Raising the profile of South Asian writers since 2007
Forty years may have passed since her ground-breaking report, The Art Britain Ignores, and yet it’s ‘extraordinary’ that the issues around diversity and the arts remain as ‘sharp, troubling and vibrant as ever,’ Naseem Khan has said. The comments were made during her opening address delivered at Curve Theatre’s ‘Diversity in British Theatre’ conference, which …
Six new and emerging writers have made the shortlist of a national competition celebrating unpublished fiction by female BME writers. The SI Leeds Literary Prize announced their shortlist of six writers this week at the Rich Mix Arts Centre. The shortlist includes: Dark Chapter – Winnie M Li Deadly Sacrifice – Stella Ahmadou Marmite and …
Novelist Tahmima Anam has made the shortlist of the BBC National Short Story Award. She joins Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, poet and author Lavinia Greenlaw, short story writer KJ Orr, and Claire-Louise Bennett in an all-female shortlist of the prestigious competition. The shortlist of five stories was announced last week during BBC Radio 4’s …
Q. The collection, Saris and a Single Malt really works as a whole piece, with each individual poem moving you along the journey from your mother being unwell, her death, to coming to terms with her death. Was the poetry always with you during this tumultuous time? Poetry and pain never left my side—from the …
Interview with Mary Mount, a fiction editor at Viking, part of Penguin Random House UK. Mary has published authors including John le Carré, Hisham Matar, Colm Tóibín, Naomi Alderman and Nina Stibbe. Q. We’re really excited about the #WriteNow initiative. Why is Penguin Random House reaching out to marginalised writers? Books and writers are …
by Anam Hussain With one foot in the English rain and the other in tropical summer, I hang in between Earlier this year, when one figure changed from five to six, our phones, so unmoved and unaffected, mutely discarded 2015. The BBC hosted a season of identity 2016, a month long series of programmes, exploring …
Q. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your writing journey? Like most writers I have always written in one way or another but as a working parent with three children it was never going to be easy to make it a priority, at least not until the kids were a bit …
What are the experiences of a generation born to immigrant parents in the UK? A collection of personal essays edited by Nikesh Shukla and crowdfunded via Unbound explore race in Britain through the eyes of a new wave of creatives: actors, poets, artists and novelists. This smorgasbord of opinion and experiences is refreshing. Each writer …
I admit I was reluctant to pick up A. A. Dhand’s debut novel, Streets of Darkness, even more so, to pen this review. I’ve dipped my toe into the genre of crime fiction before only to find the writing didn’t appeal or to lose myself literally in all the action. But having published Dhand’s blog, …
#PitchCB is a Twitter pitch party run by Curtis Brown on the fourth Friday of each month. #PitchCB opportunity for writers to pitch their completed works directly to agents. All you need to do is tweet your pitch using the hashtag #PitchCB. If an agent marks your tweet as a favourite you then submit your …