, he now lives in New York City.

Ayham Kazoun

Ayham Kazoun is a Lebanese writer and blogger. He is currently a Partnership Coordinator at Save the Children (Lebanon) and has worked as a Projects Coordinator for the British Council. He has written for Shbab Alnahar newspaper and writes his own blog here.
Twitter: @ayhamkazoun

ML Kejera

ML Kejera is a Chicago-based author from The Gambia. Though born in Bakau, he left the country with his family in 1999. He has lived in Senegal, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the US. He speaks English and French and can understand Mandinka. His work has been published in riverSedge, The Cafe Irreal, Sleaze Mag, Strange Horizons, Riddled With Arrows, Popula, PanelxPanel, and The Outline. He […]

Priscilla Keshiro

Priscilla Keshiro has a bachelor’s degree in Policy and Strategic Studies, and a master’s degree in Disaster Management and Resilience. She hopes to work with global humanitarian agencies, to become a professor and to write stories as long as she lives. Her happiest times are when she works out, sings, dances and, of course, writes […]

Sophia Khan

Sophia Khan is the author of the novels ‘Dear Yasmeen’ and ‘The Flight of the Arconaut’. Her short fiction has appeared in Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English, The Aleph Review, Kestrel Magazine and Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia, among others. She is a graduate of Haverford College and […]

Anwar Shahid Khan

Anwar Shahid Khan (b. 1949) is a Pakistani journalist who has worked as a reporter, editor and columnist for various Urdu newspapers and magazines in Pakistan for several decades. He continues to write columns for Daily Pakistan Lahore, Daily Mashriq Lahore and occasionally for other Urdu newspapers.

Fred Khumalo

Fred Khumalo is the award-winning author of the novels Dancing the Death Drill and Bitches’ Brew among other titles. With an MA in creative writing from Wits University, he is also a Nieman Fellow (Harvard University, 2011-2012). His short story “Legs of Thunder” was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015. A stage adaptation of Death Drill premiered at Nuffield […]

Gloria Kiconco

Gloria Kiconco is a poet and essayist based in Kampala, Uganda. She has written for Writivism, The Forager Magazine, and Doppiozero’s Why Africa? She performs regularly at Poetry-in- session and other arts spaces in Kampala. You can read more of her work at otherandelse.wordpress.com
Twitter: @GKiconco

Dennis Kikira

Dennis Kikira is from the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. An Environmentalist and Development Practitioner by profession, he studied environmental science and geography at the University of Papua New Guinea, and did a postgraduate degree in environmental management from the University of Queensland in Australia. An unpublished writer, Dennis has always written […]

A. N. King

A. N. King is a Thai-Australian writer and international lawyer. She graduated with first class honours in law from the University of Cambridge and is on the Dean’s List at Georgetown University Law Center. She was the youth winner of the Somerset National Novella Writing Competition and the Boroondara Literary Award. She currently resides in […]

Eleanor Kirk

Born and raised on unceded Gadigal land, Eleanor Kirk is a writer for both the page and the screen. Her non-fiction has been published in a range of national newspapers and her fiction has received such accolades as the Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship. She holds a Bachelor of Screenwriting from the University of Melbourne, and […]

Neema Komba

Neema Komba is a poet and writer from Tanzania. She is the 2014 winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in the Flash Fiction category. She is the author of See Through the Complicated, a poetry book published in 2011. Her work ‘The Search for Magical Mbuji’ appeared in Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, an anthology published by Commonwealth Writers in 2016. Her work has also appeared in This is Africa, a forum for African opinion, and Vijana Fm, an online youth platform.
Twitter: @neysk

Pallabi Konwar

Pallabi Konwar teaches English Literature to undergraduate students in Guwahati, Assam and is pursuing her doctoral research from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She translates Assamese poems, short stories and non-fiction into English. An enthusiast of the cinematic language and an amateur critic, her creative pursuits include poetry, fiction, translation […]

Bhushan Korgaonkar

Bhushan Korgaonkar is a writer, translator and theatre producer. He has been engaging with the traditional Lavani artists in Maharashtra since 2004, which led him to write his award-winning Marathi book Sangeet Bari published by Rajhans Prakashan in 2014. This is now a critically acclaimed theatre production, performed across the country and abroad. Bhushan writes […]

Rita Kothari

Rita Kothari is Professor of Translation Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar in Gujarat, India. She is also a scholar of Partition studies, with special focus on the region of Sindh and a large part of her writing is also engaged with Gujarat and its communalised politics, literary history and questions of language. Her well known books include Translating India : The Cultural Politics of English (St.Jerome Publishing); Chutnefying English : The Phenomenon of HInglish (with Rupert Snell, Penguin India) The Burden of Refuge  ( Orient Blackswan) Decentring Translation Studies : India and Beyond (with Judy Wakabyashi, John Benjamin Press).
Twitter: @KothariRita

Eva Koursoumba

Eva Koursoumba was born in Cyprus, and went to the University of Westminster in London, (B.A. Hons in Media Studies) and to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, (Diploma in TV and Cinema Studies). After working in Cyprus TV and at an advertising agency as Creative Director, she is now working in Communications. […]

Shih-Li Kow

Shih-Li Kow is a former chemical engineer and mall manager. Her novel The Sum of Our Follies was published in 2014 and the French edition (translated by Frederic Grellier) won the 2018 Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. Her collection Ripples and Other Stories was shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her […]

Parashar Kulkarni

Parashar Kulkarni is a writer and an academic at Yale-NUS College. He works at the intersection of culture and politics across disciplinary forms. His research interests include religion and politics in colonial and contemporary India and discourses on utopias. He received the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for his work on religion, property rights, and […]

Karen Kwek

Karen Kwek used to work as a book editor while dreaming about writing fiction herself, so it’s a gift for her to have had her short stories appear in recent local anthologies. Among her favourite short fiction writers are Flannery O’Connor and Alistair MacLeod. She enjoys her family, friends, good books and a great cup […]

Nikolas Kyriacou

Nikolas Kyriacou was born in Kavala (Greece) and grew up in Cyprus. He holds a Ph.D. in law. After working as lawyer in Cyprus, he moved to Luxembourg, where, he is currently working at the Court of Justice of the EU. He used to play the saxophone and probably suffers from bibliomania. He has two children with Marianna Bonellou. He is the author of 10+1 μύθοι για το Κυπριακό (10+1 Myths for […]

مي كالوتي

مي كلوتي من القدس ، درست الصحافة وعلم الاجتماع في جامعة بيرزيت ، وحصلت على درجة الماجستير في الإعلام الحديث من معهد الإعلام الأردني في عمان. عملت في صحيفة القدس كمراسلة ، وفي العديد من المؤسسات الثقافية كمنسق إعلامي. في عام 2011 نشرت كتابًا مشتركًا بعنوان “هاملت لا تشرب السم” ، كما نُشرت كتاباتها بشكل […]

Brenda Lee Browne

Brenda Lee Browne was born in London to Antiguan parents. She studied journalism and started her career in the Black British media before moving to Antigua in the mid-1980s. There, she wrote and published short stories and poetry as well as worked in the local media, both print and television. Browne returned to the UK […]

Usama Lali

Usama Lali is from Punjab, Pakistan and has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Washington, Seattle, where he has also taught undergraduate writing courses until recently. He is a recipient of the David Guterson Award 2023. @usamalali_ | @usamalali

Beatrice Lamwaka

Beatrice Lamwaka writes for Global Press Journal, an international media organization that produces award-winning journalism. She is President, PEN Uganda. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in prisons in Uganda and edited a prison’s anthology. She also edited the East African anthology to be published by 8th House Publishing (forthcoming 2022). Her collection of short stories, Missing Letter […]

Lisa Latouche

Lisa J Latouche is a Dominican writer and repeat winner of the Nature Island Literary Festival Short Story Competition. A finalist in the 2020 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize, she was awarded a Citation by the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, Brooklyn, New York. Publications include White Wall Review and Montage Domnik, among […]

Monica Leong

Monica Leong is a senior corporate communications manager by day and writer by night. Before entering the corporate world, she worked as editor and features writer for female lifestyle magazines: Marie Claire, CLEO, and PEARL. She is currently working on a short story and flash fiction anthology. Monica lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Twitter: @monicaleongps

Cosmata Lindie

Cosmata A. Lindie is an Indigenous Guyanese artist and writer. In 2022 she was one of three Guyanese writers long-listed for the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s Elizabeth Nunez Award for short fiction. As an artist she began participating in exhibitions on a national level after joining the Guyana Women Artists’ Association (GWAA). She currently resides […]

Demoy Lindo

Denoy Lindo, born in Portland Cottage, is a 21 year old Jamaican poet, writer and Victician. Currently a student at the University of the West Indies, he first stepped into the scene of literature when he was awarded the Jamaica Poet Laureate Prize in 2020. Demoy has since been published in a few journals, including […]

Tresha Lionel

Tresha Lionel is a Saint Lucian Island Scholar, writer, law student and Chief Editor and journalist at Buckingham News. Tresha started her career in media as a reporter, moved to news anchor and director before becoming the host and co-producer of the talk show, Mornings with Tresha Lionel, which focused on political and social issues. […]

Ling Low

Ling Low is a writer, journalist and filmmaker whose short stories have appeared in various anthologies of fiction. She has written on arts and culture for the Guardian, South China Morning Post and Esquire Malaysia, among other publications. Her short films have been screened at international festivals and her comedy sketches have been broadcast on […]

Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu

Irene Muchemi-Ndiritu was born in Nairobi in 1977. She holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. Irene has worked as a journalist in New York City, Washington DC and Boston. In 2017, Irene graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Cape Town (Distinction). Irene lives in Cape Town with her husband and three […]

Brandon Mc Ivor

Brandon Mc Ivor was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. He received his BSc in English Literature at New York University, and currently works as an English Teacher in Ehime, Japan.  His work has been published in a number of magazines and online, including The Caribbean Writer and Akashic Books’ flash fiction series.   

Alistair Mackay

Alistair Mackay is a South African writer based in Cape Town. His short stories have been published in New Contrast, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Kabaka Magazine, and Queer Africa II, which was shortlisted for a Lambda Award in 2018. His non-fiction has appeared in Financial Mail, GQ (South Africa), City Press, and Daily Maverick. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York City and an MA […]

Andrea E. Macleod

Andrea E Macleod is a Brisbane writer, poet and journalist. In her journalism she is passionate about issues of equality and justice. She is studying literature, working on a collection of short stories and a novella. Most recently her work was shortlisted for the Newcastle Short Story Award and long-listed for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley […]

Joyline ‘Jo’ Maenzanise

Joyline ‘Jo’ Maenzanise is trans nonbinary. Their words have found homes in publications such as Hedone, HOLAAfrica, Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women, Pink News, Healthline, Well+Good, Broadview, Verywell Mind and Kickoff (an online fitness coach). Jo also edits fiction and non-fiction. Some works they’ve edited include children’s and adults’ novels, cover letters, personal statements […]

Mozid Mahmud

Mozid Mahmud is a poet, novelist and essayist based in Bangladesh. Some of his notable works include In Praise of Mahfuza (1989), Nazrul–Spokesman of the Third World (1996) and Rabindranath’s Travelogues (2010). He has been awarded the Rabindra-Nazrul Literary Prize, Bangladesh Writers Club Prize and the country’s National Press Club Award, among others.

Faraaz Mahomed

Faraaz Mahomed is a clinical psychologist and human rights researcher based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also holds academic fellowships with the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg. A former Fulbright scholar, Faraaz’s writing is largely academic in nature, having published several journal articles relating to human rights.

Lisa Suhair Majaj

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American writer, is the author of Geographies of Light (poetry, Del Sol Press, 2009) and other creative and critical work. She coedited Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse UP, 2002), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland, 2002) and Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Routledge, 2000). […]

Tina Makereti

Tina Makereti writes essays, novels and short stories. Her novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage, 2014) has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa in 2011.
Twitter: @TinaMakereti

Nick Makoha

Author of Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press). A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. Winner of the 2015 Brunel international African Poetry prize and 2016 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his manuscript Resurrection Man. His poems appeared in The Poetry Review, Rialto, The Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri. Find him at www.nickmakoha.com
Twitter: @Nickmakoha

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu (Oneworld, 2018), won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013, and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. She won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’, which […]

Akoijam Malemnganbi

Akoijam Malemnganbi is from Imphal, Manipur and is currently a research scholar at the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include cultural translation, modernity, intersectional feminism and indigeneity. She also works as a freelance translator (Meeteilon/English) and has published a few poems in The Bangalore Review and Our Private Literature Issue 1 […]

Adriana Nordin Manan

Adriana Nordin Manan is a writer, playwright, translator and researcher. Born, raised and based in Kuala Lumpur, she is passionate about storytelling and the expanse of stories as bridges across cultures, imaginations and human desires. Trilingual in Malay, English and Spanish, Adriana has a Masters in Politics from New York University. She is also a graduate […]

Alexandra Manglis

Alexandra Manglis is a Cypriot writer and a poetry editor.  She is a 2021 recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and an enthusiastic alumna of the Clarion West class of 2017. She holds a D.Phil in English from the University of Oxford, and is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. […]

Saraswathy M. Manickam

Saraswathy Manickam is a freelance writer, language and Creative Writing teacher whose short stories have been published in Malaysian anthologies. She won the DK Dutt Memorial Award for Literary Excellence in 2017. She hopes to bring out a collection of short stories by the end of the year. Saraswathy M. Manickam’s ‘My Mother Pattu’ is the Asian […]

Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming

Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming is a Trinbagonian poet, essayist, and fiction and creative non-fiction writer who lives in Nassau, The Bahamas. Her poetry, stories, and artwork have appeared in numerous publications in The Bahamas, the Caribbean, USA, and Europe. She has won the David Hough Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer (2001) and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association 2001 Short Story Competition.

Nurat Maqbool

Nurat Maqbool is a writer based in Kashmir.  She has participated in the Creative Writing & Mentorship Programme at Anita’s Attic, Bengaluru.  She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Twitter: @nurat_maqbool

Cara Marks

Cara Marks is a writer from Vancouver Island, Canada. She writes intimate, darkly comic stories that have been longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize, the 2019 CVC Short Fiction Competition, the 2016 Mogford Food and Drink Writing Prize and others. As part of her PhD on food, empathy and literature, she is writing her first […]

Reyah Martin

Born in Scotland, Reyah Martin has featured in several online publications, and was a finalist in the BBC Young Writers’ Award 2018. She is a member of the Scottish NYAAG (National Youth Arts Advisory Group), and an undergraduate of Journalism and Creative Writing at Strathclyde University. When she is not writing, she tutors English and […]

Emma Martin

Emma Martin grew up in Dunedin, New Zealand and has lived in Melbourne, Manchester, London and Edinburgh. She currently lives in Wellington with her two teenage children. She is the author of a short story collection, Two Girls in a Boat, and is working on a novel and a collection of essays. She won the […]

Julia Martin

Julia Martin is a writer living in Sydney, Australia. She is a graduate of the MA Writing at UTS Sydney. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.  

Jo-Anne Mason

Jo-Anne Mason has lived on the Caribbean island of Anguilla for twenty-five years. She has written and illustrated three children’s books about the creatures of the Caribbean and their island homes. She and her husband now sail between Anguilla, St. Martin and Nevis/St. Kitts for work and she often writes her stories on the boat. She is working on her next novel, The Short Tale of the Long Dog. She blogs at www.jo-annemasonbooks.blogspot.com

Maskiah Haji Masrom

Maskiah Haji Masrom was born in Johor, Malaysia. She has written more than 50 short stories, four novels, three collections of short stories, two poetry collections and a textbook on speeches. So far, she has won more than 30 writing competitions including the Malaysian Literary Prize, the Utusan Group Literary Prize and the Darul Takzim […]

Mohamed Matbouly

Mohamed Matbouly, an Egyptian writer living in Cairo, was born in 1982 and holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He has published the short story collection Gamophobia, and was awarded second place in the Cairo Short Story Competition organized by Goethe Institute in 2019 for ‘In the Cities of Central Cairo’, and his short […]

Rebecca Mathai

Rebecca Mathai is a civil servant based in Delhi. She is currently editing a novel, the concept of which was a winning entry in the iWrite contest at JLF 2020. Her story has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine and another is being anthologized by the Written Circle.

Deborah Lee Matthews

Deborah Lee Matthews has been a cultural worker in the field of theatre for almost 20 years. A current postgraduate student in Cultural Studies at the UWI St. Augustine in Trinidad & Tobago, she uses creative expression as a tool to cultivate conversations about lived experiences, community building, active resistance and kinaesthetic memory.  

Ali Aiman Mazwin

Ali Aiman Mazwin is a writer, editor and translator based in Kuala Lumpur. He has translated two novels into Malay: Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (as co-translator), a series of graphic novels and other shorter works. He believes more contemporary Malay fiction needs to be shared […]

Socrates Mbamalu

Socrates Mbamalu was born in Nigeria and grew up in Kenya. His works have appeared in Saraba Magazine, Deyu African, Kalahari Review, African Writer, Sankofa Mag, and Jalada. He is an awardee of the 2016 Saraba Nonfiction Manuscript prize: his manuscript The Kenyan Boy is due for publication as an Ebook next year.
Twitter: @linsoc

Diana McCaulay

Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican environmental activist and award-winning writer. She is the founder and Chair of the Jamaica Environment Trust and has written four novels – Dog-Heart, Huracan (Peepal Tree Press), Gone to Drift (Papillote Press and HarperCollins) and White Liver Gal (self published). Both Dog-Heart and Huracan were short listed for the Saroyan […]

David McIlwraith

Canadian author and filmmaker David McIlwraith has turned to fiction after writing and directing award nominated documentary films, Celesta Found, The Lynching of Louie Sam, and the television series Harrowsmith Country Life. His recently published The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice From Gold Mountain was nominated for a BC Book Award for non-fiction. He […]

Jay McKenzie

Based on Australia’s Gold Coast, Jay McKenzie is a British writer and performing arts teacher, who has lived in the UK, Greece, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. Her short stories, flash and micro fiction focus on small, intimate details of ordinary lives. She has twice won the Australian Writers Centre’s Furious Fiction flash contest, won the […]

Pierre J. Mejlak

Pierre J. Mejlak is a writer from Malta, who has been living in Belgium since 2004. His latest collection of short stories, Having Said Goodnight, won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2014 and is being translated into eight languages. His work has earned him the Malta National Book Award and the Sea of Words European Short Story Contest.

Marwa Haitham Melhem

Marwa Melhem lives in Syria where she is studying civil engineering. She writes short stories and poetry, as well as translates. She is a co-writer of the ‘Literally Peace’ project between Syrian and German writers. She is the winner of the short story category of the Al-Sharja Award in 2018, and her book of short stories, A Third Eye, was published this year.

Karlo Mila

Karlo Mila was born in Rotorua, New Zealand. She earned her BA from Massey University and worked for ten years in labor organizing and health research before earning her PhD in sociology. Mila is of Tongan, Samoan, and European descent, and both her poetry and scholarship focus on the personal and political realities of Pasifika identity. Her first book, Dream Fish Floating (2006), won an NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. She collaborated with German artist Delicia Sampero on her second collection, the image-text A Well Written Body (2008). Of the challenges Pacific writers face, Mila has said this: “We are barely in print; [and] we are constantly fed a diet of other peoples’ stories and experiences. … We must be the protagonists wrought by our own pens, not shadows in other people’s stories.”

Mila is the recipient of a Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency and represented Tonga at the 2012 Cultural Olympiad event Poetry Parnassus Festival in London. She lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Sharon Millar

Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer. Millar won the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2012 Small Axe Short Fiction Award. In 2015, she published her first collection of short stories The Whale House and other stories (Peepal Tree Press 2015). The collection was shortlisted for the fiction component of the OCM Bocas Prize […]

Sharon Millar

Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer. She is the winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the 2012 Small Axe Short Fiction Award and her debut collection The Whale House and other stories (Peepal Tree 2015) was shortlisted for the 2016 fiction category of The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Her work has appeared in publications such as Granta, The Manchester Review, and Small Axe. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Twitter: @SharonMillar100

Nancy Anne Miller

Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet with eight poetry collections. Tide Tables (Kelsay Books 2019) is her latest. She is published internationally in journals such as Edinburgh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Salzburg Review, Agenda, Stand, The Fiddlehead, The Caribbean Writer. She is a MacDowell Fellow and Bermuda Arts Council Grant recipient. Visit her website here.   

Chia Joo Ming

Chia Joo Ming was born in 1959 in Singapore. In 1993, he was presented with the Young Artist Award for Literature by the National Arts Council of Singapore. He was also invited to participate in the Iowa International Writing Program in 1995 and was the Writer-in-Residence of Nanyang Technological University in 2014. Chia was also […]

Gothataone Moeng

Gothataone Moeng is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and received an Emerging Writer fellowship from A Public Space in 2016. Her writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, A Public Space, the Oxford American and the Columbia Journal. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of […]

Mathapelo Mofokeng

Mathapelo Mofokeng is a screenplay and short story writer from Johannesburg, South Africa. She has written short films, feature films and audio dramas on a range of themes. Her films have screened at Underwire, London Shorts, BFI Soul Connect, Aesthetica, Heart of Gold and Manchester Film Festival, among others. ‘The Strong-strong Winds’ was her first […]

Animesh Mohapatra

Animesh Mohapatra teaches English Literature at Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, University of Delhi, India. His research interests include literary history, modernity studies, translation and print culture. He has co-edited a volume of Odia critical essays in English translation titled Critical Discourse in Odia, which will be published by Routledge in 2021. He has […]

Esraa Mokaidam

An Egyptian storyteller and scriptwriter, Esraa Mokaidam published Ma Tayasar Min Sirat El Khayfeen, a poetry book in colloquial Egyptian in 2014. She won first place for the short story coffee library project contest in 2016, and second place for the Goethe Institute Cairo Short Stories competition in 2018. She co-authored the Berry Paper series, now […]

Orwa Al Mokdad

Orwa Al Mokdad studies journalism and works for several Syrian and pan-Arab newspapers. He has also been a reporter for Al Jazeera and BBC since the start of the Syrian insurrection, and won the Samir Kassir Award for freedom of the press. He has made several short films, including Street Music (2013), Under the Aleppo Sky (2013) and Under The Tank (2014), selected for Locarno’s section Pardi di domani – Concorso internazionale.
Twitter: @orwaalmokdad

Mammatli Agnes Molefi

Mammatli A. Molefi is a social worker, poet and creative writer. She writes for adults and children in a variety of genres, including romance, action-adventure, fantasy, thriller, horror, mystery, police procedurals, family sagas, women’s fiction and literary fiction. Her short story ‘While Still Breathing’ was published on fundza.mobi, and her poem ‘Memories’ was included in […]

Shanette Monrose

Shanette Monrose is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, and the University of Leicester. She currently works as a schoolteacher in Saint Lucia where she teaches English Language and English Literature.

Sonya Moor

Sonya Moor is a British and French writer of short fiction. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies and recognized for awards such as the Fish Short Story Prize, Cinnamon Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition and Bridport Short Story Prize. www.sonyamoor.com

Sunaina Ruth Priti Mudaliar

Sunaina Ruth Priti Mudaliar is currently based in Bangalore, India, and has been writing and telling stories largely in performance for various theatre festivals in the last decade. She experiments with combining different forms of storytelling through writing, painting and acting. Her storytelling style is often abstract and explores a recurring theme of identity that exists […]

Charlie Muhumuza

Charlie Muhumuza is an Ugandan writer and lawyer. His short fiction has been featured in Jalada Africa, Isele Magazine and elsewhere. He was awarded third prize at the inaugural Kalahari Short Story Competition 2020 and was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize. He lives in Kampala, Uganda.   

Rifat Munim

Rifat Munim is an editor, journalist, bilingual writer, translator and essayist based in Dhaka. He was the literary editor of Dhaka Tribune, a Bangladeshi English daily. His editorial and journalistic work has been focused on presenting Bengali literature to an international readership through English translation. South Asian fiction written in English constitutes one of his major […]

Kavitha Muralidhara

Kavitha Muralidharan is a journalist from Tamil Nadu, a southern State in India, with two decades of experience covering a wide range of issues from politics to culture and cinema. She is also a translator and writer. Kavitha has a poetry collection and a collection of essays in Tamil to her credit. Kavitha has also […]

Samantha Lane Murphy

Samantha Lane Murphy is an Australian-born New Zealand-based writer, with a love for both literature, science fiction, and the spaces in which they meet. She has been published in Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy, and literary New Zealand anthology Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, along with such […]

Perumal Murugan

Perumal Murugan is an Indian author, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in  Tamil. Several of his novels, such as One Part Woman and Poonachi or the Story of a Black Goat, have been translated into English. Trial by Silence and A Lonely Harvest, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Penguin Random House India, 2018), have been shortlisted […]

Kabubu Mutua

Kabubu Mutua (b. 2000) grew up in Machakos county, Kenya. His short story, ‘Small Mercies’, was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize. It was later published in The Hope, The Prayer, The Anthem anthology. His second short story, ‘An Act of Prayer’, appears in A Long House: Origins issue.

Guest Editors Jo Maenzanise, Roopa Farooki & Kevin Mwachiro

Joyline ‘Jo’ Maenzanise is trans nonbinary. Their words have found homes in publications such as Hedone, HOLAAfrica, Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women, Pink News, Healthline, Well+Good, Broadview, Verywell Mind and Kickoff (an online fitness coach). Jo also edits fiction and non-fiction. Some works they’ve edited include children’s and adults’ novels, cover letters, personal statements […]

Kevin Mwachiro

Kevin Mwachiro is a writer, podcaster, journalist and queer activist. His professional media and communications practitioner career is over 20 years old. Kevin’s first book is Invisible – Stories from Kenya’s Queer Community. He was part of the editorial team for Boldly Queer – African Perspectives on Same-sex Sexuality and Gender Diversity. Kevin’s most recent […]

اسراء مقيدم

قاصة وسيناريست مصرية صدر لها “ما تيسّر من سيرة الخايفين”، ديوان شعر بالعامية المصرية عام 2014 . فازت بالمركز الأول لمسابقة مشروع مكتبة القهوة للقصة القصيرة عام 2016. ,فازت بالمركز الثاني KfW Stiftung لمسابقة قصص القاهرة القصيرة التابعة لمعهد جوتة عام 2018. شاركت في تأليف مسلسل ورق التوت، قيد التصوير الآن.هي واحدة من المؤلفين المشاركين […]

مروة ملحم

تعيش مروة ملحم في سوريا حيث تدرس الهندسة المدنية. تكتب مروة القصص القصيرة و الشعر, كما انها تكتب المترجمات . اشتركت ايضا في كتابة “المشروع الأدبي”  بين الكاتبين السوريين و الالمان. حازت على جائزة القصة القصيرة في جائزة الشارقة لعام 2018. نشرت هذا العام مجموعتها للقصص القصيرة  بعنوان “عين ثالثة”

Shabnam Nadiya

Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation Grant (2020), the Steinbeck Fellowship (2019) and the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize. Nadiya’s translations include Leesa Gazi’s novel Hellfire, Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary and Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Beloved Rongomala. www.shabnamnadiya.com

Gaya Nagahawatta

Gaya Nagahawatta enjoys working with language and visuals. To date she has translated a diverse selection of stories and plays from Sinhala into English and vice versa. 

Kavita Ivy Nandan

Kavita Ivy Nandan was born in New Delhi, grew up in Suva and migrated to Australia in 1987. In 2022, she published a book of poetry about the pandemic, Return to What Remains, by Ginninderra Press. She also wrote a novel, Home After Dark, about the search for home in the aftermath of a military […]

Architha Narayanan

Architha Narayanan is a teacher with a bachelor’s in law and a master’s in public policy. She has previously been involved in environmental policy research for organizations such as the UNDP and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, India. She has also coauthored a National Governance Report called the Public Affairs Index, 2017. […]

Emma Neale

Emma Neale is the author of six novels, six collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. Her sixth novel, Billy Bird (2016), was shortlisted for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. Among Emma’s literary fellowships, residencies and awards is the Lauris […]

Christina Ng

Christina Ng is a Singaporean writer, journalist and translator based in Berlin. Her Chinese to English translations include poetry by Singaporean poets Liang Wern Fook, Ting Kheng Siong and Chinese poet Hua Qing. She writes about travel, arts and culture in both English and Chinese.

S. Niroshini

S Niroshini is a writer, poet and artist based in London. Her work focuses on the intersection of language, art, history and the body. Her work has appeared in magazines, books and projects such as The Good Journal, On Bodies: An Anthology by 3 of Cups Press, Token Magazine and Bedtime Stories for the End of the World.    

Kelechi Njoku

Kelechi Njoku is a former radio broadcaster, now an editor and ghost-writer. He is the 2014 West Africa Regional Prize winner of the Writivism Short Story Competition; he was shortlisted in Africa Book Club’s Short Reads (2014) and Naija Stories’ Best Short (2013), and he has also contributed fiction to the Kalahari Review, Nigerians Talk LitMag, Open Road Review, and Aerodrome. He lives in Lagos and Abuja.
Twitter: @Mister_Njoku

Sandra Norsen

Sandra Norsen lives in an historic goldfields town in Australia. She teaches Literature and Humanities at a rural secondary college. Sandra has a B.A. in Literary Studies. Her writing has been published in Australia and the US.  

Sihle Ntuli

Sihle Ntuli is a poet from Durban, South Africa and is a recipient of the 2023 Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies Writing Fellowship for his poetry. His work has been featured in leading journals such as Frontier Poetry, SAND Journal and Mizna, amongst others. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Rumblin (uHlanga 2020) […]

N.S. Nuseibeh

N S Nuseibeh is a Palestinian-English doctoral student at Oxford University, researching the sociology of education. Her interests include issues around identity, inequality, queerness, and learning. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found reading Ben Lerner or binging on Jane the Virgin.     

Emeka Joseph Nwankwo

Emeka Joseph Nwankwo is a writer and digital media professional from Nigeria. He was born and raised in Aba, south-east Nigeria and moved to Lagos to pursue a career in the media and eventually served as the communications manager (Africa) for Cassava Republic Press. Currently working on a master’s degree at the University of Hull, […]

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a Nigerian novelist, journalist and essayist. Her debut novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Africa), a Betty Trask First Book Award, and was named by the Washington Post as one of the Best Books of the Year. Her writing has appeared in scores of publications around the world, including the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Guardian. Nwaubani works as a part-time Nigeria correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and writes a regular column for the BBC’s ‘Letters from Africa’ section. Her debut Young Adult novel, Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree, will be published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in fall 2018.

Adorah Nworah

Adorah Nworah is an Igbo storyteller from Anambra State in Eastern Nigeria. She earned her juris doctorate from Temple Law School in 2018, and currently practices commercial real estate finance law in Philadelphia. Her short story, ‘Broken English’, was long-listed for the 2018 Short Story Day Africa prize.  

Stephanie Chizoba Odili

Stephanie Chizoba Odili is a London-born Nigerian writer. She is the author of three books: Deafening Silence, her debut novel which won the 2019 1st runner up of the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize For Prose Fiction; 22, a collection of poems and short stories; and The Lean Wedding: How To Get Married With As […]

Chisom Okafor

Chisom Okafor is a Nigerian poet, who has worked as a nutritionist, dietitian, bartender, accountant and night auditor. He was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize in 2019. His work appears in the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, SAND Journal, 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology, The Rising […]

Kunle Okesipe

Kunle Okesipe is a Nigerian poet and playwright whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Revolution Relaunch (TRR), The Tiger Moth and a number of anthologies. He has also won prizes for his plays.    

Ben Okri

Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, and playwright. His novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. His works have been translated into 26 languages. He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Okri’s books have won numerous […]

Olufunke Ogundimu

Olufunke Ogundimu was born in Lagos, Nigeria. She is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas MFA International programme in fiction. Her short story “The Armed Letter Writers” won a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She is a 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing finalist and Miles Morland Writing Scholarship finalist. She […]

Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen

A ni-Vanuatu poet, storyteller and editor, Rebecca coedited Vanuatu’s first women’s anthology, Sista, Stanap Strong! (THWUP, 2021) and first non-fiction children’s book, Taf Tumas. Her poems and short stories were published in anthologies in Vanuatu, Fiji and Aotearoa, including Sport 47, Voes, Rising Tides, A Game Of Two Halves, Va – Stories by Women of the Moana, and a collaborative poem was […]

Troy Onyango

Troy Onyango is a Kenyan writer. His work has been published in Wasafiri, Johannesburg Review of Books, AFREADA, Caine Prize Anthology, Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review and Transition among others. He was the winner of the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival Prize, was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award and Award for Creative Nonfiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He […]

Ella Otomewo

Ella Otomewo is a performance poet based in Manchester. She facilitates creative writing workshops and has performed at numerous spoken word events up and down the country, as well as appearing in ‘Other Voices’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016. She is part of Young Identity, a spoken word collective based in Manchester that uses performance to expose young people’s issues, and was also chosen to be part of Words First, the BBC’s first spoken word season in collaboration with Roundhouse Theatre; writing and performing with other poets in her region. Ella’s work is feminist, candid, and reflective.
Twitter: @black_poetess

Ahilan Packiyanathan

Ahilan Packiyanathan, born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, is a senior lecturer in Art History at the University of Jaffna. He has published three poetry collections: Pathunkukuzhi Naatkal (2001),  Saramakavigal   (2011) and Ammai (2017). An English translation of his poems, Then There Were No Witnesses, was published by Mawenzi House in 2018.  He writes critical essays on poetry, heritage, theatre and visual […]

Kritika Pandey

Kritika Pandey is a Pushcart-nominated Indian writer and a final year MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a recipient of a 2020 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her works are forthcoming or have appeared in Guernica, The Common, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Raleigh Review, and UCity Review, among others. She […]

Manoj Kumar Pandey

Manoj Kumar Pandey, born in the village Siswaan in the District of Allahabad, has a postgraduate degree in Hindi Literature from Allahabad University. He is an editor, short story writer and a critic and has published four short story collections titled Shahtoot – The Mulberries, Paani – The Water, Khajana – The Treasure, and Badalta […]

Somasuntharampillai Pathmanthan

Somasuntharampillai Pathmanthan (‘Sopa’) is from Kokuvil, Sri Lanka. He is the recipient of several state and provincial awards. He has published three volumes of his own poetry and three collections of poems in translation, locally and internationally. Sopa has presented papers in many international fora including SAARC Literature Festivals (Delhi), Poets Translating Poets (Frankfurt, Mumbai […]

Ingrid Persaud

Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. She read law at the LSE and was an academic before studying fine art at Goldsmiths and Central Saint Martins. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Prospect, The Guardian, The Independent, National Geographic, […]

Bridget Pitt

Bridget Pitt is a South African writer, environmental activist and art teacher who was born in Zimbabwe and lives in Cape Town. Her fist published writing was for grassroots newspapers, which was part of the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1980s. Her crime fiction novel The Unseen Leopard was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2011, and for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.

Jonathan Pizarro

Jonathan Pizarro is a Gibraltarian writer living in London. He studied Creative Writing at Brunel University, where he was mentored by Bernardine Evaristo. His short fiction has featured in Popshot, Litro, & Untitled: Voices, amongst others. He writes ‘Chasing Nelson’, an arts & culture column for the Gibraltar Chronicle. His short story ‘Luz in Nueva […]

Anita Lakshmi Powell

Anita Lakshmi Powell is a radio/TV journalist who covers Southern Africa. She was born in Australia to immigrant parents, moved to Texas as a child and has lived in six countries as an adult. She now lives in Johannesburg with her family, which stars her two-year-old daughter. She is very grateful to Commonwealth Writers for […]

Lina Protopapa

Lina Protopapa lives in Nicosia, Cyprus, where she works as a translator and cultural critic.   

Sujash Purna

Sujash Purna is a Bangladeshi poet and photographer. A PhD English fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is the author of Epidemic of Nostalgia (Finishing Line Press) and Biriyani (Poet’s Haven). His poetry appears in South Carolina Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Kansas City Voices, Poetry Salzburg Review, Gutter, Stonecoast Review, and others. His photography […]

Alboricah Tokologo Rathupetsane

Alboricah Tokologo Rathupetsane is a 28 year old writer from South Africa whose passions are writing and art which she uses to express her feelings and ideas. Alboricah grew up in a rural village in the Province of Limpopo, South Africa, and currently lives and works in Port Elizabeth.   

Matshediso Radebe

Matshediso Radebe is a South African fiction writer. Born in 2000, Matshediso enjoys writing character-based stories and troubled characters with interesting relationships and compelling dynamics drive her storytelling. Matshediso won the SA Writers College Short Story Competition in 2022. @Khantri_xo @Khantri_xo

Johan Radzi

Johan Radzi is a practising lawyer based in Selangor, Malaysia. He writes short stories and essays on all things under the scorching tropical sun. His published works include Tinju dan Peluru (2017) and Stesen Titik Nol (2020), a collection of travel essays on his short sojourn in Indochina pre-Covid-19.        Johan Radzi ialah peguam dan menetap di Selangor, Malaysia. Beliau […]

Usha Rajagopalan

Usha Rajagopalan is a writer, translator and conservationist from Bengaluru, India. She is the author of three novels, two volumes of poetry translated from Tamil and one collection of short stories. She won prizes three times consecutively in the annual short story competition of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, including the regional prize in 2001.

Pritika Rao

Pritika Rao is an economist and freelance writer from Bangalore, India. She has a master’s degree in economics from the University of Warwick and has worked in the areas of analytics, behavioural economics, and healthcare. She is the editor of Rewrite Mag – a repository of rejected writing. In 2018, she won second prize in […]

Tanjil Rashid

Tanjil Rashid is a reporter for the BBC in London. He has written about literature, politics and the arts for the Financial Times, the Guardian and Prospect, and his short stories have been published in Story Quarterly and Hourglass. His other interests include literary translation. He is one of the Goethe Institut’s Emerging Translators of 2017 and was shortlisted for the Harvill Secker Young Translators Prize in 2016.
Twitter: @mitteleuropean

Lynne Robertson

Lynne Robertson is recent graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington. She is the recipient of a project scholarship which she is using to prepare her collection of short stories for publication. Her work has been published in Turbine and Radio New Zealand. Lynne is passionate […]

Fiona Robertson

Fiona Robertson lives in Brisbane, Australia and writes short fiction. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines, and have been shortlisted for international short story awards including the Bridport and Fish Prizes. She recently completed her first short story collection, an extract of which was shortlisted for the 2018 Richell Prize (Hachette).

Eliza Robertson

Eliza Robertson’s 2014 debut collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize, and selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Demi-Gods, was a Globe & Mail and National Post book of the year and the winner of the 2018 QWF Paragraphe […]

Mary Rokonadravu

Mary Rokonadravu is a Fijian writer. She ran a prison writing programme in seven correctional facilities in Fiji’s capital, Suva, for four years, and edited the Pacific’s first anthology of prison writing, shedding silences, in 2008. She won the 2015 Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Pacific) and was shortlisted in 2017. Her dream is to contribute to the growth of a vibrant Pacific islands writing and publishing sector – and to Pacific islanders reading and valuing their own stories and voices.
Twitter: @rokonadravu2

Sourav Roy

Sourav Roy is a journalist, Hindi poet, translator and educator. He is the founding editor of Bengaluru Review magazine, has worked as a visiting faculty member at Azim Premji University and NIFT Bengaluru and is currently teaching at Head Start Educational Academy. His published books include Yayavar (collection of poems), Karnakavita (editor: anthology of Hindi-Urdu […]

Poetry and Spoken Word Guest Editors: Melizarani T. Selva and Keith Jarrett

Melizarani T. Selva is a Malaysian writer and spoken word poet. Her first book, Taboo, is a poetic interrogation of the Malaysian Indian identity. She is the co-editor of The Second Link – A Malaysia-Singapore Literary Anthology by Marshall Cavendish and co-published When I Say Spoken, You Say Word!, a collection of 100 poems by 61 poets from Malaysia. Her debut play, […]

Sadaf Saaz

Sadaf Saaz is a poet, writer, entrepreneur and women’s rights advocate. She grew up in the UK, where she studied Molecular Biology at Cambridge. She now lives in Dhaka, where she is involved in a range of initiatives as a cultural activist and curator. She is a festival director and the producer of the annual Dhaka Literary Festival (previously Hay Festival Dhaka), which she co-founded in 2011. She is the author of a collection of poems Sari Reams, and her monologues based on Bangladeshi women’s experiences,  Je Kotha Jai Na Bola (That which cannot be said), have been performed in various locations in Bangladesh. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies and international literary journals including Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, Critical Muslim, Weber and Bengal Lights.

Muhammad Haji Salleh

Muhammad Haji Salleh is Emeritus Professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia. In Leiden he held the Chair of Malay Studies, while in Berkeley and Harvard he was an academic and research fellow. He was also a fellow at the University of Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Muhammad is a poet and critic (in Malay […]

Muhammad Abdul Sami

Muhammad Abdul Sami is from Pakistan and is currently doing a Masters in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has worked as a journalist, script writer and translator. Occasionally he finishes one of the dozen short stories he has begun to write.

Janeen Samuel

Janeen Samuel was born in England but migrated to South Australia at the age of three. She grew up in Adelaide, then moved to Queensland to study veterinary science. An unpublished writer, she now lives in rural Victoria surrounded by slumbering volcanos, sheep, red-gum trees, and the occasional kangaroo.

Nnadi Samuel

Nnadi Samuel (he/him/his) holds a B.A in English and Literature from the University of Benin. His works appear or are forthcoming in Suburban Review, Seventh Wave Magazine, Native Skin Literary Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Miracle Monocle Award for Ambitious Student Writers 2021 (University of Louisville), Penrose Poetry Prize […]

Maria Samuela

Maria Samuela writes for children and adults. She’s been published in the School Journal and had stories translated into five Pacific languages. Her stories are broadcast on National Radio and her adult stories have appeared in Turbine, Sport, and Takahē. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and was the 2018 University Bookshop / Robert Lord Cottage summer writer […]

Tim Saunders

Tim Saunders farms sheep and beef near Palmerston North in New Zealand. He has had poetry and short stories published in Turbine|Kapohau, takahē, Landfall, Poetry NZ Yearbook and Flash Frontier. He won the 2018 Mindfood Magazine Short Story Competition and placed third in the 2019 and 2020 New Zealand National Flash Fiction Day Awards. His […]

Jasmine Sealy

Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian- Canadian writer of short fiction. In 2014 she was short- listed for the CBC Quebec Writing Competition. She has been previously published in Salut King Kong: New English Writing from Quebec (2014) and the Emerge Anthology (2016). She lives in Vancouver and is a graduate of the The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
Twitter: @jasminesealy

Stefanie Seddon

Stefanie Seddon grew up on a farm in New Zealand and moved to the UK after completing a degree in English Literature at the University of Otago. Stefanie is currently studying the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and is working on a novel inspired by the high country landscapes and rural communities of her native New Zealand.
Twitter: @stefseddon

Sarmad Sehbai

Sarmad Sehbai is a poet, playwright, film and theatre director from Pakistan who works in Urdu, Punjabi and English. He is the author of numerous poetry collections including Neeli Kay Su Rung, Un Kahi Baton ki Thakan and Pal Bhar ka Bahisht. His film Mah-e-Mir was Pakistan’s official nominee for Oscars in 2017 and garnered Sehbai a Lifetime Achievement […]

Moso Sematlane

Moso Sematlane is a writer and filmmaker based between Maseru, Lesotho, and Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been published in Nat Brut and is an assistant editor at Lolwe magazine.

Olive Senior

Olive Senior is the prizewinning author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature. Her work is taught internationally and has been widely translated. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, among others, and has been shortlisted for Canada’s Governor-General’s award for poetry. A […]

Rafee Shaams

Rafee Shaams is an essayist and short story writer based in Dhaka. He is the author of Who Even Cares Who Cares? (Bengal Publications, 2016). His essays and fiction have appeared in Six Seasons Review, Jamini and the literary pages of Dhaka Tribune and The Daily Star, Bangladesh.

Bina Shah

Bina Shah is a writer of English fiction and journalist living in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She is a regular columnist for the International New York Times, the Dawn, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and has written for the Independent and the Guardian. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published in Granta, Wasafiri, the Istanbul Review, Bengal Lights, Asian Cha, and Critical Muslim.
Twitter: @BinaShah

Taimoor Shahid

Taimoor Shahid is a multilingual poet, writer, scholar and translator working with literatures in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Seraiki, Dakkani, Bengali and other South Asian languages. His book-length works include The Madness of Waiting and The Dangerous Man, translations of two Urdu classics into English, and A Desertful of Petals, a complete concordance of Ghalib’s Urdu divan. His essays, poetry, […]

Slim Shaka

David Otieno, aka Slim Shaka, is a performance poet and a storyteller based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also the reigning Poetry Slam Africa champion(65th) and represented Kenya at the World Poetry Slam in Brazil in October 2023. Shaka has written and performed six poetry productions, the latest being Of a Dying Breed, a two-hour […]

Eman Sharabati

Eman Sharabati was born in Jerusalem, where she still lives. She works in the field of culture in Palestine, and studied Contemporary Arab Studies at Birzeit University. This is her first published story.  

Carinya Sharples

Carinya Sharples is a writer, facilitator and teacher. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published by The London Reader, BBC World Service, Gal-Dem, among others. She was longlisted for Mslexia’s Short Story Competition 2022, selected to read at Kendal Mountain Literature Festival 2021’s Open Mountain event, and shortlisted for Rebel Women Lit’s Caribbean Reader’s Awards 2020 (Non-Fiction […]

Mira Sidawi

Mira Sidawi is a Palestinian actress, director and writer. She graduated from the Lebanese University with a Theatre diploma.
In 2015 she created her first short film, Four Wheels Camp. She has acted in a number of short films and feature films including Permission, Instead of a Homeland and Mon Souflé. She has also co-written and acted in the play Ayoube about a Palestinian woman who faces her own struggles and obstacles. She is now preparing for her first feature film which takes place between Bourj Barajani and Shatila camps.

Yvonne Singh

Yvonne Singh is a journalist, writer and editor based in Kent, England, and has spent more than two decades working in national newspapers and magazines. She was a staff journalist at The Guardian and her work has appeared in that paper as well as The Observer, The Mirror, The London Evening Standard, BBC world website […]

Hannah Singh

Hannah Singh teaches English Literature and Language at the Secondary level. She is currently in her third year of the English programme at the University of Guyana. Her poems have been shortlisted in local magazines, like the Guyana Annual. Her first publication, Little Brown Boy, appeared in an online magazine, Aster Lit. She is also […]

Ratnam Singh

Ratnam Singh is a writer by profession and passion. She believes reading and writing can also be survival tools. She has been working on her first book since the pandemic, alongside a full-time job. https://www.instagram.com/a_ruminant/?utm_medium=copy_link

Vidit Singh

Vidit Singh is an undergraduate student of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. As a literary translator, he aims to bring local and intimate stories to light through his work. Along with literature, he is deeply passionate about cinema and theatre. Currently, he spends his days chasing deadlines and longing for Old Delhi’s street […]

Peter Sipeli

Peter Sipeli has more than two decades of expertise in using and managing advocacy through artistic expression. He is an Arts Manager and supporter of the Spokenword arts movement in Fiji. Peter founded The Poetry Shop, Fiji six years ago and facilitates regular poetry events in Suva and poetry circle discussions with new and emerging […]

Sumathy Sivamohan

Sumathy Sivamohan is an award winning film maker, performer, poet and academic. Professor in English at the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Her films, Ingirunthu (Here and Now), Sons and Fathers, Oranges and Upheaval have won international acclaim and her set of two plays Thin Veils was awarded the Gratiaen Prize for Best of Literature in English in 2001. […]

James Smart

James Smart is from Barnsley in the North of England. He is studying an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmertrain, Reflex Fiction, Spelk, Friction, Spilling Ink and elsewhere. He is working on a novel and is currently seeking representation. You can find […]

Anna Sophia

Anna Sophia is an intermittent writer and a counsellor and has been the manager of a nonprofit community counselling service based in the Rangitikei region of Aotearoa, New Zealand for 23 years. She lives in Papaioea in a tiny cottage where she has raised two sons with a 21-year age gap between them. After a […]

Constantia Soteriou 

Constantia Soteriou was born in Nicosia in 1975. Her first novel Aishe goes on vacation (Patakis, 2015) received the Athens Prize for Literature. Her second book Voices made of soil (Patakis, 2017) was included in the short list for the Cyprus Literature Awards. She has written plays for independent stages and the Cyprus Theatre Organization.

VK Sreelesh

VK Sreelesh is a poet and writer based in Kerala. He has previously contributed to the US food magazine Saveur, Boog City (New York) and Women’s Era ( India).

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a fiction writer based in Chennai, India. Her work in Tamil, which she also translates into English, is mostly about relationship angst. She is also an independent journalist who writes on a range of subjects such as business, technology, food and the environment.  

Stephanos Stephanides

Stephanos Stephanides is a poet, essay and memoirist, translator, cultural critic, documentary filmmaker, and professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. Selections of his poetry have been published in more than twelve languages. He was awarded first prize for poetry from the American Anthropological Association, 1988, and first prize for video poetry for his film Poets in No Man’s Land at the Nicosia International Film Festival. He was a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, 2000, 2010) and is a Fellow of the English Association, Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy. Representative publications include Translating Kali’s Feast: the Goddess in Indo-Caribbean Ritual and Fiction (2000), Blue Moon in Rajasthan and other poems (2005). He was born and lives in Cyprus.

Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart is a writer and artist in Montreal. He co-founded the Institute for the Calibration of Reality (realitycalibration.com) with artist Indigo Esmonde. He has a master’s in mathematics from McGill (Montreal) and a PhD in music from City University (London). His sonic artwork has been presented in concerts and galleries worldwide. His story ‘Comparative […]

Geetha Sukumaran

Geetha Sukumaran is a poet and a bilingual translator of both Tamil and English poetry. She has published two books in Tamil: Tharkolaikku parakkum panithuli (Tamil translation of Sylvia Plath’s poems, 2013) and her own poems, Otrai pakadaiyil enchum nampikkai in 2014. Her English translation of Ahilan’s poetry, titled Then There Were No Witnesses, was published by Mawenzi House, Toronto (2018). She is the recipient of the SPARROW-R Thyagarajan award for her poetry in Tamil and is a doctoral student in […]

Basudev Sunani

Basudev Sunani (born 1962) is an award-winning writer, in Odia and English, from Odisha. His poems (‘Asprushya’, ‘Karadi Haat’  and ‘Chhi’, among others), novels (Padaa Podi and Mashanee Sahara Delhi), stories, essays (in Dalit Encounter, Ambedkarism: A Way of Life, among others), translations, science writings and documentaries are widely read. His works have been translated into […]

Fiona Sussman

Fiona Sussman is an award-winning novelist and short–story writer, who was born in South Africa and moved to New Zealand in 1989. She worked as a family doctor before hanging up her stethoscope to pursue another long-held dream – to write. When not writing or mentoring creative writing students, she helps manage the charitable surgical service she and her husband established in Auckland.   www.fionasussman.co.nz   

Radhika Swarup

Radhika Swarup is a lapsed banker and now a writer. Her work explores the themes of identity and exile and often examines events from a feminist lens. ‘This Coronavirus Business’ forms part of The New New Delhi Book Club, a collection of interlinked short stories set during New Delhi’s 2020 Covid lockdown.  It will be published by Westland Tranquebar in October […]

ا صيداوي

ميرا صيداوي ممثلة, مخرجة و كاتبة فلسطينية. حصلت على دبلوم مسرح من الجامعة اللبنانية .
انتجت ميرا فيلمها الاول “مخيم على أربع عجلات” في 2015, ومثلت في عدد من الأفلام القصيرة و الافلام الروائية من ضمنها فيلم “الإذن” , “وطن بديل”, و “نفسي”. كما أنها اشتركت في كتابة والتمثيل في مسرحية “أيوب” التي تتناول قصة امرأة فلسطينية في مواجهة العوائق والصعوبات. تحضر ميرا حاليا لفيلمها الروائي الأول الذي تجري احداثه بين برج براجنة و مخيم شاتيلا.

Ojo Taiye

Ojo Taiye is  a cultural heritage practitioner, eco-activist, writer, poet, researcher and budding photographer whose work engages with history, memory and archive from a dynamic and nuanced perspective. He makes use of collage and sampling techniques and shares a passion for the intersection of culture, language, perception and the environment. His practice is collaborative, working […]

Shagufta Sharmeen Tania

Born in Bangladesh and initially trained as an architect, Shagufta Sharmeen Tania has authored nine books. She translated Susan Fletcher’s Eve Green and Antonio Skarmeta’s Burning Patience, from English to Bengali. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Asia Literary Review, City Press and Speaking Volumes Anthology and Massachusetts Review. Shagufta received the Bangla Academy Syed Waliullah […]

Bilal Tanweer

Bilal Tanweer’s novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great (HarperCollins) won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Chautauqua Prize (US). The novel has been translated into French and German. His translation of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar’s novel and stories was published as Love […]

Sukhada Tatke

Sukhada Tatke is an Indian journalist living in France, where she recently moved after spending four years in the United States. She is interested in social justice, politics, culture, urban affairs, race, immigration and the South Asian diaspora. Her writing has appeared in American publications such as Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, Pacific Standard, Atlas Obscura, […]

Sharma Taylor

A lawyer by profession, a writer by passion, Sharma was the inaugural winner of the 2019 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize (for fiction) for emerging writers, administered by the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago and Arvon in the UK. She was also the winner of the 22nd annual Frank Collymore Literary […]

Jonathan Tel

Jonathan Tel won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2015. He has won various other awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, and the Sunday Times EFG Story Prize. All of these were for stories set in China, which in revised form are now chapters in the highly praised […]

Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang has translated works by writers including Yeng Pway Ngon, Su Wei-Chen, Yan Ge, Zhang Yueran, Chan Ho-Kei, and Li Er. He is the author of the short story collection It Never Rains on National Day (2015) and the novel State of Emergency (2017). www.JeremyTiang.com

Alexia Tolas

Alexia Tolas is a Bahamian writer whose stories explore small-island life and local mythology to convey realities, silenced by tradition and trauma. Her writing has been featured in Womanspeak, Granta, Windrush, adda, and The Caribbean Writer. In 2019, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Regional Award for the Caribbean and was shortlisted for the 2020 […]

Nadine Tomlinson

Nadine Tomlinson is a Jamaican writer and speculative storyteller. Her short stories and poems feature elements of African lore in Caribbean culture.  

Efua Traoré

Efua Traoré is a Nigerian-German writer who grew up in a little town in the south of Nigeria. For as long as she can remember, her head was always filled with little stories, but it was not until her late twenties that she discovered her passion for writing them down. After winning a Glimmer Train […]

Shash Trevett

Shash Trevett is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. She is the author of From a Borrowed Land (Smith|Doorstop 2021) and has co-edited (with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne) Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe 2023 and Penguin Random House India 2023). […]

Shikha Tripathi

Shikha Tripathi is a journalist based in Uttarakhand, specialising in outdoor writing and Himalayan ecology with an added interest in culture, sustainable travel, and social stories. Her travel stories appear in a wide variety of publications such as the National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Lonely Planet, and more. Her environmental and social interest stories have […]

Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of the novels Loaded (1995), The Jesus Man (1999), Dead Europe (which won The Age Book of the Year – Novel in 2005) and The Slap (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009). He is also a scriptwriter, filmmaker, essayist and film critic. His works for theatre include Dead Caucasians, Non Parlo di Saló and The Trauma Report.

Iryn Tushabe

A native of Uganda currently resident in Saskatchewan, Canada, Iryn Tushabe is a writer and independent journalist.  Her creative nonfiction has been nominated for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize.  Her short fiction had been anthologised in book seven of the Carter V Cooper short fiction series.  A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, she’s […]

Obi Umeozor

Obi Umeozor received his B.A. in English from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria and taught English Literature before moving to the United States in 2015, where he obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, Shift and other publications. He is currently a […]

Franklyn Usouwa

Franklyn Usouwa is a Nigerian storyteller, studying for an undergraduate degree in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Lagos. He is interested in storytelling in all its  forms but has a particularly soft spot for short stories. Franklyn was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and his short stories have been published […]

Bijal Vachharajani

When Bijal Vachharajani is not reading a children’s book, she is writing or editing one. Her books include A Cloud Called Bhura – which won the Women AutHer Children’s Book Award 2020; So You Want to Know About the Environment, What’s Neema Eating Today? and The Seed Savers. Editor Scissorhands at Pratham Books, Bijal has a Masters in Environment Security and Peace from the […]

Vivimarie VanderPoorten

Vivimarie VanderPoorten is a Sri Lankan poet writing in English, whose first book Nothing Prepares You won the 2007 Gratiaen Award. She is a university lecturer and has a PhD in Educational Sociolinguistics from the University of Ulster, UK. She has published two award-winning volumes of poetry. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, […]

Vidhan Verma

Vidhan Verma grew up in a small town in India and graduated with a degree in business. An unpublished writer, he’s now based in Bangalore but longs to go gathering stories in small town India. @vidhanverma

Joshua Wales

Joshua Wales is a Toronto-based palliative care physician and writer, with recent work in Contemporary Verse 2, Plenitudes, Grain, The New Quarterly, the Globe and Mail, the New England Journal of Medicine and on the CBC. He won the 2020 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, and his work has been shortlisted for PRISM international’s Jacob Zilber […]

Alice Wangui

Alice Wangui is an award-winning Kenyan filmmaker and writer. Her works are centred on social issues pervading Africa. She currently lives in Singapore with her family.

Andrea Nadine West

Andrea N. West, a native of Belize City, Belize, debuted as a writer with the publication of her short story, ‘Krismos Dina/Christmas Dinner’, in Bent Pin Press Literary Journal. ‘Da Jos Shillng/It’s Just a Shilling’, an excerpt from her novel in progress, was showcased in the Institute of Creative Arts-Belize Womxn in Art 2022 exhibit. […]

Jessica White

Jessica’s short fiction, essays and poetry have been published in Southerly, Island, The Review of Australia Fiction and Overland. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy, won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie prize and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. Her second novel, Entitlement, was also published by Penguin in 2012.
Twitter: @ladyredjess

Rukshani Weerasooriya Wijemanne

Rukshani Weerasooriya Wijemanne writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, musical parodies, and rhyming stories. She holds a Master of Laws from King’s College London (2009). Rukshani lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. @rukieculous

Athol Williams

Athol Williams is an award-winning South African poet and social philosopher. He has published four collections of poetry, had poems published in forty literary publications and received four poetry awards – Sol Plaatje EU Poetry Award for 2015 & 2016, 2016 Parallel Universe Poetry Prize at Oxford University and the 2017 South African Independent Publishers […]

D. W. Wilson

D. W. Wilson is a Canadian author born in Cranbrook, British Columbia. He is the author of Once You Break a Knuckle, a short story collection, and Ballistics, a novel. His fiction and essays have appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Grain, TNQ, The Malahat Review, and Prospect.
Twitter: @RedneckAbroad

Mark Winkler

Mark has spent his working life in advertising, winning over thirty local and international advertising awards. He is currently creative director at a leading Cape Town agency. Mark’s first novel, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Absolutely Everything, was published in 2013, and his second, Wasted, in 2015. His third novel, The Safest Place You Know, will be published in September 2016.
Twitter: @giantblackdog

Andy Winter

Andy Winter (they/them/she/her) is a non-binary transfemme ice goddess living in the warm tropics of Singapore. Their works have appeared in Stellium, Strange Horizons, EnbyLife and beestung amongst others. Find them chilling at https://whispersinwinter.wordpress.com/

Penny Woods

Penny Woods writes short and flash fiction. Her work appears in the Manchester Review, Litro, Mslexia, East of the Web, and Reflex Press. She lives in London.  

Rasiah Yuvendra (Thirukovil Kaviyuvan)

Rasiah Yuvendra’s pen name is Thirukovil Kaviyuvan. He was born at Thirukkovil in Ampara District, Sri Lanka, and has a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Moratuwa. Thirukovil Kaviyuvan is now employed in the Zonal Education office in Thirukkovil. He published Vaaldhal Enpathu (What living means …), a collection of short stories, in 1996.  […]

Tryphena Yeboah

Tryphena Yeboah is a Ghanaian writer and the author of the poetry chapbook A Mouthful of Home (Akashic Books, 2020). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Lit Hub, among others. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, studying English with an emphasis in creative writing. […]

Yee Heng Yeh

Born and based in Malaysia, Yee Heng Yeh currently works as a translator and proofreader while writing in his spare time. ‘Knowing Time’ is his first poem in an international publication. Unsurprisingly, he thinks a lot about the passage of time.     

Chela Yego

Chela Yego is a visual artist based in Nairobi. Her work as an illustrator and collage artist is drawn from childhood nostalgia and her love for literature. She explores art as a form of storytelling.

Dan Ying

Lew Poo Chan, better known by her pen name Dan Ying, is a Chinese-Singapore poetess and a Chinese language lecturer at National University of Singapore where she retired in 2003. Her published works included Poems of Taiji (1979), Time Passing Through My Hairs (1993), The Human World Affairs (2012) and The Road of Poetry (2017). She has won many literary prizes including two […]

Nariman Youssef

Nariman Youssef is a semi-freelance multilingual translator working primarily between Arabic and English. Literary translations include Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter, Donia Kamal’s Cigarette No. 7, contributions in Words Without Borders, The Common, Banipal magazine, and the poetry anthologies Beirut39 and The Hundred Years’ War. Nariman holds master’s degrees in Cultural & Critical Studies (Birkbeck) and Translation Studies (Edinburgh), and is […]

Sidra Zia

Sidra Zia is a teacher of history and a marketer in limbo. Her avid obsession with tea and the seaside often takes her far from her hometown of Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously been published in local publications, and echoes the simplicity of her lifelong motif; if you see food, you eat food.

Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translations from the French range from Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins and The Living Days to the Dardenne brothers’ diaries and Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child. Among other honors, he has received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories.