Commonworld
Mahmoud Darwish, the revered Palestinian poet, said of exile: I carry it everywhere, as I carry my homeland.
Edited by: Lucy Hannah
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Common world
Lucy Hannah
“One of the many joys of reading is that of being transported to another world, far from our own, In this edition, writers explore the messy afterlife of colonialism, and grapple with how to shape our identity in today’s Commonworld.”
Lucy Hannah is the founder and director of Untold Stories and of Commonwealth Writers.
Kopuwai
Stefanie Seddon
“You never lose the view you grow up with. Whether it’s a windswept mountain or the sea or a tower block, the images that frame your childhood stay with you.”
Author Stefanie Seddon catches herself looking back at an upbringing in New Zealand, ‘trying to make sense of the view'.
The green room
Jacob Ross
“This novel deserved the prize: She handed it to Catriona: thick, mango-yellow cover, an image of the curled petal of a hibiscus flower in free-fall.”
A short story by Jacob Ross, author, editor and anthologist whose crime novel The Bone Readers won the inaugural Jhalak Prize in 2017.
Raising the dead
Nadifa Mohamed
“If a tombstone is a work of literature, what does it mean if it can only tell you that the body that lies beneath is unknown?”
Nadifa Mohamed relies on writing in print to bring to life untold stories from the past: ‘what we can never know, we can re-imagine.’
The family
Romesh Gunesekera
“This hat has travelled from Russia to Afghanistan. It belonged to the Tsar’s cousin. During the Bolshevik revolution his valet escaped with it.”
Romesh Gunesekera discovers a family secret when visiting his father's factory in Sri Lanka.
Fish out of two waters
Monique Roffey
“Being a hybrid, a creole, has given me the gift of double sight, a double take from the outside, and this goes both ways.”
Trinidadian-British writer Monique Roffey explains how she uses her hybrid identity as a useful vantage point to inspire the creation of new work.
A common world
Gillian Slovo and Kamila Shamsie
“There is a common world, and one of the things we have in common at the moment is a lot of divisions, but literature has always existed in those moments and through those moments.”
Gillian Slovo observes that it’s often easier to write linked short stories in a censored, pressured environment than to write a longer novel.
Our world
Robert Huggins
Robert Huggins’s photos remind us that literature lives like people everywhere in the world.
Robert Huggins focuses on impromptu street portraits, with most of his subjects being people he has met on the street and had an interesting conversation with.