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.

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.

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?

Angelique Golding is a LAHP Collaborative Doctoral student working with Wasafiri on their 40th Anniversary projects, with a focus on the archive, which forms the basis of her research. After completing a Master’s in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths University, Angelique won a studentship to undertake a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in collaboration with Wasafiri and the British Library. Her research, completing in December 2024, draws on methodologies from postcolonial, global literary, and archival studies combined with book and magazine history.

Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2024. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies, and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review,Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, and is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

Helen Melody is Lead Curator of Contemporary Literary and Creative archives at the British Library, where she looks after the literary and theatrical archives of writers, poets, playwrights, actors and others created in the second half of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. She began at the Library in 2008 cataloguing the Ted Hughes archive.