International migration has long been a dominant feature of world literature from both post-industrial and developing countries. The increasing demands of the global economic system and continued political instability in many of the world's region have highlighted this shifting map of the world's peoples.Yet, political concern for the larger scale economic and social impact of migration has effectively obscured the nature of the migratory nature of the migratory experience itself, the emotions and practicalities of departure, travel, arrival and the attempt to rebuild a home.Writing Across Worlds explores an extraordinary range of migration literaturesm from letters and diaries to journalistic articles, autobiographies and fiction, in order to analyse the reality of the migrant's experience. The sheer range of writings - Irish, Friulian, Italian, Jewish and South Asian British, Gastarbeiter literature from Germany, Pied noir, French-Algerian and French West Indian writing, Carribbean novels, Slovene emigrant texts, Japanese-Canadian writing, migration in American novels, narratives from Australia, South Africa, Samoa and others - illustrate the diversity of global migratory experience and emphasise the social context of literature.The geographic and literary range of Writing Across Worlds makes this collection an invaluable analysis of migration, giving voice to the hope, pain, nostalgia and triumph of lives lived in other places.
Writing has always been a means of making crossings and forging connections between different worlds. Some writers have found it hard to reach an international audience, however: for decades the western literary establishment has been all too ready to sideline writers with mixed cultural or migrant backgrounds as 'marginal', 'multicultural' or simply 'other'. Since its foundation in 1984 the literary magazine Wasafiri has focused on the idea of the writer as someone who transports the imagination beyond the maps of narrowly defined borders, and has promoted a range of new and established voices as well as signposting new waves in contemporary literature worldwide.
To celebrate Wasafiri's twentieth anniversary, Writing Across Worlds brings together a selection of interviews with major international writers previously featured in the pages of the magazine. Conducted by a wide constituency of distinguished critics, writers and journalists, the interviews offer a unique insight into the views and work of a remarkable array of acclaimed authors. They also chart a slow but certain cultural shift: those once seen as 'other' have not only won many of the establishment's most revered literary prizes but have also become central figures in contemporary literature, writing across and into all our real and imagined worlds.
With an introductory comment by Susheila Nasta, editor of Wasafiri, this collection is essential reading for all those interested in contemporary literature.
