Introduction

2024 was, to borrow a phrase from this issue’s Australia article, defined by “[t]he twin shadows” of Israel’s War in Gaza and the second election of US president Donald Trump. Within the United States, the latter has since precipitated attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes; indiscriminate detention and deportation of undocumented (and in some cases documented) immigrants and the targeted cancelling of university research funding, amid broader threats to media and intellectual freedom. Trump has also cracked down on campus demonstrations in support of the Palestinian cause, further fuelling the already hostile atmosphere facing such support in the United States and elsewhere. The Australia contributors draw attention to the divisive effect the Israel-Palestine conflict has had on the literary community. Literary festivals have been on the sharp end of these divisions, with board resignations and calls to deplatform speakers for holding both Zionist and pro-Palestinian views, while other events have seen attempts to block Palestinian writers. Partly driving these conflicts, they say, is a friction between working writers and those in control of the literary establishment — major publishing houses and the organisers of such events – who are squeamish about the effect any kind of controversy might have on sales.

Gaza and the Palestinian cause were nevertheless central preoccupations of many of the works published in the regions covered in this bibliography, which demonstrate cross-regional solidarity and draw attention to shared histories of colonial violence and occupation. In Australia, the Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani received the 2025 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for rock flight, a narrative poem that serves as an allegory of Palestinian occupation. In India, Kashmir-born performance poet Inder Salim’s Postcards to Gaza, is made up of a series of poems written from 7 October 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, to 28 March 2024 and have been performed in various cities across the country. In Pakistan, Ejaz Rahim’s Poems for Gaza with Manto’s Letter to Uncle Sam connects the Israel-Palestine conflict to Saadat Hassan Manto’s satirical 1951 letter to America during the Cold War. The plot of Sri Lankan diasporic writer Michelle de Kretser’s innovative novel Theory and Practice takes an abrupt turn following the “author’s” encounter with an account of an Israeli commander whose reading of poststructuralist and urban theory forms the justification for the destruction of Palestinian homes. Solidarity also took theatrical form in Sri Lanka, with A Night for Palestine, featuring two plays presented by Stages Theatre Group and the Free Palestine Movement: The Children of the Little Olive Park, directed by Tracy Holsinger and devised by the Stages Youth Ensemble, and Patterns of Our Genocides, written and directed by Ruwanthie de Chickera. The latter draws parallels between Rohingya and Palestinian suffering, reminding us of other conflicts that do not regularly make the headlines of international news. This includes, for example, the ongoing violence in the North-East of India, which is addressed in Assamese poet Subhakar Das’s Renditions [India: Poetry]. Sophie Maríñez connects violence and conflict to creative output in a different way with her Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic [Caribbean: General Studies], in which she deploys the framework of the “Spiral”, a core concept of Haitian literary aesthetics, to explore representations of violence related to the 2013 denationalization crisis that affected thousands of Dominicans with Haitian ancestry.

While Trump was not an explicit topic of this year’s publications, politics was often at the forefront with similarly worrying local trends towards right-wing ideologies and undemocratic tendencies. India’s Hindutva government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to endanger the pluralistic culture of the country, an issue addressed in a number of non-fiction works, including Rahul Bhatia’s The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy and Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, about sixteen human rights defenders who were imprisoned without trial and accused of sedition in 2018. In South Africa, the 2024 general election failed to achieve a majority for the African National Conference (ANC) for the first time since the end of Apartheid in 1994. According to South Africa contributor Marike Beyers, the political uncertainties caused by this change may have had an impact on the country’s literary output, as she notes there were only a few debut authors published in the year. Canada’s literary trends were also influenced by politics, though largely in response to the polarised climate on the other side of its southern border. Our Canada contributor Joel Deshaye notes, for example, that in 2024 there was a marked number of books on disability, in a seeming rejection of the anti-DEI rhetoric coming from America’s then presidential nominee, and on neoliberalism, which Deshaye reads as a repudiation of the unquestioning belief in capitalism that is central to the mythology of the United States and an “oversimplified Social Darwinist ideology of fitness and competition” that Canada has never subscribed to.

Turning more fully to the domain of literature, Malaysia and Singapore contributor Ismail S. Talib laments the lack of support for literary study — in any language — at pre-tertiary and even tertiary level education, with a shortage of qualified teachers and few universities in either country offering literature or creative writing courses. A large part of the problem is students’ declining interest in studying humanities subjects, an issue that has been growing in many countries, as the perceived “usefulness” of such degrees has been brought into question by years of corporate-backed governments and neoliberal agendas (see, for example, Feeling Obligated: Teaching in Neoliberal Times [Canada: Non-Fiction]). Talib points to the knock-on effect this has for the creative output of Malaysia and Singapore, as fewer young writers are produced along with fewer readers to fund and appreciate their work. Such declines typically impact marginalised people and locations the most, limiting the voices and experiences that circulate in the public discourse, both locally and globally. However, on a more positive note, Talib acknowledges the work of regional divisions of international publishing houses like Penguin Random House for supporting local writers by connecting them to global networks of distribution and publicity, while keeping one foot in local culture and concerns. Although, one drawback of such reliance on international publishers and markets is the “self-reinforcing cycle” (Talib) that maintains the novel as the dominant genre, due to its global visibility and more assured profitability. This is why local independent publishing houses remain central for supporting work in other genres, especially poetry — presses like firstfruits and Maths Paper Press in Singapore.

Grace Musila also draws attention to the dominance of the novel in her article on East and Central Africa, and points to the importance of recognising “ephemeral” forms “that do not enjoy critical attention nor legitimation by the formal institutions of artistic consecration” even though “they often have wide circulation beyond the academy and the middle classes”. She points to several critical publications that address such forms in African literary studies. These include important works on the performing arts like the Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance [General Studies: Regional], which includes a chapter on African dance [General Studies: Uganda]; Bobby Smith’s Theatre and Global Development: Performing Partnerships [General Studies: Regional] and Matthew Elliott and C. J. Odhiambo’s “Global North and Global South Collaboration in Training to Achieve ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’: A Case Study of Theatre for Development in Kisumu County, Kenya” [General Studies: Kenya]. While the number of drama scripts published in print has been waning in most regions, this does not necessarily signal a declining theatre scene, as our Malaysia and Singapore contributor points out. Rather, it speaks to a shift in the modes of dissemination for theatrical works, as producers make use of social media platforms to share performances or employ self-publication. For example, Alfian Sa’at’s The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore offered its full script as a limited-edition print publication during its staging. Such developments suggests that this bibliography may need to expand its definition of “publication” in order to represent this important work. Musila also highlights the growing importance of the internet and the challenge of capturing the literary work that circulates there. Three publications, Susanna L. Sacks’ Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry [General Studies: Malawi]; Sara Kazmi’s “The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond” [General Studies: Regional] (for a related work just on print magazine culture, see Alexandra Reza’s Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire [General Studies: Regional]) and Stephanie Bosch Santana’s Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language and Media in African Literary Cultures [General Studies: Regional] go some way to chart this work and its movement through different networks and platforms. While on the subject of digital texts, it is also worth mentioning Hanif Kureishi’s new memoir Shattered [Pakistan: Letters and Auto/biography], which documents the author’s journey of recovery from a fall that damaged his neck and spine and left him paralysed. The work began as a series of social media posts dictated to his family from his hospital bed, originally titled The Kureishi Chronicles.

Translated work has continued to thrive, especially in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have a growing number of entries each year. When highlighting new English translations of novels by two prominent figures of Bengali literature, Selina Hossain and Rizia Rahman, Bangladesh contributor Mahruba Mowtushi describes translation as a form of “feminist literary recovery” for the way it brings such works into wider circulation and recognition. This year’s article on Aotearoa New Zealand includes a translation into Te Reo Māori of a selection of Maya Angelou’s poetry (He Kupu Nā Te Māia / He Kohinga Ruri Nā Maya Angelou). Such entries are important to include as they contribute to the decentring of English in settler spaces like Aotearoa New Zealand and signal connections and solidarities between black and indigenous peoples. Grace Musila also underscores the importance of translation between indigenous languages and global languages like English, foregrounding Moradewun Adejunmobi’s chapter “History Lessons: Translating the African Classics” [General Studies: Regional], which concludes that “the translation of African literature originally composed in Europhone languages into and out of indigenous languages has had greater impact in the promotion and circulation of these bodies of work than other forms of translation” (Musila).

In spite of the distressing political situation, there is much to celebrate in the 2024 bibliography, especially the many accomplishments of its dedicated regional contributors. This year, two contributors were bestowed high honours in their respective countries: Pakistani representative Muneeza Shamsie was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, the country’s third highest civilian honour, for her contributions to the field of literature, and Sri Lanka representative S. W. Perera received the Sahityaratna award, the country’s highest literary honour, for his lifetime contribution to literature in English. I extend many congratulations to them both for these fantastic achievements. Our contributors also published an impressive number of scholarly works this year. Bangladesh representative Mahruba Mowtushi published her monograph, Africa in the Bengali Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-1973, which traces important historical links, as well as tensions, between these two spaces through its reading of five Bengali authors who engage with Africa, whether as a space of otherness or as a reflection of their own colonial anxieties and nationalist aspirations [Bangladesh: General Studies; see also the discussion of this book in East and Central Africa]. Caribbean representative Victoria V. Chang published several essays this year, including an article in the Journal of West Indian Literature on Aliyyah Eniath’s The Yard, the only work of fiction produced by a Muslim woman of Indian Trinidadian origin; a chapter on Indian womanhood as home in Lakshmi Persaud’s Sastra, in the book Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora, and a second chapter about navigations of belonging and diasporic identity in Sastra for the Routledge Companion to Cultural Texts and the Nation [all Caribbean: Studies on Individual Writers]. Van Ikin, one of the Australia representatives, edited a special issue of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature on the work of John Kinsella [Australia: Special Issues], while Canadian representative Joel Deshaye published an article on “environmental listening” in Don McKay’s Songs for the Songs of Birds [Canada: Studies on Individual Writers]. Muneeza Shamsie published an interview with Hanif Kureishi about his new memoir (as well as a review of the book in Dawn) and was herself interviewed for Aurora [both Pakistan: Interviews], while a paperback of her Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English was also released by Oxford University Press [General Studies]. Lastly, one of the India representatives, Payal Nagpal, has published a work of creative writing with her book of poems, Memory Keepers [India: Poetry].