Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) is a poet, novelist and playwright. He made his debut in 2003 with the critically acclaimed collection of poems Only The Gods Are New.

A Storm Blew in From Paradise (2012) was based on his own father’s life and marked an important breakthrough in Anyuru’s authorship. It received rave reviews, reached the #1 spot on the critics’ lists and was awarded and shortlisted for several prestigious literary prizes.

The Rabbit Yard (2017) was a huge ­success, both critically and commercially, and was awarded the August Prize. Translation rights have been sold to twelve territories and film rights have been acquired by Momento Film.

Kitso Lelliott is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power, and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the ‘real’ and how it is shaped through contesting epistemologies, their narratives and the form these took across the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of enunciating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations in relation to yet imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North.

Elyas Alavi is a visual artists and poet based in Adelaide. Born in the Daikundi province of Afghanistan, he has published three poetry books “I’m a daydreamer wolf” published in 2008 in Tehran (5th edition in 2016), followed by “Some wounds” in 2012 in Kabul and “Hodood” in 2015 in Tehran. He graduated from a Master of Visual Arts in 2016 at the University of South Australia and has exhibited internationally. Alavi visits many issues in his works, but mainly memory, migration, displacement, exile and the human nature.

The artistic research journal PARSE will release its latest journal under the topic of Art & Migration. It contains contributions from artists, writers and critical border scholars inquiring into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities. The journal issue is comprised of articles, essays, visual art, fiction and poetry, and podcasts, and during the release the poet and artist Elyas Alavi will give a reading of his work and Kitso Lelliott an artist talk. This issue is edited by Erling Björgvinsson, Nicholas de Genova, Mahmoud Keshavarz and Tintin Wulia. PARSE is based at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Gothenburg University and this issue was made in collaboration with the Centre on Global Migration at Gothenburg University.

In his latest poetry collection, the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson investigates the idea of a utopian paradise—the weight this word holds for his country Great Britain, and what it means in relation to his prematurely born son. He writes about the paradise that was denied the people of Grenfell Tower. The paradise that for decades has been denied the Windrush generation, who crossed the sea from the former Caribbean colonies to Great Britain. And for those captured within modern forms of slavery.

Prayers for those lost and those left behind. Prayers to heal the traumas so constantly repeated in our age.

Roger Robinson is a poet and performer, an activist, and the vocalist in King Midas Sound. He was born in the northwest borough of Hackney in London, but as a three year old returned to his parent’s Trinidad. He was captivated by his mother’s magical storytelling over the dinner table, and attended the most prestigious schools on the island while his father worked as a PR executive for an oil company—one of the first black men to reach such heights. He returned to London as a teenager, and during the nineties made a name for himself in the capital’s poetry movement. He combines his own writing with giving writing workshops in London’s schools.A Portable Paradise will be published in Swedish through Rastlös Förlag during the autumn of 2020 in translation by Maziar Farsin.