A revolution took place in the United States after Emancipation. A great migration north of the formerly enslaved brought with it convulsive changes in the organisation of cities, the shape of communities, and the practices of everyday life. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (2019), Saidiya Hartman charts the nature of those changes, tracking African American women and queer radicals who were pathologised...

Literary translations are everywhere, but how and why they’re undertaken is often hidden. In this special episode, that coincides with the beginning of Women in Translation Month, poet and novelist Meena Kandasamy explains her routes into and through her translation of Tamil writer Salma’s novel Women Dreaming. The book details the experiences of an extended family of Muslim women who live and long in a small village, and who are forced to confront cultural and practical obstacles to the...

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan burst onto the international poetry scene when a recording of her performance of her Islamophobia-excoriating 'This Is Not a Humanising Poem' at the 2017 Roundhouse Poetry Slam went viral, gathering over two million views online. Since then, she has become an outspoken critic of the marginalisation of Muslims in Britain, an educator, and a writer of renown, with work published in The Guardian, The Independent and several anti-racist anthologies, and performances around...

How do you tell the story of those who haven't had their stories told? Bernardine Evaristo is a Booker-Prize-winning novelist and decades-long champion of up-and-coming writers. On this episode, she describes her own early career: her years of drafting, redrafting, publishing, then redrafting again, her first verse novel Lara (1997 & 2009). Written in the narrative poetry form that has become Bernardine's signature, Lara spans generations and continents to present the origins of a mixed...

Rob Nixon is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor of the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. His fourth book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), uniquely made waves across the academic fields of the humanities and in the world of climate change activism. In this episode, Rob details the book's origins in his campaigning for the release of Ken Saro-Wiwa, in his anti-apartheid activism, and in his writing about the nuclear aftermath of...

Johny Pitts is a multiple-award-winning writer, photographer, and broadcast journalist, originally from Sheffield, England. His first book, Afropean (2020), combines travel writing, photography, history, and slices of memoir into a nonfiction work that seeks to sketch the many lives lived by Black people in contemporary Europe. In this fascinating interview, he tells the story of how he moved from wandering the streets and record stores of his hometown, lost, to becoming the head of...

Daniel Mella is one of the leading writers in contemporary Latin American literature. Born and based in Montevideo, Uruguay, he is a two-time winner of the Bartolomé Hildago Prize. His autofiction novel El Hermano mayor (2017) is his first translated into English, by Megan McDowell, as Older Brother (Charco Press, 2018). In this episode, he discusses the difficult process of converting the real-life tragedy that inspired the novel into a fictionalised account, the dangers of viewing the world...

Chen Chen is an award-winning poet based in the United States. In this episode, he talks about the composition, editing, re-editing (and re-editing), process of his poem 'Nature Poem' published in his debut National Book award longlisted collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017 and Bloodaxe Books, 2019). On apocalyptic pineapples, giving yourself permission, and what writers can learn from Marie Kondo.   'Sometimes you have to make mistakes,...

Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand. In this wide-ranging reflection on writing her memoir and travel diary Tiny Moons, she discusses trying (and failing) to become more Chinese in Shanghai, the language of the body, and the politics of the untranslated.   'I want to intentionally decentre English as the main language and decentre Western ideas about Asia and Asian languages ...'   In 2018, Nina was one of three winners of the Women Poets' Prize, and in 2019...

Calling all lovers of reading and literature! Join Wasafiri's Malachi McIntosh and your favourite international writers including Daniel Mella, Chen Chen, Bernadine Evaristo, and Raymond Antrobus to take you on a journey behind the scenes and unpack the often-hidden side of how their work was created. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.