Wasafiri is Britain’s leading magazine of international contemporary literature. Launched in 1984, for forty years Wasafiri has been committed to discovering, supporting, and showcasing the full breadth of literary voices on all points of the globe. Read on to learn about their 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize offers £1,000, publication, and career development for new writers of life writing, poetry, and fiction.
Since 2009 the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize has awarded some of the most exciting new voices in fiction, life writing, and poetry from around the world. The prize is taking submissions from 30 January to 30 June 2025, to be read by a global panel of multi-award-winning judges: Romesh Gunesekera (Chair), Anton Hur (Fiction), Noreen Masud (Life Writing), and Yasmine Seale (Poetry).
The sixteenth edition of the prize brings an exciting new development as we open the prize to entries in translation in all categories for the first time since the prize was founded in 2009 by Dr. Susheila Nasta.
Speaking about the prize and translation, Wasafiri’s Editor and Publishing Director, Dr. Sana Goyal, says:
‘We’re thrilled to open the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize to works in translation for the first time. Wasafiri was founded in the spirit of recognising the largest possible literary community, and taking this next step is necessary in continuing our work in provoking cross-cultural dialogue, bolstering reading and writing across borders, in service of imagining newer, diverse possibilities for belonging. Translation is a vital act of understanding and meaning making. We know that many writers are translators, too, and recognise all translators as writers. The Prize’s global sensibility – which will be enhanced by being open to works in translation – contributes something unique to the larger literary prize landscape. We’re looking forward to travelling the world via the word, in whatever language it is in, and further widening our international scope and original mission’
Past winners and shortlistees of the New Writing Prize include the likes of Akwaeke Emezi, Caleb Femi, and Louise Kennedy, who have gone on to score deals with major international publishing houses such as Penguin, Bloomsbury, and Hachette, and to be shortlisted for and win prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Forward Prizes, and the Bocas Poetry Prize, among many others.
Representing more of the globe than any other prize of its kind, the prize supports writers who have not published book-length works, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background. The winners of each category will receive a £1,000 cash prize and all winners and shortlistees will be published and receive a one-year print subscription to Wasafiri.
Anton Hur, judging Fiction, says:
‘“New writing” has to be new. While every piece of new writing comes from a tradition built by older writing, it can’t sound too much like what has come before. Trust your own voice and see where it takes you, hopefully to a place none of us have ever been to. A writer must first be an explorer. I wish you well on your journey and look forward to the stories you will tell.’
Judging Life Writing, Noreen Masud is:
‘So excited to find writing which showcases original, challenging, unexpected voices and viewpoints –– which allows genuinely new ways of looking and thinking into the world.’
And finally, Yasmine Seale, on judging Poetry, says:
‘It’s a singular pleasure to be judging this prize in the year it opens up to poetry in translation. Whether or not they began life in English, I am hoping for poems that listen as much as they speak, that vibrate with other voices, that sing across distance. Poems that bend and stretch the language. Poems that make something happen.’
Read more and enter the prize here.
About the judges
Romesh Gunesekera, FRSL, is internationally acclaimed for fiction that explores the key themes of our times — political, ecological, economic — through novels and stories of wide appeal. His fiction over the last thirty years includes Reef, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994, and The Match, the ground-breaking cricket novel. He has chaired the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Gratiaen Prize in Sri Lanka. He has also judged Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (in 2013), as well as the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the 2024 International Booker Prize.
Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence, Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, and others. He was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He resides in Seoul.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the Books are my Bag Reader Awards.
Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian poet, translator, and critic. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, Apollo, and elsewhere. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton), described by the New Yorker as ‘an electric new translation’, and Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books), a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. She lives between Paris and New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.
Find out more at www.wasafiri.org, or follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky @wasafirimag.
Photo credits: Romesh Gunesekera – Chris Dawes ©, Anton Hur – Anton Hur ©, Noreen Masud – Noreen Masud ©, Yasmine Seale – Marie d’Origny ©
