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. […]
Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners is structured in three distinct sections. It tells the stories of three black men living in England at different points in the country’s history. […]
Upon receiving the Golden PEN Award in 2012, Linton Kwesi Johnson emphasized in his acceptance speech that he saw himself as a child of the Caribbean Artist Movement (CAM)…
Daljit Nagra’s ‘For the Wealth of India’ maps the experience of a British Indian woman who returns to her ‘ancestral homeland’ (l. 4) to buy her wedding dress.
Saleh Omar, a Zanzibari refugee living in an unnamed British village ‘by the sea’, is the unreliable narrator of this section whose dealings with a Persian trader years ago in Zanzibar have led to an enmity with Latif Mahmud, now a respected poet and lecturer at the University of London. […]
Shire’s poetry makes an intervention into the broad field of refugee studies and literature by offering an important meditation on refugees’ experiences of gendered violence and the trauma of flight and resettlement.
Zadie Smith’s use of narrative voice in this extract from NW allows the reader to delve deeper into the mind of Leah.
One of the better-known biographical facts about Helen Oyeyemi is that she does not stay still for long. She made her first move at the age of four, when her family left their home in Ibadan, Nigeria, for London. […]
In terms of the novel’s plot, this paragraph describes the teenaged Hortense’s encounter with the chaos and destruction wreaked by the recent hurricane. Emerging from the schoolhouse after the storm, Hortense is […]