Susheila Nasta MBE is a writer, critic and literary activist. In 1984 she founded Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, Britain’s first magazine to platform literary voices from Britain’s Black British, South Asian, and diasporic communities. For over three and a half decades, she published 100 issues featuring more than 5000 international writers, many of whom are now internationally distinguished and have won major literary awards.

Early publications focused on writers from the Caribbean such as Sam Selvon, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul and women’s writing. In 1991, she produced the first critical anthology of black women’s writing in Britain Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Similarly pioneering, her 2002 monograph, Home Truths was the first book to map a tradition of South Asian fiction in Britain.

Recent work includes: India in Britain (Palgrave, 2012), Asian Britain: A Photographic History (Westbourne Press, 2013), and The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (CUP, 2019), which charts a continuum stretching back to the 18^th century. Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now, is a collection of essays by creative writers on writing and politics (Myriad Editions, 2019). She is currently completing The Bloomsbury Indians, a group biography and writing a memoir.

Fascinated by the history of South Asia in Britain, she has directed a number of archival projects highlighting the cultural significance of the Indian presence from the mid nineteenth century onwards. This work led to the curation of three travelling exhibitions in partnership with major public institutions: the British Library, the National Archives of India, the V&A, the British Council, Leeds Art Gallery, Edinburgh National Art Gallery and the High Commission of India.

She has been recipient of a number of honours which include an MBE in 2011 and, in 2019, the Royal Society of Literature’s distinguished Benson Medal; in 2020, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the English Association for her lifelong contributions to English Studies. Currently Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary College and the Open University, she  acts as a member of Council for the RSL and is Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. A regular juror for literary prizes, she continues to act as literary executor and representative for the Sam Selvon literary estate.