What Can the Archive Tell Us?: 40 Years of Wasafiri Magazine

Join the British Library and Wasafiri magazine, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, for a deep dive into the magazine’s archives.

If you listen closely, what stories do Wasafiri’s archives tell us about its editorial inclinations and educational impact over the last four decades –– and how are these twists and turns in its journey intertwined with, and a product of, the larger arts landscape in the UK?

British Library curator, Helen Melody, and collaborative PhD student, Angelique Golding – whose research draws on the magazine’s archives – will offer fascinating insights on the magazine’s rich history, trajectory, and evolution within the changing landscape of publishing and academia since its founding in 1984. In addition to these short talks – and an introduction from the magazine’s Editor and Publishing Director, Sana Goyal – there will also be a selection of items from the archive on show for attendees with an interest in archival and book studies, and global literatures and decolonial practices.

Please book tickets on our website, here. 

 

Our annual Awards for new poetry published in the UK is now open for entries. You can find out more about the Awards, and how to enter at https://michaelmarksawards.com/  

The Awards are for poetry published in pamphlet form, with three prizes. The Poetry Award is for the author or authors of the winning pamphlet. The Publisher award recognises the creativity and commitment to publishing new poetry in pamphlet form. The Illustration Award is made to the artist, and celebrates the partnership between poet and artist in the creation of a poetry pamphlet.

The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets is now in its 16^th year, founded by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust with the British Library and in partnership with the Wordsworth Trust. Our poetry award winner for 2023 was Courtney Conrad for I am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books). Mariscat Press won the Publisher prize and Hannah Mumby won the Illustration prize for The Strange Egg by Kirstie Millar (Emma Press).

You can listen to a selection of readings from a selection of previous winners and shortlisted poets on our Soundcloud account at https://soundcloud.com/the-british-library/sets/michael-marks-award-for-poetry

Stephen Cleary, our Lead Curator for Literary and Creative Sound Recordings, returns as a judge for this year’s Awards. He is joined by Naush Sabah and Michael Symmons Roberts. Naush Sabah is co-founder of the Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and was the author of Litanies (Guillemot press), shortlisted for the 2022 Awards. Michael Symmons Roberts is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was the winner of the 2013 Forward Prize for Drysalter (Cape Poetry), and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2004 for Corpus (Cape Poetry).

The winners of the 2024 Awards will be announced at the British Library on Monday 9th December. For more details, and to book your ticket, visit https://www.seetickets.com/event/celebrating-new-poetry-the-michael-marks-awards/british-library/3162418.

The closing date for entries to the 2024 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets is Friday 27^th September. For more details and how to apply, see the Awards website https://michaelmarksawards.com/awards/2024-awards/   

We are delighted to be working with McMaster University Library on a free virtual event One Love and Venceremos: Celebrating the Correspondence of Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey, which will be held on Thursday, July 25 at 11 a.m. EDT or 4pm BST to mark the 90th birthday of the late Austin Clarke.

The free lecture will celebrate the correspondence and friendship between Austin Clarke and Andrew Salkey, two pivotal Caribbean diaspora writers. Though divided by oceans, borders, and distance, both writers were united by a sense of brotherhood rooted in shared origins, and the emergent Black political consciousness of the 20th century.

“This correspondence is a joy to read. As writers, language was the brush with which they painted their worlds,” said presenter Myron Groover, archives and rare books librarian in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University Library. “Here we see them effortlessly moving between different registers of expression and dialect as they reflect on both the pivotal and mundane events of their lives.”

Austin Clarke was a Barbadian-born, ground-breaking, incendiary voice in Canadian and Caribbean literature. Andrew Salkey was an accomplished Jamaican novelist and a central figure of Britain’s Caribbean diaspora.

Clarke and Salkey’s poignant, furious, and funny letters reveal the inner lives, public triumphs, and private reflections of two very different men, both sustained by a sense of international community, deeply rooted in considerations of space, place, identity, exile, belonging, and transcendence.

The event will bring together scholars and archivists from McMaster University Library and the British Library to discuss this remarkable documentary legacy. Organizers say it is particularly meaningful to revisit these letters now that Clarke’s work, and the work of Caribbean diaspora writers more broadly, is receiving a long-overdue critical reappraisal.

McMaster University Library is proud to hold Clarke’s archive, which includes manuscripts, correspondence, personal files, audio tapes, unpublished novels, notebooks, and other material.

The British Library holds Salkey’s large and varied archive, which includes literary drafts, correspondence, research notes, diaries, photographs and ephemera that shed light on the different aspects of Salkey’s life and work in the literary, academic, and political spheres of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and North America.

“The British Library is delighted to be part of this event, which will allow us to showcase the depth and breadth of the Salkey archive to a wider international audience,” said presenter Helen Melody, Lead Curator, Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives at the British Library. “Austin Clarke is the single largest correspondent within the Salkey archive, and it will be wonderful to work with McMaster to shed a light on two such significant figures in 20th century Caribbean Literature.”

This event is presented by McMaster University Library, the British Library, McMaster Alumni, and McMaster’s Department of English and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and is part of a project titled Austin Clarke at 90 funded by the International Initiatives Micro-Fund and the Office of the President.

A conference will also take place in September 2024 at McMaster University and Toronto Metropolitan University. The conference, Austin Clarke, Black Studies and Black Diasporic Memory is being organized by Ronald Cummings, associate professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and Darcy Ballantyne, assistant professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Registration will open once details are finalized.

Cummings says the initiative for this project grew out of a course he has been teaching in the department for the last two years titled Windrush Writing/Writing Windrush: Empire, Race and Decolonization.

“This project not only celebrates Clarke and Salkey’s correspondence, but also seeks to understand them in relation to a wider transatlantic public and networks of Caribbean diaspora,” said Cummings. “In keeping with the diasporic friendship of these men, it is fitting that this project connects archives on different sides of the Atlantic and will hopefully lay the groundwork for future collaborations.”

Register for the July 25th virtual event on Zoom