Susheila Nasta

Dr Susheila Nasta MBE FRSL is a writer, presenter, literary activist and Professor Emerita at both Queen Mary College, University of London and the Open University. In 1984 she founded Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, one of the first magazines to platform literary voices from Britain’s Black British, South Asian, and diasporic communities. For over three and a half decades she curated over 100 issues – featuring more than 5,000 internationally distinguished writers – and founded the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, many of whose winners have gone on to win major awards including, most recently, Anthony Joseph (T. S. Eliot Prize, 2023), Abdulrazak Gurnah (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2021), Monique Roffey (Costa Book Award, 2021), Roger Robinson (T. S. Eliot Prize, 2020), and Bernardine Evaristo (Booker Prize, 2019).

Susheila has published widely in the field of contemporary international writing, particularly on women’s writing, the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas and Black Britain. Motherlands (1991) was the first book to put Black women writers from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia in Britain on the critical map. Her other books include Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002); Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (2004); India in Britain (2012); and Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013).

She edited Brave New Words (2019), an anthology of specially commissioned essays from distinguished authors to explore the power of the written word. She is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2019) and editor of Sam Sevlon’s plays – El Dorado West One (1995) and Highway in the Sun (1996) – in addition to being a leading authority on his work and his literary executor.

The Bloomsbury Indians (forthcoming 2027) is a major reframing of the cultural, literary and political landscape of London between the wars to show not only the cultural contribution of the Asian publishers, editors and writers, such as Krishna Menon, Mulk Raj Anand and James Meary Tambimuttu, who worked alongside Leonard and Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and George Orwell, but also how pre-war Britain was far more ethnically and culturally mixed than most versions of our literary history suggest.

A regular guest for BBC Radio and at literary festivals, Susheila has been judge of several literary prizes, most recently the David Cohen Prize and the Banipal Arab Literature in Translation Prize. She has curated exhibitions including ‘At the Heart of the Nation: Indians in Britain’ and ‘Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land’ for the British Library in 2018.

Susheila received an MBE in 2011 for her services to Black and Asian literature. In 2019 she was elected Honorary Fellow by the Royal Society of Literature and received the prestigious Benson Medal for an exceptional and lifelong contribution to the advancement of literature. In 2020 she received an Honorary Fellowship from the English Association.

A Member of Council at the Royal Society of Literature, a Trustee for the Royal Literary Fund and an advisor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she lives in London and is working on her memoir.

Please get in touch to discuss speaking engagements and publishing rights for Susheila Nasta.

Photo of Susheila Nasta © Sharron Wallace