Introduction

I am very pleased to be introducing my first issue of the JCL Bibliography, having taken up the post of editor in January 2023. My appointment follows the long tenure of Vassilena Parashkevova, who held the position since 2008. I am sure JCL readers will join me in thanking Vassilena for her years of excellent leadership of this essential annual resource; they will also know that I have some very large shoes to fill. I hope that I can keep up her capable work, while also adding some of my own flavour to the issue going forward.

2022 saw the world emerge from the most immediate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic following the production and dissemination of vaccines, though strict Covid restrictions did not end in China until December and the WHO kept its official designation of the disease as a Global Health Emergency in place until May 2023. The return to a more normal existence has also enabled a slow re-emergence of in-person cultural life. A number of contributors talk about how heartened they felt by the return of live theatre, which had been virtually halted due to Covid lockdowns and other restrictions. Some theatre companies succeeded in reinventing themselves as digital and multimedia companies (see, for example, Huzir) but, as a number of the contributors attest, there is no substitute for the live event.

The loosening of pandemic restrictions also meant the return of in-person literary festivals, prizing ceremonies and academic conferences, which all contribute, in different ways, to a flourishing literary and cultural sphere. Malaysia and Singapore contributor Ismail S. Talib cites the return of the Singapore Writers Festival and the Georgetown Literary Festival in Malaysia, both of which were on hold during the pandemic, and Walter Perera, introducing the Sri Lanka bibliography, notes the return of the triennial conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) (an association born out of the same 1964 conference that precipitated this journal). However, Perera also highlights the barriers to attendance that continue to exist, including high-priced post-pandemic plane tickets and ever-tightening visa restrictions. This suggests that the vastly expanded use of video conferencing platforms in the pandemic years is here to stay as it offers possibilities for global scholarly and creative exchange in the face of the relentless hardening of borders and, simultaneously, the need to move towards less carbon-intensive lifestyles.

Remaining with Sri Lanka, the country celebrated the awarding of the 2022 Booker Prize to its own Shehan Karunatilaka for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Karunatilaka is the first Sri Lankan to win the prize outright (Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was a joint win in 1992). The ceremony, held in London’s Roundhouse, was also the first to take place in person since 2019. Despite the jubilation surrounding the win, it was not without controversy, as Karunatilaka’s manuscript, then titled “Chats with the Dead”, had already been published by Penguin India in 2020. However, as discussed in an author’s note to The Seven Moons, it was “revised” to make it more accessible to a “global audience” who are “unacquainted and unfamiliar with Sri Lankan politics of the 1980s, its mythology and folklore” (Perera). The demand for such “revisions” once again raises questions about the power structures that remain endemic to the global literary marketplace and where the burden of cultural translation continues to lie.

In 2022 we also saw a continuing steady stream of publications responding to and reflecting on pandemic life, particularly its inequalities. However, where the anthology was the most prevalent form during and in the immediate aftermath of Covid-19 (see 2020 Editor’s Introduction), the memoir has emerged as the reigning form of this bibliographic year. While the anthology offers immediacy in its short form contributions and a sense of community that was especially needed amidst the isolation of pandemic lockdowns, the emergence of the memoir suggests a different kind of writerly response to the crisis, one that is more reflective, individual and covers a larger temporal scale. Within the wider memoir genre, we have seen particular sub-genres take prominence, including the physician’s memoir, the carer’s memoir and the lockdown memoir, which is perhaps a form unique to the Covid-19 crisis. In the first category is Roopa Farooki’s memoir Everything is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life (see also Heather Patterson’s Shadows and Light: A Physician’s Lens on COVID). However, Farooki frames her memoir with the death of her sister Kiron, who died of breast cancer shortly before Covid, adding an element of personal grief more common to the carer’s memoir. Everything is True was composed from a daily diary Farooki kept while working as a physician during the height of the disease, which also gives it a flavour of the immediacy found in the early set of pandemic publications. At the same time, her use of the second person rather than the familiar “I” of the memoir form produces a sense of detachment that seems necessary in the midst of such gruelling trauma. In a recent keynote lecture, Claire Chambers discussed Farooki’s fiction within the context of what she calls “decoronial” works, literature that reflects simultaneously on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial and structural inequalities that exacerbated these and continue to do so.

In the sub-genre of the carer’s memoir is journalist Mitchell Consky’s Home Safe: A Memoir of End-of-Life Care During Covid-19, which documents the transformation of domestic spaces by his father’s terminal cancer. More aligned to the latter sub-category of the lockdown memoir is sociologist Amy Kaler’s Until Further Notice: A Year in Pandemic Time, which charts, in real time, her daily responses to the changes in habits during the first year of pandemic life. In a special issue on “Pandemic Literatures” in the South African Journal of Literary Studies, Walter K. Barure and Doreen R. Tivenga address the phenomenon of the lockdown memoir, arguing that life writing is “a deliberate process of making sense of the socio-economic and psychological impact of the coronavirus lockdown, and […] narrativising the pandemic becomes a strategy to critique power structures, rethink how we envision a return to normalcy, and deconstruct perceptions of time and a homely place” (2).

In addition to life writing, a number of poetry collections published in 2022 also dealt with pandemic life. While less direct than the memoir form, poetry offers the possibility of more oblique engagements that convey the fractures of time and space and failures of language that accompanied Covid-19’s spread. In Canada, Bruce Whiteman’s The Invisible World is in Decline: Book IX, is the conclusion of a 40-year long poem and, as put by contributor Joel Deshaye, “the ongoing pandemic was tied up in the sense of an ending” that this book provided. In India, Sukrita Paul Kumar’s fifth poetry collection Vanishing Words questions “the existential nothingness of life especially in the post-pandemic world,” as put by the India contributors. The anthology also remains a significant form, as seen in the publication of The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics, edited by Michael Titlestad, Karl van Wyk and Grace A. Musila (also our contributor for East and Central Africa), a collection which brings together poetry, essays and literary criticism on pandemics, not just Covid. In drama, Clare Stopford’s Covid Moons explores the Covid lockdown through the lives of strangers isolating in a block of flats and navigating a relationship around the dividing wall of their balconies. And, from the other side of the Covid experience, the play Transmission by Stuart McKenzie details the parliamentary response to Covid-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand and is primarily crafted from interviews with then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, finance minister Grant Robertson and epidemiologist Michael Baker.

Scholars are also now publishing work on pandemic cultural expression. In addition to the articles in the special issue already mentioned, Wendy Roy focuses on women writers like Emily St. John Mandel and Saleema Nawaz to assess the value of community communication during the disease’s spread and Canadian Literature put out a special issue, “Imagining Endemic Times”, which recontextualizes the pandemic in terms of dystopian and utopian fiction (see Kim C 2022). As the editors of the issue on “Pandemic Literatures” remind us, there were other pandemics pre-Covid, some of which we still live with, and that “daunting and frightening as mass precarity is, it does suggest that in order to survive in a humane way, some structural, group and individual arrangements should change” (Manase and Ndlovu 2022, 5). There is also another type of pandemic writing that is just beginning to emerge, which looks more to how we can learn lessons for the future, as seen in Vivek Shraya’s Next Time There’s a Pandemic.

Looking beyond Covid to another huge challenge faced by humanity, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the bulk of its Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2022, in which it concluded that many of the negative environmental impacts propagated by humans are on the verge of becoming “irreversible” (Harvey, 2022). Unsurprisingly, climate change and other environment-related topics continue to be a prominent theme in both creative and scholarly output. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate was an important work of ecocriticism published in 2022 and includes chapters relevant to a number of JCL regions (Johns-Putra and Sultzbach). We saw the centring of non-human voices in Catherine Chidgey’s multi award-winning novel The Axeman’s Carnival, which is narrated by a sentient magpie called Tama. In Australian Chris Flynn’s collection Here Be Leviathans, stories are narrated by either an animal or object. It was also a big year for environmental poetry, including the expansive anthology No Other Place to Stand, edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri and published by Auckland University Press. In India, Lakshmi Kanchi (pen name SoulReserve), Poet-in-Residence at The Wetlands Centre, Cockburn, published her first collection, Lakesong, to much celebration. Tasnuva Hayden’s An Orchid Astronomy also contains themes of environmental collapse. Two poetry collections exploring climate in relation to migration and displacement are Joanne Leow’s seas move away and Jaspreet Singh’s How to Hold a Pebble. In fiction, J. D. Kurtness’s novel Aquariums (translated from the French in 2022) and Kasia van Schaik’s short story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth both deal with themes of environmental collapse.

With the pandemic and climate crisis on everyone’s mind, it is not surprising that dystopian novels were a prominent showing in this year’s bibliography. Mohsin Hamid brings together anxieties about contagion and racial dissolution in his latest novel The Last White Man and Robert McGill’s A Suitable Companion to the End of the World has been billed as a dystopian plague novel. Tabish Khair also published his eighth novel, The Body by the Shore, which portrays a dystopia set in the coming decade. Bangladeshi Saad Z. Hossain published the tragi-comic Cyber Mage, which is the fourth in a series of sci-fi novels set in Dhaka. She also published Kundu Wakes Up, a sequel to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019), which focuses on a futuristic South Asia of airborne nanotech, video games and environmental disaster.

We also saw several writers drawing on non-Western traditions and beliefs in their works. Former Caine Prize winner Okwiri Oduor’s Things They Lost blends Kenyan history with nods to cosmologies of magic drawn from Swahili culture. We also saw novels drawing on ancient Chinese mythology, such as Tan Sue Lynn’s Celestial Kingdom Duology, the novels Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Heart of the Sun Warrior. In a similar vein, Gracie Kim’s Sir Julius Vogel award-wining Gifted Clans children’s trilogy was inspired by Korean mythology and 2022 saw the publication of its final instalment, The Last Fallen Moon. Also related to fantasy, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature published a special issue on fantasy and magic realism.

Crime fiction was also a prominent genre in 2022, especially in South Asia. Nilanjana Roy’s Black River is set in present-day Delhi and focuses on those living on the periphery of the city. 2022 also saw new thrillers by Harini Nagendra (The Bangalore Detectives Club), Meeti Shroff-Shah (The Death of Kirti Kadakia) and Nachi (Death of a District Magistrate). And Joygopal Podder published his twelfth thriller, Eye Witness. In addition to crime thrillers, our Malaysia and Singapore contributor highlights the prevalence of horror, as in My Lovely Skull & Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim and The Wicked and the Willing: An F/F Gothic Horror Vampire Novel by the Australian-Malaysian Tan Lianyu. Romance was also not left out, with the publication of the next instalment of Moni Mohsin’s hugely successful “Butterfly” chick lit series, Between You, Me & the Four Walls: The Social Butterfly Bulletin, but strikes a more serious note with the appearance of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Works by indigenous writers and scholars featured heavily in the lists of Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, with some notable titles published in India as well. The anthology form has proven an important one for this arena as well, such as Canadian collection Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation, edited by Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, Aimée Craft, and Hōkūlani K. Aikau, and Australian publications This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction, edited by Mykaela Saunders, and Unlimited Futures, edited by Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven. Historian Monty Soutar published her bestselling novel Kāwai, which is set in Aotearoa before the arrival of European settlers. There was also the founding of Saufo’i Press, started by writer Faith Wilson, which champions Moana Pacific writers, and its first publication, HEAL! by poet Simone Kaho. From India’s North-Eastern States came a collection by Gumlat Ong Maio of the Singpho tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, which retells folk tales of the tribe in verse form. Australian poet Lionel Fogarty also published Harvest Lingo: New Poems, which the Australia contributors describe as “arguably the year’s most significant contribution to writing about Indigenous experience”, in spite of (or perhaps because of) Fogarty’s refusal to be confined to “Indigenous issues” in his work. In drama, Hemi Kelly’s whakamāori (interpretation) of Brian Friel’s Translations, Ngā Whakamāoritanga, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and brings a new perspective to Friel’s ever-poignant exploration of colonialism’s decimation of native languages. On the subject of language, Canada contributor Joel Deshaye highlights the increased preference of writers and scholars from indigenous backgrounds to use indigenous words and phrases in their titles, sometimes with translations but more often without, as in Gabe Calderon’s novel Màgòdiz (its title drawing on the word for “rebel” in the Anishinaabe language) and in Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know: Indigenous Re-Search Methodologies, by Kathleen E. Absolon (Minogiizhigokwe, Anishinaabe), which Deshaye infers from context means “learning”, though admits there are other titles he could not find a translation to. Such a practice provides a refreshing contrast to the expectation that readers should be spared the work of translation (whether linguistic or cultural), as seen with the “revision” of Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker prize-winning novel for global publication. Deshaye also points out the limitations of the bibliography as a form, with its tendency to aggregate works by indigenous writers from different tribes or regions, just as this author is doing, and calls for “a deeper engagement with the works (and cultures) themselves”.

Returning to the subject of translation, it is heartening to see the quantity and variety of translated works in the list, especially from non-European languages. This is particularly pertinent in India, where at least a taste of the wealth of literature in such languages, known as bhashas, can finally be appreciated within a wider cultural sphere (the points made above notwithstanding). Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize for 2022 and was the first Indian-language novel to do so. Also, significantly, the JCB prize (India’s main literary prize) shortlist had just one novel written originally in English, with the others being translations, from Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Malayalam and Nepali, respectively. There are also multi-lingual publications, such as Harihar Vaishnav’s Selected Poems, with English and Devanagari script in parallel. In nonfiction, there is the pioneering anthology Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, co-edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, which includes both translations and Anglophone contributions from a wide range of Muslim-majority regions. Another important work on the region is Amina Yaqin’s Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Women’s Writing, which offers new insights into the tradition of Urdu women’s writing. While, like South Asia, South Africa is highly diverse linguistically, with twelve official languages, contributor Crystal Warren laments that in 2022 all the translated works were originally published in Afrikaans. In East and Central Africa, however, there is more to celebrate in this arena, with the publication of Shoonie Hartwig’s Aniceti Kitereza: A Tanzanian Epic, a biographical portrait of one of the major foundational writers in Tanzania, Aniceti Kitereza. It tells the story of the forty-year journey towards publication of his novel Mr Myombekere and his Wife Bugonoka, their Son Ntulanalwo and Daughter Bulihwali: The Story of an Ancient African Community (2000), which he originally wrote in kiKerewe (subsequently translated into Kiswahili and English).

2022 was a tumultuous year in global geopolitics and economics, with Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, triggering worldwide inflation and a cost-of-living crisis that hit the world’s poorest populations the hardest with soaring fuel and grain prices. In Sri Lanka, growing frustration with government corruption and mismanagement that led to a forex crisis and ensuing scarcity of basic necessities precipitated in the Aragalaya movement, which loosely translates to revolt or rebellion. Contributor Senath Perera discusses the impact of these events in his introduction, which included repercussions for the publishing industry on the island due to the tripling of paper prices. This meant that many writers were unable to publish their works or had to be satisfied with much smaller print runs than initially anticipated. This also had an impact on scholarly publications like journals, some of which had to cut down the number of issues published that year. Persistent power cuts during the unrest also meant online publication was not an easy solution either. Much like during the pandemic, theatre productions were also put on hold due to the unrest and shortages, yet, as Perera notes, Aragalaya also led to a flurry of creative activity as “plays, poetry, folk drama, and ritualistic performances communicated narratives that the state had purposefully subsumed”.

2022 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin’s government. This grim milestone was marked with the publication of a number of scholarly works, including an article by Anneeth Kaur Hundle in the Journal of the African Literature Association, “Fifty Years On: The 1972 Asian Expulsion as Global Critical Event, or the Insecurities of Expulsion”. As contributor Grace Musila summarises, “Hundle’s essay confronts what it terms ‘expulsion exceptionalism’, in reference to the singular status the expulsion has come to occupy in Afro-Asian public discourse; and sees to reframe the expulsion as what can be termed a ‘global critical event’ that remains influential in shaping Afro-Asian debates on belonging”. Also on the subject of Asians in East Africa, Mahruba T. Mowtushi (also one of our Bangladesh contributors) published her important monograph, Africa in the Bengali Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928-1973 which, as Musila explains, “offers a provocative reflection on south-south politics of representation, which tend to be overshadowed by the more prevalent north-south axis.” Though the fifty-year anniversary of Bangladeshi independence took place in 2021, there is still a steady stream of publications coming out to mark it, as our Bangladesh contributors point out. They include three notable anthologies: An Ekushey Anthology: 1952-2022, edited by Niaz Zaman; Bangladesh: Writings On 1971, Across Borders, edited by Rakshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta; and Arise Out of the Lock: 50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English, edited by Alam Khorshed. These collections include works translated from both Bengali and Urdu and feature writers from Bangladesh, West Bengal and Pakistan.

On the subject of events and anniversaries, it would be strange not to mention the death of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96, not long after celebrating her Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years as Britain’s monarch and head of the Commonwealth of Nations. Despite great fanfare in Britain, this event was greeted with ambivalence from many of Britain’s former colonies, especially India and Ireland, whose citizens expressed their feelings on social media, often with a hefty dose of black humour. Perhaps the fact that this event was not mentioned by any of the bibliography’s contributors is evidence enough that the monarch’s (and by extension the Commonwealth’s) relevance to the once-colonised countries of the world has truly met its demise. Instead, they commemorated the loss of writers and scholars (thankfully lessened post-pandemic) from their respective regions. This includes a number of well-known figures in the field, such as Indian literary critic and historian Aijaz Ahmad, Pakistani poet, critic, essayist and scholar Sara Suleri Goodyear and Ghanaian writer, poet and dramatist Ama Ata Aidoo (d 2023). 2022 also saw the publication of special issues of the Journal of West Indian Literature and Small Axe commemorating the work of Kamau Braithwaite, who died in 2020, and Ariel, commemorating the work of Andrea Levy, who died in 2019. George Lamming was also highlighted by the JWIL through a critical forum in its November 2022 issue following his passing the same year.

Other notable publications from 2022 that there was not occasion to mention elsewhere include new poetry collections by John Agard, Olive Senior and Moniza Alvi. Kamila Shamsie also published her latest novel Best of Friends, set in 1988 Karachi and 2019-2020 London. In criticism, We Must Learn to Sit Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Decolonising Essays, 1967–1984, is an important publication that collects the early works of leading cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. Unfortunately, due to illness, there is no West Africa section in this bibliography, but we hope to include 2022 titles in next year’s issue.