Adrian Fernandes

Five years after the Black Lives Matter movement reignited powerful student demands to diversify the English literature curriculum, Writers Make Worlds reviews where we stand now. Our initiative, which rose from diversification interests emerging in the 2010s, reported on the Oxford protests as they happened. The conclusion is clear: the vibrant, student-led energy that pushed for a literature syllabus reflecting students’ lives has collided with institutional rigidity. The promise of 2020 has faded, stifled by deeply embedded barriers.

In 2020, the demand for change was unignorable. Students and young people, with London organisers as young as 18 and 21, orchestrated the largest antiracist uprising in decades. Their emails to headteachers offered detailed critiques, linking the white literary canon to colonial history and systemic racism. For a moment, transformative change seemed an exciting possibility.

Today, that momentum has been absorbed. Recent research with English teachers reveals that, whilst examination boards expanded reading lists, the crucial architecture for implementation was not built. Teachers report a vacuum of training and material resources, forcing a return to (in one participant’s words) a “tried and tested” canon. The white canonical texts by Dickens, Priestley and Stevenson are in the book cupboard, and their familiar schemes of work offer a safe bet in a system that prizes examination grades.

The entire burden of enacting curriculum change was placed upon individual teachers, who simultaneously navigated institutional hostility. Some faced performative allyship – schools that, as one participant said, “chatted a lot but acted little.” Others encountered direct retaliation for their efforts to create change. One teacher, who found a lack of representation after a curriculum audit, was directly threatened by their manager with the words, “If you show this to anyone, I will see you fired.” Where support for addressing change did occur, minoritised teachers were often saddled with unpaid diversity labour, automatically positioned as “the race expert” against their will.

Back in 2020, the profound student engagement with representative texts was neatly reflected in one participant’s joyful remark on reading a minoritised text: “This story feels like my family!” Now, the government’s recent curriculum review offers a new chance to make that feeling of belonging systemic. For this moment to yield a different result, the response must be defined by what was absent before: the concrete investment, dedicated training and institutional courage required to enact lasting change. Without a commitment to implement these core supports, the review – and the diverse, representative curriculum it could enable – risks becoming just another fading echo.

Further reading

Elliott, V., Nelson-Addy, L., Chantiluke, R., & Courtney, M. (2021). Lit in Colour: Diversity in literature in English schools. Lit in Colour. https://litincolour.penguin.co.uk/

Elliott, V., Watkis, D., Hart, B., & Davison, K. (2024). The effect of studying a text by an author of colour: The Lit in Colour Pioneers Pilot. Lit in Colour. https://wp.penguin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Lit-in-Colour-Pioneers-Pilot-Report-Full-Final-V12.pdf

Peters, M. A. (2015). Why is My Curriculum White? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(7), 641–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1037227

Shukla, N. (2017, October 25). Adichie, Kureishi, Hurston: what authors should be in the ‘decolonised’ canon? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2017/oct/25/adichie-kureishihurston-what-authors-should-be-in-the-decolonised-canon

Cite this: Fernandes, Adrian. “Five years on from Black Lives Matter: The fading echo of curriculum change.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2025, https://writersmakeworlds.com/five-years-on-from-black-lives-matter-the-fading-echo-of-curriculum-change. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Zana Mody

The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998 (5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025) is currently on display at the Barbican Centre in London. The dates in the exhibition’s title mark a turbulent period in India’s history. 1975 was the year in which Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the state of Emergency, imposed a draconian regime on the country during which almost all democratic rights were suspended. Some twenty years later, in 1998, India began its Pokhran nuclear testing program – a pivotal moment in its contemporary history which launched the country onto the geopolitical global stage. Exhibited in London, some 77 years after Britain’s violent exit from the subcontinent, this landmark exhibition pivots us back to a critical period of transformation in postcolonial Indian history. The exhibition features over thirty Indian artists whose works encapsulate the political turbulence of the subcontinent in the later twentieth century. This was a time when life in India was marked by ‘social upheaval, economic instability, and rapid urbanization’, as the introductory essay in the exhibition guide tells us.

The title of the exhibition takes its name from Indian cultural historian Sudipta Kaviraj’s critical essay, The Imaginary Institution of India, published in 1991. In it, he details the complexities of conceptualising the myth that is India as a nation. It is a myth that many Indian writers at home and abroad continue to wrestle with to this day, not least Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, among many others. From a postcolonial standpoint, Kaviraj’s essay speaks to the difficulty of enforcing and maintaining a historical sense of the nation in a modern society that is characterised by wide-ranging diversity and plurality.

Spread across the upper and lower galleries of the Barbican’s exhibition space, the show opens with a striking painting by the artist and writer Gieve Patel entitled Two Men with Hand Cart (1979). The pink composition provides a hazy backdrop to the two central figures in the painting who converse alongside the tools and objects of their trade. The quotidian scene offers a snapshot of the metropolis of city where traders and skyscrapers co-exist. This is a metropolis under construction, gesturing to the beginning of a globalised India, while the warm pink tones cast a hazy portrait, gesturing to the stylised artistic practises of nationalist myth-making within the microcosmic space of the city. In the background, the sepia-toned buildings – partially outlined and unfinished – allude to the city that is yet to be constructed. Patel’s painting offers us a scene in which he (and we) can speculate about India’s future. By placing two labourers at the centre of this scene, he alerts us to the impacts of the country’s economic developments on its inhabitants.

The visceral shock of the Emergency between the years of 1975–1977 is explored by artist Navjot Altaf whose ink prints transformed into political posters and framed the resistance struggle. Inspired by the visual language of Cuban political propaganda, Altaf’s artworks are powerful talismans of a period of serious social and economic upheaval. Amid glossy layers of black ink, a fist emerges in the dark as a symbol of unity and resistance.

A personal standout in the exhibition was a series of photographs taken by Sheba Chhachhi. Her 1980–91 series, Seven Lives and a Dream, is the culmination of a decade spent documenting the lives of various female activists during ‘The Woman’s Movement’ in India of the 1980s, in what she refers to as ‘staged portraits’. Chhachhi points out in a 2016 essay that these photographs mark a transition in her artistic career. As she begins to consider the photograph as ‘fiction rather than as document’, we see how these staged and collaborative portraits invite us into the inner lives of these female activists.[1] Pictured below is a striking portrait of the young historian Urvashi Butalia in Delhi in 1990, around the time she was compiling material for what would go on to become a major artefact in the 1947 Partition Archive: The Other Side of Silence. The book is the product of a decade of recording and transcribing female experience of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. During this period, thousands of women were brutalised and mutilated in the name of religious and sectarian differences. If 1947 marks the year in which the ‘fault lines of our nation state were becoming visible’, to use Butalia’s own words, then 1997, the time of publishing, reveals to us that the faultlines are now ‘full-blown and growing’.[2] Surrounded by documents, data, and testimonies, Butalia in the photograph stares directly at the camera, calling us to interrogate the other side of the 1947 Partition of India and its horrific impact on female bodies.

The artworks in the exhibition augment our sense of postcolonial Indian culture and its many facets, tracing a progression of the nation state over two decades through the imagination of artists both at home and elsewhere. For a contemporary Indian art exhibition of this scale to be exhibited in the heart of the city of London exposes, to an international audience, the rapid transformation of the Indian landscape between 1975 and 1998. It urges both British and global audiences to consider where the country stands today.

[1] Sheba Chhachhi, Arc Silt Dive: The Works of Sheba Chhachhi (2016).

[2] Urvashi Butalia, ‘Return’ in The Other Side of Silence, 2^nd edition (Haryana: Penguin Books, 2017).

Cite this: Mody, Zana. “The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998: Exhibition Report.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/the-imaginary-institution-of-india-exhibition-report/. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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C.J. Griffin and Amrita Shenoy

Working across the page, stage, and airwaves, Jackie Kay is one of the most accomplished writers in Britain today. In this interview, held on 13 September 2023, C.J. Griffin (CG) and Amrita Shenoy (AS) ask questions ranging across the different literary forms and themes that have animated Kay’s oeuvre over the last thirty years. In response, Kay reflects on the craft of writing and her career as it has unfolded alongside rapid technological, social, and political change in Britain and beyond.

CG: During a short film you made with the Scottish Book Trust, you said that you ‘write in order to ask questions, not to answer them’. What are the questions you are asking when you write? Have they changed over time?

Jackie Kay: Every book brings its own set of dilemmas and questions, really. In Trumpet, I was interested in the basis of identity — particularly gender identity and how the act of love could transcend concerns or worries about identity. In other words, if you love somebody enough, you believe them. In May Day,I was interested in protest. Protest from throughout my life and in grief, including whether grief is a form of protest.

In The Adoption Papers, I was drawn to ideas of nature and nurture and which of them is stronger in asserting people’s personalities and identities. I suppose the loose theme of a lot of my books is identity and the voice — how the voice works and whether the voice is character and can be plot.  

Seamus Heaney once said that every writer has their own plot, their own wee patch of ground they keep digging. It doesn’t matter if the patch of ground is quite small as long as, each time, you find something surprising. My little patches are identity, voice and character and I keep trying to explore these themes from different angles.

CG: In art and life there is a sense of there being a ‘real’ truth and, equally, a ‘fictional truth’ – something you yourself have acknowledged. What does ‘fictional truth’ mean for you? Do you think its distinction from ‘real’ truth is becoming harder to maintain?

JK: Well, I think there are two kinds of fictional truth that currently operate in our world. There’s one I call a pure version of the fictional truth where your imagination gets to something closer to the truth than ‘the truth’. When I, say, created my character Mohammad Nassar Sharif, the registrar in Trumpet, I didn’t interview lots of registrars for the research. He was loosely based on a fleeting moment from when I was registering the birth of my son. Everything else about him was fictitious. Yet, he seemed closer to the truth than if I had to try to recreate somebody from reality.

Whereas Sophie Stones in Trumpet is a character we see often in our society. We have craven, wanton, corrupt, lawless journalists who make things up for their living and distress people. Because she was too close to that truth, I couldn’t breathe imaginative truth into her. And so, she’s the least successful character in the book. For a fictional character to work, it is necessary that something else breathes in them.

There’s another kind of fictional truth that exists in our society.  We live in times where reality is challenged and threatened all the time, and where people fictionalise themselves through different social media outlets as the line dividing their real life and their imaginative life is very, very thin indeed. Nobody can tell who the real person is anymore. So, we have a big challenge now, with the question of the truth of a self. And it has a different answer than I would have given ten or fifteen years ago.

AS: Some of your works, such as The Adoption Papers (1991) and Life Mask (2005), have often invited autobiographical readings. However, in terms of literary appreciation, might this limit a text’s autonomy to the scope of the author’s life? How separate can the art be from the artist?

JK:  When I first wrote The Adoption Papers, I didn’t expect it to be paid the attention it got. Neither did the publisher. 

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.

As to the question of whether it limits a work to just read it autobiographically, I think it does, yes. If we read Sylvia Plath’s poems, for instance — not that I’m comparing myself to her, I’m just talking about a writer who gets read very autobiographically — then sometimes, we can put onto the work itself, things that we know from the life [of the author]. And we don’t then give the writer the freedom or the license to be completely imaginative. An awful lot of writers through time have been hampered by this very dilemma. For Anne Sexton, she was affected by how often her work was read as a cipher for her personal experiences. I think I managed to swerve this problem of seeing myself as representative — since, I don’t even really see that my work, once I’ve written it, is completely me anymore.

AS: Writers of colour in Britain have often discussed a literary ‘ghettoisation’ in the global literary scene, a typecasting of marginalised writers as political voices. In your view, what could readers and scholars of literature do differently to circumvent this problem?

JK: One thing they could do is regard the text itself and not make assumptions or necessarily connect one writer to the other. There are writers that exist in the same space and time, like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s exciting when you read their works together. Yet, connections between writers’ works happen almost by a process of osmosis or modes we can’t easily, sociologically, explain. But since black writers have been marginalised for so long, literary critics have now got [to find] a way of looking at their works. Sometimes they then lump such writers together and perpetuate a ‘ghettoisation’. I tend to elude such groups because I am a Scottish black writer who writes in a voice different from that of the stereotype for the black writer. Yet, it’s equally problematic if there’s no way of grouping and identifying people because this will also lead to their invisibility.

I would put black writers in parts of the bookshops or in groups where they could easily be found. But I would also advise on doubling up and having them everywhere in the rest of the shop.

CG: Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds is a digital archive of Black and Asian British contemporary writing. How have Britain and Britishness figured in your own writing about Scotland and Scottishness?

JK: Seemingly, Scotland sees itself as a victim of an English colonialism — which it has been, definitely. But it is also true that Scotland’s own benefits from the British Empire haven’t been discussed enough. In The Lamplighter, I wrote about how British cities profited from money from the slave trade. One of the cities that the book covers in detail is Glasgow — a city that would hardly have invited attention for its connections with the slave trade. People knew about the tobacco lords but they didn’t read more into names such as ‘Virginia Street’ or ‘Jamaica Bridge’. Similarly, in the popular imagination, a plantation owner is never wearing a kilt. We need to grow up as a country. It’s taken Britain, generally anyway, an awfully long time to acknowledge racism in its institutions. There are examples of institutionalised racism even in leftfield things.

AS: Interestingly, ‘Makar’ translates to ’maker’. In this sense, the poet laureate and, by extension, the writer, is a maker of fictive worlds. In your time as Makar, which fictive worlds did you feel most compelled to make and share?

JK:  I like how democratic the term ‘Makar’ is. It comes from the old word ’to make things’, used in the fifteenth century to describe bards. This was not exclusively Scottish, at first. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, too, was referred to as a Makar. It’s the opposite of the word ‘laureate’, which implies monarchs, kings, queens and laurels. Rather, Makar suggests that poetry can be practical — essential as well as elegiac. For example, when I read about the ‘Baby Box of Essential Things’ project, I wrote to the Scottish Government to ask if a poem could be included as an essential thing. To my surprise, they said ‘yes’. That’s something that is important to me; that poetry can have its uses.

I also read the poem ‘Threshold’ for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I wanted it to be a multi-voiced poem in many different languages to show Scotland as a place of welcome. Because, in that year, 2016, Scotland had voted very differently on Brexit than England and Wales, with 62% of the Scottish population wanting to stay in Europe. So being Scots Makar was a thrilling job to have and, also, to be able to go around Scotland, to the tiny Hebridean islands and see how those places have changed. For instance, I was in North Uist, near Hebrides, and I was surprised that there was a huge lesbian turnout for me.  It gave me a sense of how the country was changing; from rural Scotland, down to round all the islands and the mainland, and urban Scotland. And it was great to try and reflect that in my writing.

AS:  The ‘many-voicedness’ you discuss can be seen across your works. As you mentioned, a recent example of this is ’Threshold’ which invites Scotland’s diverse ethno-linguistic identities to unite in the same ‘living room’. What is it about multiplicity that you think enables such powerful expression?

JK: The refrain of ‘Threshold’ is ’it takes many tongues to tell a story’. I believe that. The world — particularly the Western world — is very ethnocentric. It promotes certain global languages, overlooking other languages that people speak. People cannot be excluded on such bases and locked out of experiences. Particularly in Scotland, there are more languages spoken than people automatically think of. For instance, Italian Scots and Chinese Scots have been there for years. I then wanted to have as many languages as were actually spoken in Scotland to make the poem multiple. Because, we are obsessed with singular truths in our society, but I believe the truth is multiple. And the closer we get to multiple voices telling their stories, the better society will be.

CG: Across many different genres and forms, your writing often returns to secrets and secrecy. And this interest in secrets is frequently connected with music. The most obvious examples are Trumpet (1998) and Bessie Smith (1997). What interests you as a writer about secrecy? Are secrecy and music connected?

JK: I am fascinated by secrets. We are all are fascinated by secrets, as human beings. It’s interesting to ask which things people will easily talk about and which they’ll be silent about.

Sometimes, silence is as creative or as palpable as noise. I am interested in secrets because, like music, they’re all to do with time. So, I guess secrets and music connect through time. Secrets are time bombs waiting to go off. Why we are perhaps thrilled by them, sometimes in a salacious way, is because we know that sooner or later, the secret will come out. Even if it is after somebody has died, the secret, eventually, does come out. It’s very rare for a secret to even last a lifetime and for anyone to get away with it, completely. So, there’s a kind of discovery in that, which is fascinating.

There’s something very fictive about secrets. That’s why we have so many expressions around secrecy, like ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’. The truth usually involves secrets and in being ‘stranger’ than fiction, the truth is usually a secret truth…

AS: You once movingly said that a poem is a “little moment of belief”. Often however, writers find it difficult to make their moments of belief last, what with rejections from big-ticket publishers and literary prizes that construct notions of the ‘best’ writer. Having navigated the writing industry for more than three decades, which insights are worth sharing with emerging writers?

JK: The advice differs depending on the writing people produce. My advice for young poets would be to read their poetry out loud, to themselves or to friends. To send their poetry to magazines, from Poetry Review to Magma. To enter young poets’ competitions like Foyle Young Poets of the Year. To try and get on Arvon Creating Writing courses and to enter the Poetry Business Award, which publishes a pamphlet of poems first, since it’s difficult to get a collection of poems published without having published first of all. And the pamphlet is enjoying a new renaissance. It’s wonderful how many outlets there are for beautifully, artistically well-produced pamphlets, from Full Candlestick to Lighthouse, and others. There’s even an award for the best pamphlet — the Michael Marks Poetry Award.

If it was a young novelist, I would tell them to join a writers’ group or form one of their own. Because it’s useful to have feedback. The novel is a long and lonely trudge. The little moment of belief with regard to the poem is easy enough to sustain for the length of a poem but much more difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. And writers are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, in a way, because we have to believe in ourselves but we also have to doubt ourselves in equal measure.

So, it’s important to tell young writers to believe in themselves but also to have enough healthy self-criticism; to be able to kill off your darlings, as they say. And to know that editing is, really, the secret of the universe — it’s not so much what you write first of all, it’s how you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again. And not to be afraid of failure and of bad reviews. To be completely and utterly yourself. To take risks, because writing is a risk-taking business. And sometimes that can feel quite scary. Writing is as psychological a game as football. You know you can get a penalty when nobody’s looking and, then, when everyone’s looking, you suddenly can’t get a penalty!

Every time you get to write a new poem, you must discover something fresh and the challenge of that is terrifying! So, after three decades, I know that there are terrors, but I also know that there are things that we can do about them.

Cite this: Griffin, & Shenoy, Amrita. “On Being a Writer: An Interview with Jackie Kay (2024).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/on-being-a-writer-interview-jackie-kay. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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The prolific and influential American writer Percival Everett has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize with his novel James. James is a rewriting of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with more than one twist in the tale. In this Black History Month discussion, members of the Oxford English Faculty community talk about the many intriguing facets of Everett’s novel, including whether the voice of the character James, Jim in Mark Twain, is convincing, and how the Mississippi River becomes a character in the novel alongside James. The discussion is chaired by Prof. Nicole King.

Read more on the Oxford English Faculty’s website

Cite this: “’James’ by Percival Everett book discussion.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/james-by-percival-everett-book-discussion. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Eliza McCarthy

The British Library’s 2024 exhibition, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music (26 April to 26 August) mapped the coordinates of a vast and ever-evolving audible history over a clockwise journey through the exhibition space. Three hundred exhibits explore the radical potential of Black British music to draw communities together and included pieces ranging from the letters of writer and composer Ignatius Sancho to Trinidadian steel drums, carnival costumes, sound systems and original installation pieces.

Images from the Beyond the Bassline exhibition, 2024 (Photos: Eliza McCarthy)

The exhibition culminated in iwoyi, an immersive five-channel piece commissioned by the British Library and created by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with Touching Bass. Rapoport is a London-based producer, artist, and film director, and Ayinde an artist and poet whose work traverses literary, audio, and video forms in its embrace of performance and installation. The South London Touching Base is a curatorial music and movement platform. Played at varying speeds across the walls and ceilings of two conjoined rooms, the piece offered an Afro-surrealist expressive journey into how sound and silence are entangled within Black life. We were invited to sit awhile on the benches or the cushions on the floor, and lean into the sensory opacity as sound lagged behind movement, and movement became fractured across the surfaces of the two conjoined rooms.

Rohan Ayinde & Tayo Rapoport’s Iwoyi, 2024 (Embed from Nowness)

Iwoyi strikes at the heart of the exhibition’s exploration into sound as a multisensory experience—a notion that was encapsulated by the poet Linton Kwesi Johnston’s 1980 album, Bass Culture that in many ways inspired the exhibition. The vinyl sleeve sits in a softly-lit glass in the middle of the displays and Johnson himself is famed for his experiments with audio frequencies below 40Hz, existing right on the boundaries of the human auditory realm. At this level, sound becomes tactile, radically unintelligible perhaps but felt as a physical sensation within the listener’s body. In Bass Culture, we are invited to consider sound beyond the realm of the aural, a notion that is played out on a larger scale in iwoyi.

At the heart of these two examples is the distinct ways in which sound is rendered at once highly material, tactile, and visible, contradicting its otherwise fundamental ephemerality. Whilst sound is translated into a physical sensation in Bass Culture, the aural similarly becomes entwined with the other senses in iwoyi. In the curatorial space that is mapped within Beyond the Bassline, sound continued to evolve. As we looked through the glass case at LKJ’s vinyl sleeve, we heard Fela Kuti meeting Shirley Bassey, and encountered the tinny sounds from headphones we had yet to use. And these sounds in turn crossed with the continual, surrounding-thrum of an ambient ocean scape in the contemporary short film, Of Us, about migrant identities in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay.

Bass Culture offered visitors a sound palimpsest that became continually re-contextualised within an ever-expanding soundscape and invited the possibility of a reparative future shaped within and around music.

Cite this: McCarthy, Eliza. “Exhibition Report – Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/exhibition-report-beyond-the-bassline-500-years-of-black-british-music/. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Following this, Clara Park held the following interview with the poet.

Clara Park (CP): You told us a lot about the repetition of the butterfly motif in your work. Could you speak more to specific ideas or objects that recur across and throughout your work and how you return (or do not return) to certain themes?

Roger Robinson (RR): Animals have entered my work in the strangest way, never planned it, but as I’m looking over my new and selected poems at the moment, I clearly take animals to be proxies of myself. I make them either angry, scared, or say weird things, or make them sympathetic. Somebody pointed it out to me, I didn’t know it myself, but there’s references to crazy crows, dogs, butterflies, horses, but I clearly have something with the animal kingdom. It wasn’t planned, but I dig it. 

CP: We got to speak a little at the end about your influences and inspirations. What are you reading now, and who were the greatest influences (literary or otherwise) that brought you into writing?

RR: Right now, I’m reading Rilke, selected poems of Rilke, translated, and Helen Vendler, a series of essays called The Given and the Made, that speaks in really interesting ways about lyric poetry. People who brought me into poetry… I would say between a writer called Kwame Dawes, who ended up being a mentor of mine, and a writer called Sharon Olds. They definitely had that voice, and saw the way I think in that voice, and it led me to get my voice. And that voice was very much simple but not simplistic, heavy on emotions and narrative and heavy on craft. 

CP: Have you been able to find home in your writing? Or have you arrived at the way to create a portable paradise?

RR: When you say find home, I’m not sure if you meant find “tribe I belong” to or feel comfortable in when writing, but I most definitely mean both. Writing people are definitely my tribe and my home. Writing was something I always had as a gift, and it’s something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. And, on the subject of writing paradise: it was not so much a case of if I could write paradise in a new place, it’s more if I could make this new place into a paradise that I had once known. I needed to do it because I was putting down roots here and I was having a child, so I had to come to some conclusions about where I really live, and stop having the immigrant mind of living in two places but never belonging to either. And so it’s a conscious decision. And, to some extent, with A Portable Paradise, the original idea was to document how I could do it, or the process of doing it. 

CP: When your work is politicized, do you come to view what you’ve written in a new way? What is it like to see things that may have originally been written deeply personally and then reanimated in the public sphere in perhaps unexpected ways? Are there any instances that have particularly stuck with you?

RR: I think the personal is political, and everything is political, but there were a few poems that did surprise me when taken to the public sphere. Like there’s a poem I have called “Nurses,” [written when] I did not know that COVID would happen and everyone would be dependent on nurses. And nurses had a particular role to play in society at that point, and that particular poem became quite a chant for them. Along with a poem I wrote about my son being tended to by nurses. Also a lot of people quoted that poem when they were trying to raise the pay for nurses, cause they had worked so hard over COVID. It wasn’t surprising, I understand it, but I didn’t expect it.  

Cite this: Park, Clara. “Clara Park interviews Roger Robinson.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/clara-park-interviews-roger-robinson/. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Robinson’s talk and the subsequent Q&A were moderated by Dr Malachi McIntosh, the Barbara Pym tutorial fellow at the College, a writer and critic, and a self-professed personal fan of Robinson’s writing.

Throughout, Robinson’s charismatic levity shone through as he flitted across the room, butterfly-like, working the crowd and reading a selection of poems from A Portable Paradise, his most recent collection, published in 2019 and the winner of the T. S. Eliot prize. His reading included “The Job of Paradise,” “Midwinter,” “The Crow Palinode,” “Grace” and “Day Moon.” Though these poems were all from the most recent collection, Robinson referenced earlier publications as well, including symbolic resonances from his 2013 The Butterfly Hotel. He also explained some of the backstory of his multimedia project with photographer and WMW author Johny Pitts, Home is Not a Place. 

Although Robinson’s work has often intervened in, and is distinctly entangled with, political issues, he insists that the craft of poetry is often politicised outside the control, or even intention, of the author. The poems in his A Portable Paradise ranged across a variety of themes, but, as he explained, were especially focused on thinking through the possibilities, impossibilities and practicalities of creating paradise in a new place. This is in contrast to The Butterfly Hotel, which emphasises the tearing in two that comes with immigration and migration. His ideas about migration from his earlier collections had transformed with the birth of his son, he said. He spoke about the subsequent necessity of putting down roots in a place that had consistently devalued “global majority bodies,” as he put it, and was hostile to the project of paradise-making for those denied dignity and body-hood. 

In the conversation, Robinson referenced both the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire and the Windrush scandal, to highlight the way in which bodies had become undone in these places that were not home. At Malachi McIntosh’s prompting, Robinson also discussed the ways that poetry might offer dignity and subjecthood to these political and politicised people through the (ironically) distinctly de-material and “air-borne” nature of poetry. As Malachi asked more about how that project and craft have changed over the years, Robinson characterised his movement from The Butterfly Hotel to A Portable Paradise as a continual effort to make a home in poetry. For Robinson, the making of poetry has been a project that intervenes in the world around him to create portable paradises. 

Robinson came back to the motif of a butterfly several times. Butterflies as images and motifs proliferate across Robinson’s new collection and also carry resonances with the work that Robinson cites as his creative and craft inspirations, not least the recurring flower motif in Louise Gluck’s collection The Wild Iris. The butterfly was also an apt metaphor to encapsulate his thoughts and presence at this event. Robinson’s poetic interests seem to be butterfly-like in their vast range and breadth (he reads widely, broadly, voraciously). His poetic practice is also committed to reconciling one identity across migrations, like a butterfly. He insists on beauty in the banal, and on the banal in the lives of people whose stories have been “under-told”, whose banalities haven’t been represented. The butterfly, for me, highlighted the wide range of poetic craft that Robinson studies, as well as forms of repeated and unrelenting migration. Ultimately, the motif underlines his dedication to using poetry to “create paradise,” to make “paradise portable,” to put down roots despite his previous expressions of rootlessness. 

Cite this: Park, Clara. “‘As if their bodies became AIR’: Roger Robinson in Oxford, 23 May 2024.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/as-if-their-bodies-became-air-roger-robinson-in-oxford/. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Sadia Zulfiqar

In this interview with Sadia Zulfiqar, Leila Aboulela reflects on her creative process and her approach to representing Muslim women in her fiction.

Cite this: Zulfiqar, Sadia and Leila Aboulela. “Interview with Leila Aboulela.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Jennifer Wong

Cited in the preface to the State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation anthology (Outspoken Press, 2023), leading British-Jamaican critic-scholar Stuart Hall suggested that cultural identity is ‘a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. This idea is pervasive across Writers Make Worlds, but in these days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora, it also relates specifically to diasporic Asian identity which is open-ended and subject to change. Indeed, looking only at Britain today, ‘it is impossible to fully encompass the complexities of Asian identities.’^[1]

Instead, the conversations in the book open up spaces to initiate exchanges among poets who identify as Asians, to encourage ‘accepting the complexity and diversity’ and appreciate ‘what they care about, write about, struggle with, or call out against.’ For example, in the conversation between Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade (2015) and Monica Youn, author of from from (2023), the task of writing about race and racialised experiences is addressed with searing honesty, and ranges from the complexity of the lyrical self to the writing of dailiness and motherhood.

Conversations in the book are generated from a diasporic community of Asian poets, as they corresponded with each other across continents and generations, sharing their thoughts on many levels: from languages, the meaning of home, gender and racial identities, to the craft of writing and their everyday life. Not only did the anthology lead to more visibility for the work of these Asian poets in Britain, it has also brought their works into dialogue thematically, highlighting the relationship between the works of minority writers and the ‘mainstream’ British literary canon. Moreover, the anthology makes space for discussing taboos and challenges these Asian poets face collectively. As US-based Chinese-Scottish poet and author of Imperium, Jay Gao, puts it in the book: ‘We’re allowed gratitude, glee, pride, cheer, joy—all tempered, or marbled, by some degree of modesty. What gets discussed far less, at least in public, is the private discomfort and alienation.’

On 28 November 2023, Professor Elleke Boehmer moderated a special reading and launch conversation in Oxford with some of the State of Play contributors including Sarah Howe, London-based Vietnamese-Chinese poet Natalie Linh Bolderston, joined by Asian-American poets Chen Chen and Lora Supandi. The poets reflected together on shared themes, including their complex, sometimes contradictory sense of belonging and racial heritage, their connections with the languages they grew up with, and the themes they feel compelled to write.

Amplifying the conversation further, to mark the LGBQT+ history month in February 2024, the English Faculty at the University of Oxford added a digital companion to the anthology, featuring short interviews and excerpts of conversations from the book with the anthology LGBQT+ contributors. As they noted, their sense of belonging in Britain is complex, because in addition to their racial and cultural belonging, their LGBQT+ identities also matter deeply. Therefore, the process of writing for the anthology prompted several of the poets to rethink their artistic work and the intersectional spaces in their writing, and how their work contributes to or finds a home in the contemporary literary scene. In particular, we see how individual Asian poets have always been readers themselves, and form part of the literary discourse, such as Kit Fan whose literary influences include Bishop, Wilde and Highsmith.

Born and raised in the Philippines before moving with his family to the UK in 2007, Troy Cabida noted in his contribution that we need to acknowledge the challenge that exists in writing about desire. On a personal level, the dynamics of sharing his writing and life journey in the anthology has also led him to reconsider the importance of being Asian and queer as formative experiences. At the same time, the experience of belonging to a writing community such as the one gathered between the covers of State of Play, has been helpful to him in becoming bolder and more playful in his expressiveness as a poet.

A Nepalese writer who studied English at Oxford, Mukahang Limbu published his first pamphlet, Mother of Flip-flops (2022) at the age of 20. For Mukahang, his creative practice involves finding space within and beyond migration: ‘for all the different facets that are not so separate; my mother, my father, being a migrant, boyhood, growing up, superstitions, softbois, and being gay can all fit in one poem.’

In a number of Asian countries or city-states such as Hong Kong, China and Singapore, the attitude towards LGBQT community is still conservative and queerness is regarded as subversive, morally dubious or controversial. Against this background, one can more fully appreciate the boundary-pushing nature of the works by these minority writers and the impact of migration on their creative work. As Marylyn Tan, Singapore-based poet and the first-ever female winner of Singapore Literature Prize, remarked, the anthology contribution has led to a new ‘space for re-discovering the community in an intimate and informal fashion’. She also notes how much she enjoys ‘the simple and mere fact of epistolary.’

As from the conversation between Asian-American poet Yanyi, author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World, 2022) and The Year of the Blue Water (2019) and the UK-based Hong Kong-Chinese poet Mary Jean Chan, author of Bright Fear (2023) and Flèche (2019), writing is a way of embracing the unknown, hidden parts of oneself. Yanyi concedes that ‘each one is the new poem you wanted to write that you didn’t know how to write.’ For Chan, having their book gifted or included in libraries or someone’s book collection is a way of feeling or being seen, and this sense of belonging is especially precious because, as a queer writer, they grew up in a society with far fewer models for their queer poetics.

In the dialogue between Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and Lora Supandi, Stanford graduate of Indonesian heritage, one becomes aware of how many painstaking struggles and epiphanies emerge from excavating meaning within different forms of relationships, including familial relationships, friendships and romantic love. In Chen Chen’s letter, he wrote: ‘Ache knows how to find us. Maybe because ache is life, too, alongside non-ache. They are neighbours.‘ In writing about pain, therefore, these writers also discover and acknowledge the necessity to celebrate or chronicle joy that exists alongside grief, and how those feelings will shape them as writers of colour.

^[1] Eddie Tay and Jennifer Wong, Editors’ Preface in State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023), piii-iv.

Cite this: Wong, Jennifer. “Rethinking cultural identity and belonging: East and Southeast Asian Poets writing in and beyond Britain.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-wong-state-of-play. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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Ciaran Duncan

In a city not short on spaces that can feel intimidating, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is especially prominent. Here is where Oxford’s students file in for their Graduation ceremonies. Where we talk about cultural gatekeepers, the Sheldonian is an especially well-established one–designed by the architect Christopher Wren to resemble a Roman theatre, with a (rather good) Siegfried Sassoon poem set in and named after it. What a pleasure, then, to see this space filled not by a parade of gowns competing for attention with the imposing baroque painted ceiling, but by the 2019 Booker Prize-winner, and longstanding Writers Make Worlds author, Bernardine Evaristo.

Evaristo is a writer and academic in possession of sharp intellect and passionate clarity of communication and this was in clear evidence in her 22 June Friends of the Bodleian talk, entitled “Bridging the Gap”. In it, she offered a virtuosic tour of postwar Black British literary history before zooming in on the literary landscape of 2023. Her through-line was the contribution of black female authors and their extra struggle to be heard and promoted, something she has directly experienced as well as studied.

Indeed, Evaristo’s talk was studded with personal testimony. She recalled how a top UK agent told her that her novel Mr Loverman (2013) was “too niche” (read: “black and queer”) to find success. This anecdote left me nearly tearing my hair out since that novel means a lot to me for the way it avoids the pattern of many successful queer novels which depict coming-of-age stories heavily focused on trauma and often lacking in any trace of humour. Evaristo is always keen to twist agilely away from stereotyping. For instance, she says she is often told in interviews that her most celebrated book Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is “a novel about race”. Why not consider it a novel “about” relationships or generational divides instead or as well? she asked.

In Evaristo’s account of modern Black British literary history, especial and due prominence was given to Buchi Emecheta, the trailblazing author whose life straddled Nigeria and Britain. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Emecheta’s work afforded Evaristo her introduction to books about black women’s lives. Of particular importance to her were Emecheta’s second novel Second Class Citizen (1974) and, above all, her later work The Joys of Motherhood (1979). That latter novel offers an indelible portrayal of an Igbo woman’s experience of working-class colonial Nigeria. Evaristo makes the case for this as an equally ground-breaking “female counterpart” to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), an unforgettable novel, now a classic, and, perhaps more than any other, a staple of postcolonial literature courses and reading lists everywhere. Evaristo drew her audience’s attention to the fact that so often the books taken as representatives of a period or movement are those authored by men. For instance, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is often talked about as “the” novel of the Windrush generation (and rather less discussed for its limited portrayal of female characters). Evaristo is not one to let any form of marginalisation go ignored and unexplored.

After discussing the intervening contributions of the likes of Andrea Levy and Judith Bryan, Evaristo homed in on the “lovely flourishing” of books by Black women that has occurred in Britain over the last few years. Here she highlighted in detail four novels published in 2023 that she has enjoyed; Writers Make Worlds author Diana Evans’ fourth novel, A House for Alice, the sequel to her award-winning Ordinary People, and set in the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy; Jacqueline Crooks’ debut, Fire Rush, which explores the relationships between young black Brits amidst the 1970s dub reggae scene, and has already been shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction; The List by Yomi Adegoke, which ambivalently explores the impact of social media allegations in the age of MeToo, and which Evaristo commended for its “entertaining versatility” of voices; and, finally, the founder of the pioneering gal-dem magazine Liv Little’s Rosewater, which for Evaristo marks “a generational first” in its “sexy and bodacious” portrayal of a young queer black woman in London. Noticeably, in the case of The List and Rosewater, she picks out qualities redolent of her own many-voiced mosaic of a novel Girl, Woman, Other. In Evaristo’s own words, GWO’s 2019 Booker Prize win has catapulted her from “Bernardine who?!” to “Bernardine, we’re so honoured to meet you!”. As well as rocket-fuelling her sales, the win gave her the platform that she used so judiciously in her talk to both recognise the women who have come before her, and spotlight her younger contemporaries who are helping to make this such an exciting time to be a reader.

In the post-lecture Q&A especially, Evaristo was sharp-eyed on the institutional underpinnings–the publishing industry, libraries, schools–that heavily influence who is read, studied and canonised. She described London’s Woolwich library as “the making of me” as a child. She referred to the Runnymede Trust’s 2021 report, Lit In Colour, which found that, at that time, fewer than 1% of students at GCSE studied a book by a writer of colour. Essentially, it is still possible to go through the entire UK education system being given only books by white writers. Finally, Evaristo discussed the Black Britain Writing Back series–“a huge passion project of mine”–that she has curated with Penguin and that has reissued landmark works by the likes of Beryl Gilroy and C.L.R. James.

Generous with enthusiasm and intellect, the overriding impression her talk left is one of life lived as a major passion project and a relationship to other people and language that is playful, curious and always open to new possibilities. Whether you look to novels for beauty or learning, community or self-interrogation, listening to Evaristo can only foster a sense of excitement at the further “lovely flourishing” to come if readers and writers manage to sustain the momentum behind Black British women’s writing. 

Cite this: Duncan, Ciaran. “Sustaining the Momentum: Bernardine Evaristo speaks at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, 22 June 2023.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2023, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-evaristo-bridging-the-gap-sheldonian. Accessed 18 March 2026.

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