For Sarah Howe, the English-speaking daughter of an orphaned Chinese mother, the themes of motherhood and mother tongue are inextricably linked.
In literary studies, we tend to think of cultural forms (poems/plays/novels) as imaginatively conjured containers for a particular writer’s plot and characters…
Reviewers often position Mimi Khalvati as a ‘Persian poet’ due to her inclusion of Persian imagery, form, and the occasional line of Farsi in her poetry.
‘My first book is about the loss of a twin, what happens beyond that loss’, says Diana Evans in a 2018 BBC radio interview.
The heart of Nadeem Aslam’s third novel, The Wasted Vigil (2008), echoes John Berger’s often quoted claim (excerpted from his Booker-winning novel G.): ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one’.
Caleb Femi’s work compels his audience to move away from a modern dependence on the written word…
Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist follows the experiences of the chameleon-like protagonist, Pran Nath…
A House for Mr Biswas has been canonized, as Harish Trivedi says, ‘as one of the greatest postcolonial novels in English’. […]
Alvi’s poem, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ (‘a little night music’) shares its title with a Mozart serenade (No. 13 for Strings in G Major) and a Stephen Sondheim musical. But its direct point of reference is a 1943 painting, ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, by the American surrealist Dorothea Tanning. […]
On the selection of this text for Best Collection, Chair of the 2016 Forward Prize panel Malika Booker noted that Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation (2016) captures what it is to inhabit liminal spaces. […]