Essays

Carissa is a college student born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She has been writing poems in her head for years and finally started putting them to paper last fall. She is passionate about spreading awareness of climate anxiety and the disproportionate effects the climate crisis has on women’s health. Her winning entry is titled Haemorrhage.

Andrea Yang is a Taiwanese-American writer from Arizona. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2022 with a degree in English Literature. Andrea is currently working on a screenplay and hopes to publish a novel one day. In her writing, she hopes to explore the ways in which people interact with and create change in their environments. She has published poetry through the Tempe Public Library. Her winning entry is titled 

Bioluminescence.

Maya Teiman, originally from São Paulo, Brazil, is an environmental economics student at Middlebury College, USA. She passionately explores the intersection of energy transition and community impact through her written and professional work. Having worked on projects with communities from the Amazon in Brazil to rural India, Maya aims for a diversity of global stories in her climate writing. With aspirations to contribute to the energy transition in a way that respects local communities, she has always cherished storytelling and hopes to inspire change through her written work. Her winning entry is titled The Turbines.

Udochukwu Chidera also known as Chidera is a Nigerian writer and pharmacist of Igbo ancestry. She is the inaugural winner of the 2023 monthly writing contest for the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation, Lagos chapter. She has won several writing contests including the 2022 Movement of the People Poetry Contest, the 2022 Shuzia Songs of Zion Poetry Contest and the 2022 Shuzia Prose Contest.She is a contributor to various journals and magazines including IHRAF Thorn, Tears, and Treachery Anthology for the Sudanese War and 2022 Chinua Achebe Poetry/Essay Anthology. Her entry is titled Cry me a river.

Julia Martinčič is the winner of our international essay competition. Read her essay Skin

Elijah Koome is one of two runners up in our international essay competition. Read his essay Generation M.

Malumi Adeboye is one of two runners up in our international essay competition. Read his essay My Generation.

Festival author and dancer Tishani Doshi on the fearlessness required in both writing and dancing.

Read two poems from Holmberg's Nordic council prize nominated poetry collection Juolgevuođđu ("Sole").

The novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo S Ndebele explores the meaning of South Africa itself, writes associate professor Tonje Vold.

You don't know fuckery until you have been loved like Mandela. Read Koleka Putuma's poem.

Everyday returns after violence like the rain after droughts, Ramallah residents and authors Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson write in this dialogue-essay.

He might have passed for a Cupid, were it not for the long socks. Extract from a book by Maria Stepanova.

I had read popular fiction and not Dostoevsky for a reason: to protect my unique genius. Read Gunnhild Øyehaug's humorous text. 

"The sea is my life, our life, the mother's breast of all living things", writes author Yann Queffélec.

There are so many things you can do wrong. Essay by Heinz Bude, sociologist and author.

Ideology and propaganda in Russia during the Soviet era looked to the future and the dream of socialism’s ultimate triumph. Today, however, the glorious past has taken over the role of symbolic capital for the powers that be.

Where is “arguably the most vigorous and exciting body of poetry in our time” being written? According to Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt, the answer is the Caribbean.

Read Inger Bråtveits essay about Dubravka Ugrešić.