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Martin Glynn (criminologist) Martin Glynn (born 1957) is a British poet, theatre director, cultural activist, and criminologist. As a poet Glynn is best known for his dub poetry performance. Life. Martin Glynn was born in "a modern slum" in Nottingham, to a white mother and black father of Jamaican heritage. Glynn has written and directed performance works, as well as writing radio and theatre plays. He has also been an Arts Development Consultant, and founded BLAK (UK) (Being Liberated and Knowledgeable), an organization encouraging the arts as a tool for personal transformation. His poem 'Tranes Blue Madness' is a tribute to John Coltrane. The poem's rhythm is modelled on Coltrane's bassline, with a relentless drive mirroring the persistence of mental depression. Glynn gained a PhD from Birmingham City University in 2013, applying critical race theory to look at black men's desistance from crime. In 2018 Glynn co-authored "Revealed", a play exploring anger within a family spanning three generations of black men. "Revealed" premiered at mac in Birmingham in February 2018.

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Nick Stone (author) Nick Stone (born 31 October 1966) is a British thriller writer. Background. Stone was born in Cambridge, England, on 31 October 1966. He is of half-Scottish and half-Haitian descent. His father, Norman Stone, was a well-known historian and his mother, Nicole, was a niece of the finance minister in the Haitian government of François Duvalier ("Papa Doc"). Early life. When he was six months old, Stone was sent to Haiti to live with his grandparents, where he stayed until returning to England in 1970. He returned to Haiti during 1973–1974, in 1982 and in 1995. His grandparents owned an estate in Haiti and some of his relatives worked for the country's dictator, Duvalier. During his visit in 1982 he met Jean Bertrand Aristide, the priest who would become Haiti's first democratically elected President; he has said that he had high hopes for Aristide's term as president but that "he turned out to be Papa Doc without the jokes". He has cited his Haitian experience as being an influence on his writings and has said that until his visit in the 1990s he thought it to be an "idyllic" place. From that visit he has said: He was bullied as a child due to his skin colour. This caused him to take up amateur boxing, at which he fought at welterweight and light-middleweight. His maternal grandfather had been a bareknuckle boxer based in France before World War II. He read History at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1989. Work. Stone has named some of his favourite crime writers as being James Ellroy, John Grisham, Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. His first novel, "Mr Clarinet", took shape during his visit to Haiti of 1995. In an interview with Stone it was said that the book "articulated the change in Haiti over the last 30 years". Stone's second novel, "King of Swords" – a prequel to "Mr Clarinet", set in Cocaine Cowboy era Miami – was published in 2007. Stone's third novel, "Voodoo Eyes", set in Miami and Cuba either side of the 2008 US Presidential Election, marks the third and final outing for the character of Max Mingus. Nick Stone's fourth novel, "The Verdict", is a legal thriller set in contemporary London . The book was a significant departure from Stone's previous novels, in both content and narrative style. Awards. "Mr Clarinet" won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award in 2006 for best thriller of the year, the International Thriller Writers Award for best first novel, and the Macavity Award for best first novel, both in 2007. The French translation, "Tonton Clarinette", won the ninth SNCF Prix du Polar in 2009.

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Andrea Stuart Andrea Stuart (born 1962) is a Barbadian-British historian and writer, who was raised in the Caribbean and the US and now lives in the UK. Her biography of Josephine Bonaparte, entitled "The Rose of Martinique", won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Although her three published books so far have been non-fiction, she has spoken of working on a novel set in the 18th century. Early years. Born in Jamaica, of Barbadian parents, Andrea Stuart spent many of her early years there, where her father was Dean of the medical school at the University College of the West Indies. She moved to England with her family when she was 14, in 1976. She studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. She began working as a journalist, then branched into publishing and television documentary production. Writing. Stuart's first book was "Showgirls" (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), a collective biography of showgirls through history to the present day, from Colette, to Marlene Dietrich, to Josephine Baker, to Madonna. It was adapted into a two-part documentary for the Discovery Channel in 1998, and since then has inspired a stage show, a dance piece and a number of burlesque performances. In 2003 Stuart's second book, "The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon's Josephine", was published. Described by "Kirkus Reviews" as "unfailingly interesting", and by "The Washington Post" as "a comprehensive and truly empathetic biography", it won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004 and has been translated into several languages. Her most recent book, "Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire", was published by Portobello Books in 2012, to much acclaim. It tells the story of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean from the perspective of what Stuart learned about her own family's experience through seven generations from the 17th century. Amy Wilentz wrote in "The New York Times": "In this multigenerational, minutely researched history, Stuart teases out these connections. She sets out to understand her family’s genealogy, hoping to explain the mysteries that often surround Caribbean family histories and to elucidate more important cultural and historic themes and events: the psychological aftereffects of slavery and the long relationship between sugar — 'white gold' — and forced labor... Much of the fiery magic of this book arises from Stuart’s ability to knit together her imaginative speculations with family research, secondary sources and the work of historians of the region, including C. L. R. James and Adam Hochschild...There is not a single boring page in this book." "Publishers Weekly" referred to Stuart "Brilliantly weaving together threads of family history, political history, social history, and agricultural history into a vivid quilt covering the evolution of sugar—"white gold"—and slavery and sugar's impact on the development of Barbados as well as on her own family." Valerie Grove in "The Times" said: "A riveting story of family, slavery and the sugar trade…[Stuart belongs] in the canon of fine post-colonial writers." "The Guardian"′s reviewer described the book as "a diligently researched hybrid of family memoir and history ... absorbing". Margaret Busby in "The Independent" referred to it as "a magisterial work of history". Stuart's work has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, and anthologies (including 2019's "New Daughters of Africa", edited by Margaret Busby), and she has been co-editor of "Black Film Bulletin" and fiction editor of "Critical Quarterly". Awards and recognition. In 2004, Stuart won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize from the Franco-British Society for "The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon's Josephine". "Sugar in the Blood" was shortlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize in the non-fiction category and for the Spear's Book Award, and was "The Boston Globe"′s non-fiction book of 2013. In June 2014, Stuart was named by "Ebony" magazine as one of "six Caribbean writers you should take some time to discover" (alongside Mervyn Morris, Beverley East, Ann-Margaret Lim, Roland Watson-Grant, and Tiphanie Yanique, who were attending the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica). Teaching and lecturing. Stuart has taught at Kingston University, as a Writer in Residence since 2011, and on the Biography course at Arvon. She was also a writing tutor with the Faber Academy, directing the "Writing Family History" course, and has been associate lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the Arts London, visiting lecturer in creative writing at City University London, and in cultural studies at Central Saint Martins.

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Francis Barber Francis Barber ( – 13 January 1801), born Quashey, was the Jamaican manservant of Samuel Johnson in London from 1752 until Johnson's death in 1784. Johnson made him his residual heir, with £70 () a year to be given him by Trustees, expressing the wish that he move from London to Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson's native city. After Johnson's death, Barber did this, opening a draper's shop and marrying a local woman. Barber was also bequeathed Johnson's books and papers, and a gold watch. In later years he had acted as Johnson's assistant in revising his famous "Dictionary of the English Language" and other works. Barber was also an important source for Boswell concerning Johnson's life in the years before Boswell himself knew Johnson. Biography. Barber was born a slave in Jamaica on a sugarcane plantation belonging to the Bathurst family. His original name was Quashey, which is a common name for men of Coromantee origin. At the age of about 15, he was brought to England by his owner, Colonel Richard Bathhurst, whose son, also called Richard, was a close friend of Johnson. Barber was sent to school in Yorkshire. Johnson's wife Elizabeth died in 1752, plunging Johnson into a depression that Barber later vividly described to James Boswell. The Bathursts sent Barber to Johnson as a valet, arriving two weeks after her death. Although the legal validity of slavery in England was ambiguous at this time (and the Somersett's Case of 1772 did not clarify it, only ruling that it was illegal to transport a slave out of England against his will), when the elder Bathurst died two years later he gave Barber his freedom in his will, with a small legacy of £12 (). Johnson himself was an outspoken opponent of slavery, not just in England but in the American colonies as well. Royal Navy. Barber then went to work for an apothecary in Cheapside but kept in touch with Johnson. He later signed up as a sailor for the Navy. He served as a "landsman" aboard various ships, received regular pay and good reports, saw the coast of Britain from Leith to Torbay, and acquired a taste for tobacco. He was discharged "three days before George II died", in other words on 22 October 1760, and returned to London and to Johnson to be his servant. Barber's brief maritime career is known from James Boswell's "Life of Johnson": Later Johnson put Barber, by then in his early thirties, in a school, presumably so that he could act as Johnson's assistant. From Boswell's "Life": Later years. Barber is mentioned frequently in James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and other contemporary sources, and there are at least two versions of a portrait, one now in Dr Johnson's House, which may be of him. Most recent art historians thought it was probably painted by James Northcote, or perhaps by Northcote's master Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was one of Barber's Trustees under the will. An alternative view, recently expressed on a BBC programme, is that it is by Reynolds himself, but of his own black servant, not Barber. When making his will, Johnson asked Sir John Hawkins, later his first biographer, what provision he should make for Barber. Sir John said that a nobleman would give 50 pounds a year (). Then I shall be "noblissimus" replied Johnson, and give him 70 (). Hawkins disapproved, and after Johnson's death criticised his "ostentatious bounty [and] favour to negroes". The bequest was indeed widely covered in the press. Johnson, in fact, left £750 () in the trust of his friend Bennet Langton from which he was expected to pay an annuity. Barber moved with his family to a rented terrace house in Lichfield, Johnson's birthplace, where – as a "Gentleman's Magazine" correspondent reported – he spent his time "in fishing, cultivating a few potatoes, and a little reading". Later he opened up a small village school in nearby Burntwood. The money from his inheritance did not last and Barber sold off his store of Johnson memorabilia to defray his debts. Johnson's biographers, Hawkins and Hester Piozzi, were critical of Barber's marriage to a white woman. He died in Stafford on 13 January 1801 due to an unsuccessful operation at Staffordshire Royal Infirmary. He was survived by his son, Samuel Barber, his daughter, Ann, and his wife, Elizabeth. Samuel became a Methodist lay preacher, while Elizabeth and Ann set up a small school. Both Samuel and Ann married white partners. Both Samuel Barber and Ann Barber feature in the short animation, Tunstall, written and directed by Jason Young. Barber's descendants still farm near Lichfield. Legacy. Francis Barber's marriage to Elizabeth Ball is featured in the short silent animation "The Trouble with Francis" (2000), whilst Barber also appears as a character in the 2015 play "Mr Foote's Other Leg" and the 2014 short animation, Tunstall. A plaque in Barber's honour on the railings of his and Johnson's former home (now Dr Johnson's House) was unveiled in 2016, by his great great great great grandson, Cedric Barber.

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Jay Bernard (writer) Jay Bernard (born 1988), FRSL, is a British writer, artist, film programmer, and activist from London, UK. Bernard has been a programmer at since 2014, co-editor of "Oxford Poetry", and their fiction, non-fiction, and art has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. Bernard's work engages with LGBT identities and dialogues. They believe that celebrations such as LGBT History Month are great but there needs to be vigilance against those that use it for their own agendas. Accolades. Bernard was named a Foyle Young Poet of the year in 2005. Bernard's pamphlet "The Red and Yellow Nothing" was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2016. The collection tells of the story of Sir Morien, a black knight at Camelot. The reviewer for "The London Magazine" wrote: "Jay Bernard has created a rare and beautiful thing. Part contemporary verse drama, part mythic retelling...Employing metrical ballads and concrete poems with equal vigour, Bernard takes us on a visual and allusive journey to test the imagination, thus putting the poet’s resources of sight and sound to full use. ...reading "The Red and Yellow Nothing" brings continuous surprise." Bernard won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for new poetry for their multimedia performance work "Surge: Side A", that includes the film "Something Said", inspired by the 1981 New Cross house fire and archives held at the George Padmore Institute, where they were the first poet-in-residence. The 2014 novel "A Brief History of Seven Killings" by Marlon James, and "Twilight City", a film produced by Reece Auguiste for the Black Audio Film Collective in 1989, also provided inspiration for the work. Bernard was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. Bernard's poetry collection, "Surge", published by Chatto & Windus, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize in 2019, for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award, for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. It has won the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Work. Performances. "Surge: Side A" (2017), a multimedia performance piece that won the Ted Hughes Award for new poetry. The work was performed at the Roundhouse, London, during The Last Word Festival 2017, and was produced by Speaking Volumes. Inclusion in anthologies and collections. Graphic art and poetry by Bernard appears in the following collections: Personal life. Bernard was born and grew up in Croydon, London, and read English at Oxford University. Bernard uses the pronouns "they/ them". Their Jamaican-born grandmother, Gee Bernard (1934–2016), was the first black councillor in Croydon and the first black member of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).

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Warsan Shire Warsan Shire (born 1 August 1988) is a British writer, poet, editor and teacher, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries. Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark", from the poem "Conversations about Home (at a deportation centre)", have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates". Life and career. Born on 1 August 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents, Shire migrated with her family to the United Kingdom at the age of one. She has four siblings. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing. As of 2015, she primarily resides in Los Angeles, California. In 2011, she released "Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth", a poetry pamphlet published by Flipped eye. Her full collection was released in 2016, also through Flipped Eye. Shire has read her poetry in various artistic venues throughout the world, including in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, North America, South Africa and Kenya. Her poems have been published in various literary publications, including "Poetry Review", "Magma" and "Wasafiri". Additionally, Shire's verse has been featured in the collections "Salt Book of Younger Poets" (Salt, 2011), "Ten: The New Wave" (Bloodaxe, 2014), and "New Daughters of Africa" (edited by Margaret Busby, 2019). Her poetry has also been translated into a number of languages, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Estonian. As of 2016, Shire is working on her first full-length poetry collection, having put out a limited-release pamphlet called "Her Blue Body" in 2015. She serves as the poetry editor at "SPOOK" magazine and she teaches poetry workshops both globally and online for cathartic and aesthetic purposes. Shire's poetry featured prominently in Beyoncé's 2016 feature-length film "Lemonade". Knowles-Carter's interest in using Shire's work was sparked with Shire's piece "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love". Influences. Shire uses not only her own personal experiences but also the experiences of people to whom she is close. She is quoted as saying: "I either know, or I am, every person I have written about, for or as. But I do imagine them in their most intimate settings." Her main interest is writing about and for people who are generally not heard otherwise, e.g. immigrants and refugees as well as other marginalized groups of people. Shire is also quoted as saying: "I also navigate a lot through memory, my memories and other people's memories, trying to essentially just make sense of stuff." As a first-generation immigrant, she has used her poetry to connect with her home country of Somalia, which she has never been to. She uses this position as an immigrant herself to convey the lives of these peoples. Shire utilizes the influences of her close relatives, and family members and their experiences to depict in her poetry the struggles that they have all faced. Awards and honours. Shire has received various awards for her art. In April 2013, she was presented with Brunel University's inaugural African Poetry Prize, an award earmarked for poets who have yet to publish a full-length poetry collection. She was chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries. In October 2013, Shire was selected from a shortlist of six as the first Young Poet Laureate for London. The honour is part of the London Legacy Development Corporation's Spoke programme, which focuses on promoting arts and culture in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the surrounding area. In 2014, Shire was also chosen as poet-in-residence of Queensland, Australia, liaising with the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts over a six-week period. In June 2018 Shire was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

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James Berry (poet) James Berry, OBE, Hon FRSL (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017), was a black Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often "explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards". As the editor of two seminal anthologies, "Bluefoot Traveller" (1976) and "News for Babylon" (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing. Biography. The son of Robert Berry, a smallholder, and his wife Maud, a seamstress, James Berry was born and grew up in rural Portland, Jamaica. He began writing stories and poems while still at school. During the Second World War, as a teenager, he went to work for six years (1942–48) in the United States, before returning to Jamaica. In his own words: Settling in 1948 in Great Britain, he attended night school, trained and worked as a telegrapher in London, while also writing. He has been reported as saying: "I knew I was right for London and London was right for me. London had books and accessible libraries." He became an early member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, founded in 1966 by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and John La Rose, and in 1971 was its acting chair. In 1976 Berry compiled the anthology "Bluefoot Traveller" and in 1979 his first poetry collection, "Fractured Circles", was published by New Beacon Books. In 1981 he won the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, the first poet of West Indian origin to do so. He edited the landmark anthology "News for Babylon" (1984), considered "a ground-breaking publication because its publishing house Chatto & Windus was 'mainstream' and distinguished for its international poetry list". Berry wrote many books for young readers, including "A Thief in the Village and Other Stories" (1987), "The Girls and Yanga Marshall" (1987), "The Future-Telling Lady and Other Stories" (1991), "Anancy-Spiderman" (1988), "Don't Leave an Elephant to Go and Chase a Bird" (1996) and "First Palm Trees" (1997). His "A Story About Afiya" was published by Lantana in 2020 and named one of the New York Times Best Children's Books of the year. It was also listed in the New York Times list of children's books that "let young minds wonder and wander on their own." His last book of poetry, "A Story I Am In: Selected Poems" (2011), draws on five earlier collections: "Fractured Circles" (1979), "Lucy’s Letters and Loving" (1982, "Chain of Days" (1985), "Hot Earth Cold Earth" (1995) and "Windrush Songs" (2007). In 1995, his "Song of a Blue Foot Man" was adapted and staged at the Watford Palace Theatre. In 1990, Berry was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to poetry. In September 2004 he was one of fifty Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature who featured in the historic "A Great Day in London" photograph at the British Library. His archives were acquired by the British Library in October 2012. Among other items, the archive contains drafts of an unpublished novel, "The Domain of Sollo and Sport". He died in London on 20 June 2017 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

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Stuart Hall (cultural theorist) Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential "New Left Review". At Hoggart's invitation, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the Centre in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979. While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists like Michel Foucault. Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University. He was President of the British Sociological Association 1995–97. He retired from the Open University in 1997 and was a professor emeritus. British newspaper "The Observer" called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists". Hall was also involved in the Black Arts Movement. Movie directors such as John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien also see him as one of their heroes. Hall was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London, with whom he had two children. After his death, Stuart Hall was described as "one of the most influential intellectuals of the last sixty years". Biography. Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle-class Jamaican family of African, British, Portuguese Jewish and likely Indian descent. He attended Jamaica College, receiving an education modelled after the British school system. In an interview Hall describes himself as a "bright, promising scholar" in these years and his formal education as "a very 'classical' education; very good but in very formal academic terms." With the help of sympathetic teachers, he expanded his education to include "T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry", as well as "Caribbean literature". Hall's later works reveal that growing up in the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than much of his family, had a profound effect on his views. In 1951 Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he studied English and obtained an M.A., becoming part of the Windrush generation, the first large-scale emigration of West Indians, as that community was then known. He continued his studies at Oxford by beginning a Ph.D. on Henry James but, galvanised particularly by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and the Suez Crisis, abandoned this in 1957 or 1958 to focus on his political work. In 1957, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife. From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a London secondary modern school and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, concluding around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean. After working on the "Universities and Left Review" during his time at Oxford, Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with "The New Reasoner", launching the "New Left Review" in 1960 with Hall as the founding editor. In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting place for left-wingers. Hall left the board of the "New Left Review" in 1961 or 1962. Hall's academic career took off in 1964 after he co-wrote with Paddy Whannel of the British Film Institute (BFI) "one of the first books to make the case for the serious study of film as entertainment", "The Popular Arts". As a direct result, Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow at Hoggart's own expense. In 1968 Hall became director of the Centre. He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, including "Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures" (1972) and "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973). He also contributed to the book "Policing the Crisis" (1978) and coedited the influential "Resistance Through Rituals" (1975). Shortly before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Hall and Maggie Steed presented "It Ain't Half Racist Mum", an Open Door programme made by the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (CARM) which tackled racial stereotypes and contemporary British attitudes to immigration. After his appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University (OU) that year, Hall published further influential books, including "The Hard Road to Renewal" (1988), "Formations of Modernity" (1992), "Questions of Cultural Identity" (1996) and "Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices" (1997). Through the 1970s and 1980s, Hall was closely associated with the journal "Marxism Today"; in 1995, he was a founding editor of "Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture". He spoke internationally on Cultural Studies, including a series of lectures in 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that were recorded and would decades later form the basis of the 2016 book "Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History" (edited by Jennifer Slack and Lawrence Grossberg). Hall was the founding chair of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and the photography organization Autograph ABP (the Association of Black Photographers). Hall retired from the Open University in 1997. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2005 and received the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award in 2008. He died on 10 February 2014, from complications following kidney failure, a week after his 82nd birthday. By the time of his death, he was widely known as the "godfather of multiculturalism". His memoir, "Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands" (co-authored with Bill Schwarz), was posthumously published in 2017. Ideas. Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as "producers" and "consumers" of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the socio-cultural production of "consent" and "coercion".) For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled". Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis". The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories. In his essay "Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement", Hall also interrogates questions of historical memory and visuality in relation to photography as a colonial technology. According to Hall, understanding and writing about the history of Black migration and settlement in Britain during the postwar era requires a careful and critical examination of the limited historical archive, and photographic evidence proves itself invaluable. However, photographic images are often perceived as more objective than other representations, which is dangerous. In his view, one must critically examine who produced these images, what purpose they serve, and how they further their agenda (e.g., what has been deliberately included and excluded in the frame). For example, in the context of postwar Britain, photographic images like those displayed in the "Picture Post" article "Thirty Thousand Colour Problems" construct Black migration, Blackness in Britain, as "the "problem"". They construct miscegenation as "the centre of the problem", as "the problem of the problem", as "the core issue". Hall's political influence extended to the Labour Party, perhaps related to the influential articles he wrote for the CPGB's theoretical journal "Marxism Today" ("MT") that challenged the left's views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, although Hall later decried New Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism". Encoding and decoding model. Hall presented his encoding and decoding philosophy in various publications and at several oral events across his career. The first was in "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), a paper he wrote for the Council of Europe Colloquy on "Training in the Critical Readings of Television Language" organised by the Council and the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester. It was produced for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Paddy Scannell explains: "largely accounts for the provisional feel of the text and its 'incompleteness'". In 1974 the paper was presented at a symposium on Broadcasters and the Audience in Venice. Hall also presented his encoding and decoding model in "Encoding/Decoding" in "Culture, Media, Language" in 1980. The time difference between Hall's first publication on encoding and decoding in 1973 and his 1980 publication is highlighted by several critics. Of particular note is Hall's transition from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the Open University. Hall had a major influence on cultural studies, and many of the terms his texts set forth continue to be used in the field. His 1973 text is viewed as a turning point in Hall's research toward structuralism and provides insight into some of the main theoretical developments he explored at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hall takes a semiotic approach and builds on the work of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. The essay takes up and challenges longheld assumptions about how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication. "The 'object' of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse". According to Hall, "a message must be perceived as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully de-coded before it has an effect, a use, or satisfies a need". There are four codes of the Encoding/Decoding Model of Communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning full and straight and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, it operates inside the dominant code." The second way of encoding is the professional code. It operates in tandem with the dominant code. "It serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, 'professionalism' etc." The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with 'exceptions' to the rule". The fourth way of encoding is the oppositional code, also known as the globally contrary code. "It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way." "Before this message can have an 'effect' (however defined), or satisfy a 'need' or be put to a 'use', it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded." Hall challenged all four components of the mass communications model. He argues that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight does not guarantee that audiences will feel sympathetic. Despite being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the producers' intentions and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience. Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a "failure" of the producer or viewer. There is a "lack of fit", Hall argues, "between the two sides in the communicative exchange"—that is, between the moment of the production of the message ("encoding") and the moment of its reception ("decoding"). In "Encoding/decoding", Hall suggests media messages accrue commonsense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of "9/11" (as an example; there are others like it), a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only plausible and universal but elevated to "common sense". Views on cultural identity and the African diaspora. In his influential 1996 essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Hall presents two different definitions of cultural identity. In the first definition, cultural identity is "a sort of collective 'one true self'… which many people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common." In this view, cultural identity provides a "stable, unchanging and continuous frame of reference and meaning" through the ebb and flow of historical change. This allows the tracing back the origins of descendants and reflecting on the historical experiences of ancestors as a shared truth Therefore, blacks living in the diaspora need only "unearth" their African past to discover their true cultural identity. While Hall appreciates the good effects this first view of cultural identity has had in the postcolonial world, he proposes a second definition of cultural identity that he views as superior. Hall's second definition of cultural identity "recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant "difference" which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather – since history has intervened – 'what we have become.'" In this view, cultural identity is not a fixed essence rooted in the past. Instead, cultural identities “undergo constant transformation” throughout history as they are "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power". Thus Hall defines cultural identities as “the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.” This view of cultural identity was more challenging than the previous due to its dive into deep differences, but nonetheless it showed the mixture of the African diaspora."In other words, for Hall cultural identity is "not an essence but a "positioning"". Presences. Hall describes Caribbean identity in terms of three distinct "presences": the African, the European, and the American. Taking the terms from Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, he describes the three presences: "Présence Africaine", "Présence Européenne", and "Présence Americaine" (230). "Présence Africaine" is the "unspeakable 'presence' in Caribbean culture" (230). According to Hall, the African presence, though repressed by slavery and colonialism, is in fact hiding in plain sight in every aspect of Caribbean society and culture, including language, religion, the arts, and music. For many black people living in the diaspora, Africa becomes an "imagined community" to which they feel a sense of belonging. But, Hall points out, there is no going back to the Africa that existed before slavery, because Africa too has changed. Secondly, Hall describes the European presence in Caribbean cultural identity as the legacy of colonialism, racism, power and exclusion. Unlike the "Présence Africaine", the European presence is not unspoken even though many would like to be separated from the history of the oppressor. But Hall argues that Caribbeans and diasporic peoples must acknowledge how the European presence has also become an inextricable part of their own identities. Lastly, Hall describes the American presence as the "ground, place, territory" where people and cultures from around the world collided. It is, as Hall puts it, "where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West", and also where the displacement of the natives occurred (234). Diasporic identity. Because diasporic cultural identity in the Caribbean and throughout the world is a mixture of all these different presences, Hall advocates a "conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity". According to Hall, black people living in diaspora are constantly reinventing themselves and their identities by mixing, hybridizing, and "creolizing" influences from Africa, Europe, and the rest of the world in their everyday lives and cultural practices. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all cultural identity for diasporic people, but rather a multiplicity of different cultural identities that share both important similarities and important differences, all of which should be respected. Difference and Differance. In "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", Hall sheds light on the topic of difference within black identity. He first acknowledges the oneness in the black diaspora and how this unity is at the core of blackness and the black experience. He expresses how this has a unifying effect on the diaspora, giving way to movements such as negritude and the Pan-African political project. Hall also acknowledges the deep rooted "difference" within the diaspora as well. This difference was created by destructive nature of the transatlantic slave trade and the resulting generations of slavery. He describes this difference as what constitutes "what we really are", or the true nature of the diaspora. The duality of such an identity, that expresses deep unity but clear uniqueness and internal distinctness provokes a question out of Hall: "How, then, to describe this play of 'difference' within identity?" Hall's answer is 'differance'. The use of the 'a' in the word unsettles us from our initial and common interpretation of it, and was originally introduced by Jacques Derrida. This modification of the word difference conveys the separation between spatial and temporal difference, and more adequately encapsulates the nuances of the diaspora. Legacy. Film. Hall was a presenter of a seven-part television series entitled "Redemption Song" — made by Barraclough Carey Productions, and transmitted on BBC2, between 30 June and 12 August 1991 — in which he examined the elements that make up the Caribbean, looking at the turbulent history of the islands and interviewing people who live there today. The series episodes were as follows: Hall's lectures have been turned into several videos distributed by the Media Education Foundation: Mike Dibb produced a film based on a long interview between journalist Maya Jaggi and Stuart Hall called "Personally Speaking" (2009). Hall is the subject of two films directed by John Akomfrah, entitled "The Unfinished Conversation" (2012) and "The Stuart Hall Project" (2013). The first film was shown (26 October 2013 – 23 March 2014) at Tate Britain, Millbank, London, while the second is now available on DVD. "The Stuart Hall Project" was composed of clips drawn from more than 100 hours of archival footage of Hall, woven together over the music of jazz artist Miles Davis, who was an inspiration to both Hall and Akomfrah. The film's structure is composed of multiple strands. There is a chronological grounding in historical events, such as the Suez Crisis, Vietnam War, and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, along with reflections by Hall on his experiences as an immigrant from the Caribbean to Britain. Another historical event vital to the film was the 1958 Notting Hill race riots occasioned by the murder of a Black British man; these protests showed the presence of a Black community within England. When discussing the Caribbean, Hall discusses the idea of hybridity and he states that the Caribbean is the home of hybridity. There are also voiceovers and interviews offered without a specific temporal grounding in the film that nonetheless give the viewer greater insights into Hall and his philosophy. Along with the voiceovers and interviews, embedded in the film are also Hall's personal achievements; this is extremely rare, as there are no traditional archives of those Caribbean peoples moulded by the Middle Passage experience. The film can be viewed as a more pointedly focused take on the Windrush generation, those who migrated from the Caribbean to Britain in the years immediately following World War II. Hall, himself a member of this generation, exposed the less glamorous truth underlying the British Empire experience for Caribbean people, contrasting West Indian migrant expectations with the often harsher reality encountered on arriving in the Mother Country. A central theme in the film is Diasporic belonging. Hall confronted his own identity within both British and Caribbean communities, and at one point in the film he remarks: "Britain is my home, but I am not English." IMDb summarises the film as "a roller coaster ride through the upheavals, struggles and turning points that made the 20th century the century of campaigning, and of global political and cultural change." In August 2012, Professor Sut Jhally conducted an interview with Hall that touched on a number of themes and issues in cultural studies.

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Hakim Adi Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the 2018 book "Pan-Africanism: A History". Currently a professor at the University of Chichester, Adi is an advocate of the education curriculum in the UK, both at secondary school and higher education level, being changed to reflect the history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the contribution of African people to world history. Career. Adi obtained a BA and his PhD in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, and has described himself as "a late developer into higher education... I've taught history at every level you can imagine: schools, prison, adult education, further education, university. I've taught in Broadmoor, Strangeways — you name it, I've done it...". He was Reader in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at Middlesex University for many years until the department of history was closed down. He currently lectures in African History at the University of Chichester, West Sussex, and is one of the few African British academics to become recognised as a professor. He was a founder member in 1991 of the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), which he chaired for several years. He also leads the History Matters group, a collection of academics and teachers concerned with the under-representation of students and teachers of African and Caribbean heritage within the History discipline. In 2015 the group convened the History Matters conference of the same name held at the Institute of Historial Research. Writings. Adi has written widely on Pan-Africanism and on the history of the African diaspora, particularly Africans in Britain. He is the author of the books "West Africans in Britain 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism" (1998), "Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939" (2013), and the joint author (with Marika Sherwood) of "The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited" (1995) and "Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787" (2003). He has also written history books for children, including "The History of the African and Caribbean Communities in Britain" (2005). Film work. Hakim Adi featured (alongside Maulana Karenga, Muhammed Shareef, Francis Cress Welsin, Kimani Nehusi, Paul Robeson Jr, and Nelson George) in the multi-award-winning documentary "500 Years Later" (2005), written by M. K. Asante, Jr. and directed by Owen 'Alik Shahadah.

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Jo Hodges Jo Hodges (1959-2017) was a British scriptwriter, novelist, advertising creative and lecturer at London College of Communication. Hodges wrote the 1997 comedy film "The Girl with Brains in Her Feet", the first feature film directed by Robert Bangura. Life. Jo Hodges was born in 1959 in Leicester. "The Girl with Brains in Her Feet", a 1997 film script which Hodges turned into a 1998 novel, told the coming-of-age story of 'Jack', a mixed-race working-class girl from Leicester with dreams of becoming a professional runner. Photographed by Robert Taylor for a 2001 book "Portraits of Black Achievement", she provided encouragement to young black people feeling scared of attempting writing as a career: Hodges worked in advertising for DMB&B, GGK and Ogilvy & Mather. In 2002 she started lecturing on advertising at the University of the Arts London. In 2007 she joined London College of Communication, going on to become course leader of the BA in Advertising there, and later Creative Practice Director for Communications and Media. She died from an ongoing illness on 25 July 2017, aged 58.

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Delia Jarrett-Macauley Delia Jarrett-Macauley , also known as Dee Jarrett-Macauley, is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her debut novel, "Moses, Citizen & Me", won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize. She has devised and presented features on BBC Radio, as well as being a participant in a range of programmes. As a multi-disciplinary scholar in history, literature and cultural politics, she has taught at Leeds University, Birkbeck College and other educational establishments, most recently as a fellow in English at the University of Warwick. She is also a business and arts consultant, specialising in organisation development. Early years and education. Delia Jarrett-Macauley was born in Hertfordshire to Sierra Leonean parents, their youngest daughter, and visited Sierra Leone as a child. She studied at York College for Girls and Harrogate Grammar School and earned her first degree in management and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from London University. Career: cultural sector and academia. Jarrett-Macauley began working in the cultural sector in the mid-1980s, including as Director of the Independent Theatre Council, and as a consultant to Arts Council England. She also managed the pan-African dance summer school and co-ordinated educational projects for African Players. In the 1990s she was joint director of the Royal National Theatre's project "Transmission", which focused on arts and social change in Europe. She has also judged prizes, served on the boards and been closely involved with a number of other cultural and literary initiatives, among them the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2007 as well as in 2016, when she was chair of the judging panel. In July 2016 Jarrett-Macauley was appointed chair of the Caine Prize board of trustees, stepping down in April 2019, when her successor was named as Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. Her university teaching career began in 1989, when she ran the first black women's studies courses on the MA in women's studies at the University of Kent. Based on that programme of work, she subsequently edited the 1996 anthology "Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women", the first British feminist anthology to examine concepts of womanhood and feminism within the context of "race" and ethnicity. She also devised and led the arts management programme at Birkbeck College, London. She has been a visiting fellow in gender studies at the London School of Economics (LSE) and has taught a range of courses at the Universities of Kent, London and Middlesex. She has also trained teachers at Goldsmith's College, London, and has contributed to many professional development courses in Europe at a range of institutions, including the Amsterdam Summer University and (in association with the European Cultural Foundation) the King Baudouin Foundation (Brussels) and the European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centres. Jarrett-Macauley has contributed to a number of academic publications as author and board member, including "Feminist Review", "Women's History Review", "Journal of Gender Studies", and "Gender and History". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa", edited by Margaret Busby. In October 2018 it was announced that Jarrett-Macauley was included in the 2019 edition of the Powerlist, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons. Jarrett-Macauley has also edited "Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard in Contemporary Britain" (June 2016), with contributors who include Eldred Durosimi Jones, Jatinder Verma, Naseem Khan, Dawn Monique Williams, Michael Pearce, Lynette Goddard, Varsha Panjwani, Jami Rogers, Michael McMillan, Iqbal Khan, Diane Allison-Mitchell, Pat Cumper, Sita Thomas, and Terri Power. In 2016 Jarrett-Macauley was on the London Book Fair delegation to China, where she spoke at The Shanghai International Book Fair and at various events in Beijing, including the Beijing Book Fair’s Cultural Industries Forum. She was also filmed for the British Council’s "Walking the cities" series in Rome. Writing. Jarrett-Macauley has written two significant books: "The Life of Una Marson, 1905–65" (first published in 1998) and the novel "Moses, Citizen & Me" (2005). "The Life of Una Marson, 1905–65". She is the author of a well received biography of the BBC's first black programme-maker, Una Marson. Chris Searle, reviewing it in "Tribune" wrote: "Delia Jarrett-Macauley is to be congratulated in creating this finely written, detailed, narrative which opens up black life from an era often untouched by the written word". Margaret Busby referred to it in "The Sunday Times" as "compelling", with other appreciative feedback coming from Stewart Brown of the University of Birmingham ("thoroughly researched and well documented"), Caroline Benn ("An excellent biography"), John Thieme of the University of Hull ("A work of sustained and original scholarship"), Hakim Adi ("Delia Jarrett-Macauley has done a great service"), Kevin Le Gendre for the "Independent on Sunday" ("genuinely inspiring"), Sheila Rowbotham ("a scholarly work, deftly written"), while Stuart Hall praised it as "a significant contribution to the work of historical memory". "Moses, Citizen & Me". Jarrett-Macauley's 2005 novel takes as its subject matter the conflict in Sierra Leone, drawing imaginatively on "both the European canon and African oral traditions to illuminate the sufferings of child soldiers and their families". The book was widely and positively reviewed, including by such as Aminatta Forna ("A deeply affecting and vividly told story of ordinary people with the courage to survive... A wonderful book"), Bernardine Evaristo in "Wasafiri" ("This is a very serious and significant choice of subject matter for a debut novel; ambitiously rendered, it proves fertile and potent ground for fiction."), Francis Wheen ("An extraordinary novel about war, childhood, art and salvation. Shakespearean tragedy recast in modern Africa, transformed into a redemptive vision as magical as a midsummer night's dream."), while Lucy Beresford remarked in "The Literary Review": "...her understated prose a foil to the bleak and disturbing subject matter. ...sensitively establishes the family as a microcosm of the ruptured nation... and Shakespeare provides an inspirational and uplifting agent of therapy." In the "Guardian", Ali Smith commented on "the considered and multi-layered story of a Sierra Leone family blasted apart by one of its children turning boy soldier in the civil war. It is a novel remarkable for its slowed, measured pulse and its calm analysis, its keenness to promise hope and rehabilitation even after the worst", and Maya Jaggi wrote : "Seven years ago Delia Jarrett-Macauley published The Life of Una Marson 1906-65, a landmark biography of the Jamaican feminist who became the BBC's first black programme maker. In her debut novel, Jarrett-Macauley again breaks ground with a delicate and brave, if over-ambitious, fictional treatment of child soldiers in the aftermath of a west African civil war...as a deftly sensitive exploration of a tormented generation, and a family's dilemma, it is a haunting piece of fiction." "Moses, Citizen & Me" was awarded the Orwell Prize in 2006, with the judges concluding: "It is a work of great intimacy and moral complexity, the kind of writing that sheds light on a world we barely understand...the book is one that Orwell himself might have liked." In 2008, following the publication of "", a bestselling first-hand account by Ishmael Beah of his time as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the accuracy of which was questioned, there was also some discussion about the memoir's alleged similarity in parts to Jarrett-Macauley's novel. Broadcasting. Jarrett-Macauley has worked on a number of broadcasting projects for BBC Radio, including devising and presenting "The Una Marson Story" (BBC Radio 3) and "Black Women Writers in 1930s England" on BBC Radio 4. In 2006 she made the Radio 4 feature "Imaginary Homeland", for which she returned to Sierra Leone after 30 years, and the programme "interweaves her memories and her fiction with the real struggle to rebuild the place known as Salone". She has also contributed to other programmes such as "Woman’s Hour" and "Open Book" on Radio 4, the Radio 3 website on Ideas and Culture and the 2004 BBC Music Live Festival. She voiced "Warrior Marks", Alice Walker's documentary film, which was shown on UK television (based on the 1993 book of the same title about female genital mutilation).

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Dreda Say Mitchell Louise Emma Joseph, professionally known as Dreda Say Mitchell MBE (born 1965) is a British novelist, broadcaster, journalist and freelance education consultant. Background. Dreda say Mitchell is a best-selling and award-winning crime author, broadcaster, journalist and campaigner who grew up on a housing estate in the East End of London. Her parents are from the Caribbean island of Grenada. She attended Bishop Challoner Girls’ School and went on to receive a BA (Hons) in African history from SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London She also has a MA in education studies from the University of North London. For twenty-five years she worked as a teacher and education consultant in London with a special focus on raising the educational achievement of children from minority ethnic and working-class backgrounds. The Times Education Supplement: ‘Mitchell gives a voice to the working class communities she grew up in.’ Career. Dreda’s writing career started on a creative writing course at Soho’s Groucho Club where she began writing her debut novel Running Hot. Her debut was awarded the Memorial John Creasey Dagger, CWA, in 2005, the first time a Black British author has scooped this award. She has since written seventeen crime books, many with her writing partner Tony Mason, including their international best-selling psychological thriller, Spare Room. Lee Child describes her work, ‘As good as it gets. Mitchell is English fiction’s brightest new voice.’ Her Gangland Girls Crime series has been a No.1 crime series on Amazon. She has also written a Quick Read for The Reading Agency as part of their drive to enhance reading skills among hard to reach communities. She has been a judge on the National Book Awards, Index on Censorship Awards and The John Creasey Dagger. She was the 2011 chair of the Harrogate Theakston Crime Fiction Festival, Europe’s largest crime festival. Dreda and Tony were part of Sky Arts ground-breaking Arts50 in 2019. Dreda is also a social and cultural commentator who has presented BBC Radio 4’s, Open Book and BBC Radio 3’s The Sunday Feature exploring life on housing estates. Her television appearances include Question Time, Newsnight, The Review Show, Front Row Late, BBC Breakfast, The Victoria Derbyshire Show and Canada’s Sun News Live. Her radio credits include BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Saturday Review, Vanessa, The Simon Mayo Show, Four Thought and Nightwaves. For many years she reviewed the newspapers on the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC 5 Live. Dreda was commissioned by the Youth Justice Board to facilitate ‘Write-on’, a pilot creative writing and mentoring project in Feltham and Cookham Wood YOIs focusing on children of African-Caribbean, mixed heritage and white working class backgrounds. One of the students was awarded three Koestler awards, including the inaugural Peter Selby Award for Under-18 Creative Writing. She continues to work in prisons as a guest speaker and delivering creative writing workshops. Dreda has written for The Guardian, Independent and Observer"," on issues ranging from ‘race’, culture and class. Bibliography. Running Hot, MAIA Press, 2004. Killer Tune, Hodder, 2007. Gangland Girl Series DI Rio Wray Thriller Series Flesh and Blood Series Psychological Standalones Big Mo Crime Series

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Gus Casely-Hayford Augustus Casely-Hayford, (born 1964) is a British curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and lecturer with Ghanaian roots. He is presently the Director of V&A East and formerly, the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in June 2018 for his services to Arts and Culture. and Professor of Practice at SOAS in 2021. He was commissioned to present a second TV series of "Tate Walks" for Sky Arts in 2017 featuring David Bailey, Helena Bonham Carter, Billy Connolly, Robert Lindsay, Jeremy Paxman and Harriet Walter. Casely-Hayford was awarded the Leader of the Year for Arts and Media by the Black British Business Awards 2017. He delivered a TED talk in August 2017. He has been awarded a Cultural Fellowship at King's College, London, and a Fellowship at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). In 2010, as part of the Wonderful Africa Season, he presented "Lost Kingdoms of Africa", four 60-minute television programmes for BBC Two and BBC Four; in 2014, the series was broadcast by the French-speaking TV channel Histoire. He was commissioned to present a second series in February 2012. He wrote the book "Lost Kingdoms of Africa" in 2012, published by Bantam Press. He presented a study of William Hogarth and the 18th century for the television series "The Genius of British Art", on Channel 4, in 2010 and hosted "The Culture Show" for BBC 2 in 2012. In 2016 Casely-Hayford presented the television series "Tate Walks" for Sky Arts. He is also the author of a book on Timbuktu, published in 2018 by Ladybird/Penguin. Career. Born in London, England, into a prominent Ghanaian family, Gus Casely-Hayford attended Clayesmore School in Dorset from 1978 to 1980, and went on to gain a PhD in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. He is the former Executive Director of Arts Strategy for Arts Council England. He was previously Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Art), a London-based arts organisation with a particular emphasis on international practice, which collaborates with partner venues throughout the UK and worldwide. Prior to this he was the Director of Africa 05, the largest African arts season ever hosted in Britain, involving throughout 2005 more than 150 cultural organisations, including the BBC, the aim of which Casely-Hayford said was to create "sustainable change in the way the art world – and the public – thinks about Africa. ...We don't want this just to be about one year." He also led the British Museum's diversity programme. He has advised the United Nations and the Canada Council, Council for Culture of the Dutch and Norwegian Arts Councils, and was commissioned to develop the future audience vision for the Tate family of galleries. In 2012 he was a Jury member of the National Open Art Competition and the National Portrait Gallery's BP Portrait Award. In 2013 he was the Chair of the Caine Prize judges. He was chair of the advisory panel for the 2015 British Library exhibition "" and co-authored the accompanying book of the same title. He has presented an award-winning South Bank show on African art, produced a documentary on Chris Ofili for Channel 4 and presented several series on African culture for BBC World Service. He has presented "Brit Art – Where to Now?" for BBC Four. He was a commissioner of arts for the Greater London Authority. He lectures on world art at Sotheby's, Goldsmiths College and the University of Westminster, and is a consultant for organisations such as the United Nations, the Arts Council and the BBC. He is a Clore Fellow and is a Trustee of the National Trust, a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaque Group and a member of Tate's "Tate for All Board". He is a Judge for the Art Fund's "Museum of the Year" in 2016. He was formerly a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and a Council Member of Tate Britain. He also sits on the Caine Prize Council and is a spokesperson for the National Archives' Explore Your Archive programme. Casely-Hayford is a supporter of Sense International. Personal life. He is the brother of fashion designer Joe Casely-Hayford, OBE (1956–2019), and of lawyer Margaret Casely-Hayford, and (as son of Victor Casely-Hayford, an accountant who trained as a barrister) the grandson of J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930), the great Gold Coast thinker, writer and politician. He is married and has one daughter, and as of 2018 the family lives in Washington DC.

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Mike Gayle Mike Gayle (born October 1970) is an English journalist and novelist. Biography. Gayle was born in Quinton, Birmingham, to parents from Jamaica, and is the younger brother of broadcaster Phil Gayle. He attended Lordswood Boys' School where he was Head Boy. He studied Sociology and Journalism at university. Gayle edited a music fanzine and joined a Birmingham listings magazine before moving to London and starting a postgraduate diploma in journalism. Before having his first novel published, he was a features editor and later an agony aunt for "Just Seventeen" and "Bliss". As a freelance journalist he has written for the "Sunday Times", "The Guardian", "The Times", the "Daily Express", "FHM", "More!", "The Scotsman" and "Top of the Pops". Gayle is a chick-lit author, although he has expressed a dislike for the term. Alongside Tony Parsons and Tim Lott, he has also been associated with a "new wave of fictions about inadequate young British masculinities". Gayle is friends with Danny Wallace, who has dubbed Mike his Minister of Home Affairs in the Kingdom of Lovely. He lives in Harborne with his daughters and his wife Claire.

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Michael Abbensetts Michael John Abbensetts (8 June 1938 – 24 November 2016) was a Guyana-born British writer who settled in England in the 1960s. He had been described as "the best Black playwright to emerge from his generation, and as having given "Caribbeans a real voice in Britain". He was the first black British playwright commissioned to write a television drama series, "Empire Road", which the BBC aired from 1978 to 1979. Early years. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), the son of Neville John (a doctor) and Elaine Abbensetts, Michael Abbensetts attended Queen's College from 1952 to 1956, then Stanstead College, Quebec, Canada, and Sir George Williams University, in Montreal (1960–61), before moving to England "around 1963". He became a British citizen in 1974. Writing career. Abbensetts's work debuted in theatre in 1973 with "Sweet Talk", which had a cast including Mona Hammond and Don Warrington. It was directed by Stephen Frears. For television, Abbensetts's 1977 work, "Black Christmas" aired on BBC and was also directed by Frears. It has been called by Stephen Bourne "one of the best television dramas of the 1970s". From the 1970s to 1990s, Abbensetts continued his theatre career throughout London. Some of his works during this time period included "Samba" (1980), "Outlaw" (1983), and "The Lion" (1993). Apart from plays, Abbensetts was a screenwriter for "Empire Road" (BBC, 1978–79), considered British television's first Black soap opera. He has said: "I never really liked it being called a Soap. It was "The Daily Mail" that called it that. I always thought of it as a drama series, where each episode had a separate story." The second series was directed by Horace Ové, "establishing a production unit with a Black director, Black writer and Black actors." The cast featured Norman Beaton, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Joseph Marcell, Rudolph Walker and Wayne Laryea. Other television projects by Abbensetts include "Easy Money" (1981), "Big George Is Dead" (Channel 4, 1987), starring Norman Beaton, Linzi Drew and Ram John Holder, and the mini-series "Little Napoleons" (1994, Channel 4). Teaching and fellowships. In 1983–84, Abbensetts was Visiting Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. From September 2002, he was a Project Fellow in the Caribbean Studies Department of the University of North London. He was a Fellow at City and Guilds of London Art School, 2006–09. Later years and personal life. With Abbensetts' health declining in his latter years as a result of Alzheimer's disease, a tribute was organised for his benefit by Anton Phillips on Sunday, 9 December 2012: a rehearsed reading of "Sweet Talk", directed by Phillips and attended by Abbensetts himself, was held at the Tricycle Theatre, with many well known figures in Black theatre and arts in the audience, including Yvonne Brewster, Don Warrington, Rudolph Walker, Oscar James, Allister Bain, and Errol Lloyd. Abbensetts died aged 78 on 24 November 2016, survived by his daughter, Justine, from his relationship with Anne Stewart, and by two grandchildren, Sean and Danielle, as well as a sister Elizabeth. His first wife Connie, a lawyer, had died of cancer towards the end of the 1980s, and in 2005 he was married to Liz Bluett, though they later separated.

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Patience Agbabi Patience Agbabi FRSL (born 1965) is a British poet and performer who gives particular emphasis to the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of strong formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as both "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature prominently in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life and education. Patience Agbabi was born in London to Nigerian parents, and from a young age was privately fostered by a white English family, who when she was 12 years old moved from Sussex to North Wales, where Agbabi was raised in Colwyn Bay. She studied English language and literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She earned an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education from the University of Sussex in 2002, and in September that year was appointed Associate Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Poetry and performances. Agbabi began performing on the London club circuit in 1995. She has cited among her influences Janis Joplin, Carol Ann Duffy, Chaucer, and various aspects of contemporary music and culture. Agbabi's childhood love of cake is apparent in her poem "Eat Me". The poems in her first book "R.A.W.", published in 1995, "owe much to the rhythms, verbal and associational genius of rap". Her next collection was "Transformatrix" (2000), a commentary on contemporary Britain that draws inspiration from popular music forms. In 2008 Agbabi published "Bloodshot Monochrome", a collection that, as described by one reviewer, highlights social and political issues, captures and considers moments in time through long-dead authors, and offers readers a diverse sampling of the author's views of life in a variety of places". Carol Rumens has said: "Agbabi characteristically makes poetry an opportunity for conversation with the past, not swamping it but setting new lexical terms." As Canterbury Laureate from July 2009 to December 2010, Agbabi received an Arts Council grant to write a full-length poetry collection based on Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", and her next book, 2014's "Telling Tales", mines the Middle-English masterwork to offer a 21st-century take on the characters, its poetry and its performance elements. The book met with praise from poets including Simon Armitage, who described it as "the liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read." Agbabi continues to tour "Telling Tales" as a performance-poetry production shown at literature festivals, arts spaces and libraries across the UK. She has performed widely and worked with other writers. Her work has been influenced by rap rhythms and wordplay. She was a member of Atomic Lip, which has been called as "poetry's first pop group". They worked together from 1995 to 1998 and their last tour, Quadrophonix (1998), merged live and video performance. In 1996 she worked on a performance piece called "FO(U)R WOMEN", with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smartt, first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and touring from 1995 to 1998. As well as performing in Britain, Agbabi has undertaken British Council reading tours of Namibia, the Czech Republic, Zimbabwe, Germany and Switzerland. She took part in "Modern Love", a spoken-word tour produced by Renaissance One, which explored love and modern relationships, touring the UK and Switzerland. Her poetry has been featured on television and radio, including the Channel 4 series "Litpop" in 1998 and on the children's programme "Blue Peter" in 1999. She has also been a contributor to several anthologies, among them "Jubilee Lines" (2012), edited by Carol Ann Duffy), which marked Queen Elizabeth II's 60th anniversary on the throne, and "Refugee Tales" (2016), a collection of stories based on accounts by Gatwick airport detainees. She has taught and run workshops and also been poet-in-residence at various places, ranging from Oxford Brookes University and Eton College to a London tattoo and piercing studio. In 2018 she was writer in residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Awards and recognition. Agbabi's first poetry collection, "R.A.W "(1995), received the Excelle Literary Award in 1997. In 2000, she was one of 10 poets commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a poem for National Poetry Day. In 2004, she featured on the Poetry Book Society list of Next Generation poets. Agbabi was Canterbury Festival's Laureate in 2010. In March 2015, The Poetry Society announced Agbabi as one of five poets shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, for her book "Telling Tales". In 2017 Agbabi was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Errol Lloyd Errol Lloyd (born 1943) is a Jamaican-born artist, writer, art critic, editor and arts administrator. Since the 1960s he has been based in London, to which he originally travelled to study law. Now well known as a book illustrator, he was runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1973 for his work on "My Brother Sean" by Petronella Breinburg. Becoming involved with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in 1966, he went on to produce book jackets, greetings cards and other material for the London black-owned publishing companies, New Beacon Books, Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, and Allison and Busby. Lloyd also had a long association with the Minorities' Arts Advisory Service (MAAS), whose magazine, "Artrage", he edited for a while. He is recognised for having done much pioneering work for black art, beginning in the 1960s, when he was one of the few artists "who consciously chose to create Black images". Eddie Chambers has written of him: "Gifted with an ability to capture likenesses in a range of creative and engaging ways, Lloyd has been responsible for a number of portrait commissions of leading Black and Caribbean males who have excelled in their respective fields over the course of the twentieth century", among them C. L. R. James, Sir Alexander Bustamante, Sir Garfield Sobers and Lord Pitt. Life and career. Born in Lucea, Jamaica, Errol Lloyd was schooled at Munro College in Saint Elizabeth Parish, where he excelled at sports and was an outstanding footballer (described in his schooldays in the early 1960s as being like "a Rolls Royce in a used car lot"). He travelled to Britain in 1963, aged 20, to study at the Council of Legal Education with the intention of becoming a lawyer, but that ambition was superseded by his interest in art (he did not complete his legal studies until 1974), although he undertook no formal training in that field. He has said: "I was self-taught and worked in isolation until I was introduced to [the] Caribbean Artists Movement... I met older artists like the sculptor Ron Moody and they acted like role models for me. From there my work developed." In 1967, Lloyd sculpted a bust of C. L. R. James and, having joined the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), took part in CAM's art exhibition at the University of Kent. While still a student Lloyd began to receive commissions to make bronze busts; his subjects have included the Jamaican prime minister Sir Alexander Bustamante, politician Lord Pitt, cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers, and cultural figures including John La Rose, Linton Kwesi Johnson and others. Lloyd regularly provided artwork for books published by Bogle-L'Ouverture and New Beacon Books, as well as having his paintings featured on greetings cards. In 1969, he was responsible for the cover of Bogle-L'Ouverture's first title, Walter Rodney's "The Groundings with my Brothers", as well as their next title and others over the years. In 1971 he designed the cover for Bernard Coard's "How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System", published by New Beacon. In addition Lloyd worked for mainstream publishers such as Random House, Penguin Books and Oxford University Press. His success as an illustrator began with the children's book "My Brother Sean" by Petronella Breinburg (Bodley Head, 1973), for which he was Highly Commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal; "My Brother Sean" was the first picture book by a mainstream UK publisher to feature black children aimed at the UK market. Other accolades followed during his career, including when his 1995 novel for teenagers, "Many Rivers to Cross", won the Youth Library Group award and was nominated for a Carnegie Medal. Alongside creating his own work, Lloyd has demonstrated a consistent concern for the general advancement of Black visual arts in Britain, promoting, supporting and celebrating other artists including such notables as Ronald Moody and Aubrey Williams. Lloyd was artist-in-residence at the Keskidee Centre from its early days and was involved with some of the productions staged there by such playwrights as Rufus Collins. He also had a long association with the Minorities' Arts Advisory Service (MAAS), which aimed "to promote ethnic identity and preserve cultural traditions", in the course of which he did service as an editor of the MAAS journal "Artrage" (published from 1980 for some 15 years). He was a member of an initiative set up in 1978 called the Rainbow Art Group, which mounted several exhibitions. He was formerly a teacher for Advanced Painting at the Camden Arts Centre, and also served on the Visual Arts Panel for Arts Council England. He is also known as a musician, playwright and storyteller. Lloyd is the subject of a photograph in the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Horace Ové. He also features in Ové's film about John La Rose, "Dream to Change the World". In 2012, Lloyd gave the keynote address on "Arts and Activism, Culture and Resistance" at the Annual Huntley Conference at London Metropolitan Archives. Exhibitions. Errol Lloyd has over the years participated in many significant exhibitions in the UK. In 1997 he featured in "Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996" — a historical exhibition in three New York City venues: the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Caribbean Cultural Center – representing the Caribbean Artists Movement along with Winston Branch, Althea McNish, Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody. The most recent exhibition to show his work is "", at the Guildhall Art Gallery (10 July 2015 – 24 January 2016), as part of which he was in conversation with Eddie Chambers on 13 July 2015, discussing "the impact made by notable Black Artists in the late 20th Century, who have gone largely unnoticed in the British Art Arena".

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Obi Egbuna Obi Benue Egbuna (18 July 1938 – 18 January 2014) was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist known for leading the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and being a member of the British Black Panther Movement (1968–72) during the years when he lived in England, between 1961 and 1973. Egbuna published several texts on Marxist–Black Power, including "Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain" (1971) and "The ABC of Black Power Thought" (1973). Biography. Early years and education. Egbuna was born in Ozubulu, Anambra State, Nigeria. He studied at the University of Iowa and Howard University, Washington, DC, moving in 1961 to England, where he lived until 1973. Political activism in Britain. In London, Egbuna was a member of a group called the Committee of African Organisations that had roots in the West African Students' Union, and which organised Malcolm X's 1965 visit to Britain. Egbuna participated in events organized by the Caribbean Artists Movement, and in 1966 his play "Wind Versus Polygamy" was performed at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, where the Pan African Players and the Negro Theatre Workshop (founded in London by Pearl Connor) represented the United Kingdom. He became a pioneer of the Black Power movement in Britain, forming the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) – "the first avowed Black Power group in Britain in August 1967, following Stokely Carmichael's visit" – and speaking at a major anti-Vietnam war rally in October that year. Egbuna also participated in the Antiuniversity of London. In August 2020, Egbuna's son, Obi Egbuna Jr, spoke candidly to Bryan Knight's "Tell A Friend" podcast about his father's political activism and the fight against racism in the Britain of the 1960 and 1970s. Being heavily influenced by Marxism, Egbuna stressed the importance of an international struggle against capitalism, as a part of the global struggle against racial oppression. In a speech from 1967 at Trafalgar Square, London, Egbuna stated: "Black Power means simply that the blacks of this world are out to liquidate capitalist oppression of black people wherever it exists by any means necessary." On 10 November 1967, he launched the "Black Power Manifesto", published by the Universal Coloured People's Association. As spokesperson for the group, he claimed they had recruited 778 members in London during the previous seven weeks. In 1968 Egbuna published a pamphlet entitled "Black Power or Death". Egbuna also saw the socialist and communist student movements of the 1960s as problematic to the Black Power cause. Although ideologically rooted in a similar Marxist intellectual tradition, he saw the student organisations as "socialist snobs" who decree from "the premise that only they have read and can understand Marx". This intellectual snobbery was, according to Egbuna, "doing a great harm to the cause they claim to be upholding" by ignoring race as a key reason for oppression of black workers: Nobody in his right mind disputes that the fact that the White worker is a prey to capitalist exploitation, as well as the Black Worker. But equally indisputable is the fact that the White worker is exploited only because he is a worker, not because he is white, while in contrast, the Black Worker is oppressed, not only because he is a worker, but also because he is Black. During the 1960s, many sympathisers of Black Power left their socialist and communist student organisations and subsequently started their own Marxist-orientated Black Power organisations, such as Black Socialist Alliance. As a consequence of the Race Relations Act 1965, incitement of racial violence had become illegal in the United Kingdom. Several members of Egbuna's UCPA were fined under this act. Egbuna was later that year imprisoned accused of threatening to kill police and certain politicians. Later years. Egbuna's last novel, "The Madness of Didi", was published in 1980. He died in Washington, DC, on 18 January 2014, aged 75, and a tribute to his life and work was held on Saturday, 1 March 2014, at the Rankin Memorial Chapel, Howard University, Washington, DC. Egbuna's papers are held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, at the New York Public Library. Bibliography. Drama: Novels: Short stories: Non-fiction:

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Oonya Kempadoo Oonya Kempadoo (born 1966) is a novelist who was born in the United Kingdom of Guyanese parentage, her father being the writer Peter Kempadoo. Biography. Born in Sussex, England, "of mixed Indian, African, Scottish, and Amerindian descent", Oonya Kempadoo was brought up in Guyana from the age of five. She has studied art in Amsterdam, and has also lived in Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Tobago. She now lives in St. George's, Grenada. Kempadoo began writing seriously in 1997 and her first novel, "Buxton Spice", a semi-autobiographical rural coming-of-age story, was published 1998. "The New York Times" described it as "superb, and superbly written". Her second book, "Tide Running" (Picador, 2001), set in Plymouth, Tobago, is the story of young brothers Cliff and Ossie. "Tide Running" won the Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel. Both of these books were nominated for International Dublin Literary Awards, the first in 2000 and the second in 2003. In 2011, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA. She was named a Great Talent for the Twenty-First Century by the Orange Prize judges and is a winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize. Her third novel "All Decent Animals" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) was recommended on Oprah's 2013 Summer Reading List by Karen Russell, who said: "How am I only now finding out about this writer? It's as if she's inventing her own language, which is incantatory, dense, and lush. The authority and blood pulse of it seduced me."

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Helen Oyeyemi Helen Oyeyemi (born 10 December 1984) is a British novelist and writer of short stories. Since 2014 her home has been in Prague. Life and career. Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria and was raised in Lewisham, South London from when she was four. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, "The Icarus Girl", while studying for her A-levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. While studying at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Oyeyemi's plays "Juniper's Whitening" and "Victimese" were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen. In 2007 Bloomsbury published Oyeyemi's second novel, "The Opposite House", which is inspired by Cuban mythology. Her third novel, "White Is for Witching", was published by Picador in May 2009. A fourth novel, "Mr Fox", was published by Picador in June 2011, and a fifth, "Boy, Snow, Bird", in 2014. Oyeyemi published a story collection "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours", in 2016. Oyeyemi's latest work, a novel titled "Gingerbread", was published 5 March 2019. Professional awards and recognition. Her novel "White Is for Witching" was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognized as one of the women on Venus Zine's "25 under 25" list. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. "Boy, Snow, Bird" was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2014. "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours" won the PEN Open Book Award: for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of colour published in 2016. Oyeyemi was a judge on the Booktrust Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2015, and served as a judge for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

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Gus John Augustine John (born 11 March 1945) is a Grenadian-born award-winning writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has done notable work in the fields of education policy, management and international development. As a social analyst he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development. Since the 1960s he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and he was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain. He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London, and visiting professor at Coventry University. A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant. Early life and education. Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers. At the age of 12 he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital. When he was aged 17 he joined a seminary in Trinidad, where he spent two years as a theology student. At the age of 19 he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University. He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls: Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa. In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club. Community activism. Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist. In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary school in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues. After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers. The following year, as he recalled: In 1972 "Because They're Black", a book on which he collaborated with Derek Humphry, was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for its contribution to racial harmony in Britain, and Gus John went on to produce many other notable publications. His 1976 work "The New Black Presence in Britain" was "One of the earliest texts written by a Black Christian in Britain that began to articulate a distinct and conscious experience of black religious sensibilities" and he has been called described as "a grand patriarch of black theology in Britain". He became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt. By 1981 John was the northern organiser of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, and one of the organisers of the "Black People's Day of Action" held on 2 March, a response to the New Cross Fire on 18 January in which 13 young black people died. Following the uprisings in Moss Side in July 1981 he chaired the Moss Side Defence Committee, and he was adviser to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee following the Toxteth Uprisings that same year. He was the co-ordinator of the Black Parents Movement in Manchester, founded the Education for Liberation book service and helped to organise the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in Manchester, London and Bradford. He was a member of the 1987 Macdonald Inquiry into Racism and Racial Violence in Manchester Schools and subsequently co-authored (with Ian Macdonald, Reena Bhavnani and Lily Khan) "Murder in the Playground: the Burnage Report". He was a founder trustee of the George Padmore Institute under the chairmanship of John La Rose. In 1989 John was appointed Director of Education in Hackney and was the first black person to hold such a position. When the two departments were amalgamated he became Hackney's first Director of Education and Leisure Services. Consulting and advisory work. Since leaving Hackney in 1996 Gus John has worked as an education consultant in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, and is director of Gus John Consultancy Limited. He has been Chair of the Communities Empowerment Network (CEN), an advocacy and campaigning service working for equality and justice in education founded in 1999, and is Chair of Parents and Students Empowerment (PaSE), an organisation devoted to empowering students and parents in schooling and education. He chaired the "Round Table" for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in October 2006/March 2007 and produced "Born to be Great", the NUT's Charter on Promoting the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys (2007). In 2010 he produced "The Case for a Learners' Charter for Schools", a charter that articulates the educational entitlement of all school students and the rights and responsibilities of everybody engaged in the schooling process – local authorities, school governors, teachers, pupils and parents. He was a member of Channel 4's Street Weapons Commission and later adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson on serious youth violence in the capital. Since 2006 Gus John has been a member of the African Union's Technical Committee of Experts working on "modalities for reunifying Africa and its global diaspora". He has advised member states in Africa and the Caribbean (Cameroon, Somaliland, Lagos State Government, Jamaica) in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals related to education and youth. Between 2004 and 2012 John worked on Niger Delta affairs and in 2012 collaborated with Kingsley Kuku, the then special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, and David Keighe on a development manual entitled "Remaking the Niger Delta: Challenges and Opportunities". In 2008 he co-authored with Samina Zahir "Speaking Truth to Power", which resulted from research for Arts Council England on identity, aesthetics and ethnicity in theatre and the arts. Among other recent undertakings he has since 2011 been a consultant to the Methodist Church, UK, on implementing Equality and Human Rights legislation, and in 2012 was appointed to chair the Expert Advisory Group on Equality, Diversity and Social Mobility as part of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). He was commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to undertake a comparative review of how the SRA has dealt with disciplinary cases and especially the over-representative number of black and ethnic minority solicitors that are sanctioned by that regulator, John's report being published in 2014. John made a submission to the United Kingdom Parliament's 2017 Youth Violence Commission, which he subsequently published in digest form. In 2019, John quit from an advisory body to the Church of England, after Archbishop Justin Welby endorsed the criticism of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by the chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, making allegations of antisemitism. John said: "What gives the archbishop of Canterbury the right to endorse the chief rabbi’s scaremongering about Corbyn and adopt such a lofty moral position in defence of the Jewish population?" Honours. In October 1999, Gus John was asked by Tony Blair to accept a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year Honours List, 2000. Declining, John said that he believed such honours to be anachronistic and indeed an insult to the struggles of African people like himself who have spent their life trying to humanise British society and combating racism, which is a core part of the legacy of Empire and which the society and its institutions are perennially failing to confront. He was quoted by "The Guardian" as saying: The journalist Jon Snow, who himself refused an OBE, made a special study of the honours system, writing in "The Independent": "Gus John, the Afro-Caribbean former Director of Education for Hackney, explained to me what it felt like for him to be approached with the offer of being appointed CBE. 'I regard [the title] Commander of the British Empire as part of the iconography of British imperialism,' he said." Snow subsequently commented to a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating criticism of the honours system on John's position: "As he had fought his whole life trying to unpick the consequences of British imperialism, he felt it was a pretty serious dishonour to have to wander round the planet henceforth as a Commander of the very institution he had tried to demolish." In 2015 Gus John's 70th birthday was marked by events honouring his five decades of activism in Britain: on 11 March at Conway Hall, on 14 March at the British Film Institute, in conversation with Gary Younge, and on 19 April at the Phoenix Cinema, in conversation with Margaret Busby. A 1979 portrait of John, by the photographer Brian Shuel, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Professor Gus John was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons" in the 2020 poll and book initiated by Patrick Vernon. In October 2020 John was named by FutureLearn on a list of "12 Black history pioneers with careers that will inspire you", together with Lewis Latimer, Shirley Jackson, Lisa Gelobter, Yvonne Connolly, Susie King Taylor, Mary Seacole, Alexa Canady, Charles DeWitt Watts, Kanya King, Oprah Winfrey, and Madam C. J. Walker.

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Bonnie Greer Bonnie Greer, OBE (born 16 November 1948) is an American-British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986. She has appeared as a panellist on television programmes such as "Newsnight Review" and "Question Time" and has served on the boards of several leading arts organisations, including the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the London Film School. She is Vice President of the Shaw Society. She is former Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames, London. Life and career. Early life. Greer was born on the West Side of Chicago, the eldest of seven children born to Ben, a factory worker, and Willie Mae, a home maker. Greer's father was born to a family of Mississippi sharecroppers. He was stationed in Britain during World War II and took part in the D-Day landings. Although she began writing plays at the age of nine, Greer originally set out on a legal career, but dropped out when her professor told her he did not think women should have a career in law. Instead she studied theatre in Chicago under David Mamet's supervision and at the Actors Studio in New York with Elia Kazan. Living in Manhattan's West Village (part of Greenwich Village) in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Greer had many gay male friends who became seriously ill. Since 1986. Greer visited Scotland as part of a production at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 and has been based in Britain since then. She told "The Sunday Times" in 2006 that she owes her life to the move. At the time, she made the decision to migrate to the UK because of her need to "escape the shadow of death" and the declining theatre scene in New York City. She acquired British citizenship in 1997. She has worked mainly in theatre with women and ethnic minorities, and is a former Arts Council playwright in residence at the Soho Theatre and for Nitro, previously known as the Black Theatre Co-operative and now called NitroBeat. Greer has played Joan of Arc at the Theatre Atelier in Paris. She has written radio plays for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, including a translation of "The Little Prince". Her plays include "Munda Negra" (1993), concerning the mental health problems of black women, "Dancing on Blackwater" (1994) and "Jitterbug" (2001), and the musicals "Solid" and "Marilyn and Ella". The latter work began as a radio play broadcast in December 2005 ("Marilyn and Ella Backstage at the Mocambo") after Greer watched a documentary on Marilyn Monroe which mentioned Monroe's assistance to the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald as segregation prevented the singer from working at certain venues, especially the Mocambo nightclub. Adapted for the stage, Greer's radio play was given a production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006 and was later rewritten and performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2008. The play was produced at the Apollo Theatre, in London's West End, in November 2009. She is the author of two novels, "Hanging by Her Teeth" (1994) and "Entropy" (2009), and is working on a play for the National Theatre Studio. Greer was a regular contributor to BBC Two's "Newsnight Review", and has been a panelist on the BBC's "Question Time" programme. She appeared on the edition in October 2009 that also featured Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party. Commenting after the recording she called it "probably the weirdest and most creepy experience of my life". The encounter formed the basis for her opera, "Yes", written for the Royal Opera House with music by Errollyn Wallen, and which premiered there at the Linbury Studio Theatre in November 2011. She was formerly director of the Talawa Theatre Company and has served on the boards of the Royal Opera House and the London Film School. She is also a former theatre critic for "Time Out" magazine. Greer's book "Obama Music", partly a musical memoir, was published by Legend Press in October 2009. Reviewing it in "The Independent", Lesley McDowell said: "Greer expertly weaves in memories of her own upbringing in Chicago, with more humour than you might expect, along with a clear, defined passion for the music she grew up listening to. She wants to show, too, how both the place she lived in, and the songs she listened to, were full of unseen boundaries that had held people back – but also gave them something to fight against." Her biography of Langston Hughes, "Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction", was published in 2011 (Arcadia/BlackAmber Inspirations). Greer co-produced a documentary film, "Reflecting Skin" (directed by Mike Dibb) – on representations of black people in Western art – which was shown by the BBC in 2004. She is currently working on a novel about Rossetti. Greer's memoir "A Parallel Life" was published in 2014 and was described by Joy Lodico in "The Independent" as "the story of a journey deliberately and bravely taken against all expectations". Greer is a member of the Arts Emergency Service, a British charity working with 16- to 19-year-olds in further education from diverse backgrounds. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK. She is also a board member of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). In April 2005, she was appointed to the British Museum's Board of Trustees and completed two full terms; from late March 2009 she served as Deputy Chairman. In 2011, she accepted the post of President of the Brontë Society. She resigned in June 2015, following internal disagreements about the society's direction. Greer is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa", edited by Margaret Busby. Honours and awards. Greer was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours for services to the Arts. She received her honour from Prince Charles.

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Cass Pennant Carol "Cass" Pennant (born 3 March 1958), is an English writer and former football hooligan. Background. Pennant's mother emigrated from Jamaica while pregnant and he was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire. Six weeks old, he was abandoned and was placed into a Dr. Barnardo's Home. As a black baby, Pennant was fostered by an elderly white family in Slade Green, Greater London where he was the only black person, and where he states he was "bullied from day one" year after year, and beaten persistently - "Not just from rivals or other kids, the whole town. Imagine as a kid, you're picked out; people in vehicles shouting out at you, total strangers". Pennant had been christened Carol (a common masculine name in parts of the West Indies, unusual as a masculine name in the UK, but is the Irish equivalent for the name "Charles") by his biological mother, which was also a source of bullying for him, particularly at school. After he saw the boxer Muhammad Ali (then known by his birth name of Cassius Clay) beat Henry Cooper he adopted the name Cass. Pennant who stands 6'4 (193 cm), was a member, and leader, of the Inter City Firm (ICF) associated with the English football club, West Ham United in the 1970s. Cass Pennant's story is remarkable given the level of racism that was prevalent during the 1970s, 1980s and early 90s in Britain. Cass managed to rise to the top and become one of the generals of the ICF despite being black. He was eventually sentenced to four years in prison in 1980 and was the first person to receive a long term sentence for football hooliganism. After a second time in prison he started running a night club security firm in London. While working at one such nightclub in South London he was shot three times. In 2002, Pennant appeared on the Channel 4 documentary, "Football's Fight Club" about football hooliganism in the 1970s. He has been a consultant on television programmes such as "The Real Football Factories" and "The Real Football Factories International". He also worked as a consultant and played a cameo role as a riot police officer in the 2005 drama film about football hooliganism, "Green Street". In 2006, he had a documentary made about him, "Cass Pennant - Enough Said" (Gangster Videos) directed by Liam Galvin, and in 2008 a film was made based on Pennant's life story, "Cass", starring Nonso Anozie as Pennant, and directed by Jon S. Baird. In 2010, he played a leading role in the movie "Killer Bitch". He also wrote the foreword for Manchester United football hooligan Colin Blaney's book "Undesirables" and contributed a short piece about Manchester United's rivalry with West Ham External links. Cass - The Cass Pennant movie review at The Hollywood News

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Sarah Ladipo Manyika Sarah Ladipo Manyika (born 7 March 1968) is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays. She is author of two well received novels, "In Dependence" (2009) and "Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun" (2016), and has had work published in publications including "Granta", "Transition", "Guernica", and "OZY", currently serving as Books Editor of "OZY". Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa". Early life. Sarah Manyika was born and raised in Nigeria. She has also lived in Kenya, France, Zimbabwe, and Britain. Her father is Nigerian and her mother is British. Manyika inherited her birth name (Ladipo) from her father, who was born in Ibadan (South-West Nigeria) in the late 1930s. Her father met and married her mother in the UK in the 1960s. Sarah spent much of her childhood in Lagos and the city of Jos in Plateau State. As a teenager, she lived for two years in Nairobi, Kenya, before her family moved to the UK. Career. Manyika studied at the Universities of Birmingham (UK), Bordeaux (France), and California (Berkeley), receiving a Ph.D from the latter. She was married in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1994, and now divides her time between San Francisco (where she has taught literature at San Francisco State University), London and Harare. Her writing includes published essays, academic papers, book reviews and short stories. Her short story "Mr Wonder" appeared in the 2008 collection "Women Writing Zimbabwe". Her first novel, "In Dependence", was originally published by Legend Press, London, in 2008, and was chosen by the UK's largest bookstore chain as its featured book for Black History Month. In 2009, "In Dependence", was published by Cassava Republic, a literary press based in Abuja, Nigeria (as well as, latterly, in the UK), with a stable of authors that includes Teju Cole and Helon Habila. Speaking of her decision to sign with an African publisher, Manyika has said: "I realized that by granting world rights to an African publisher I could, in a small way, attempt to address the imbalance of power in a world where the gatekeepers of literature, even for so-called African stories, remain firmly rooted in the west." Toni Kan writes in "The Lagos Review": "Sarah Manyika has written an impressive debut novel which will find a well deserved place in the pantheon of post-colonial literature." In 2014, "In Dependence" was published by Weaver Press in Zimbabwe, where it is a set book for the Advanced-level English Literature examination. "In Dependence" has also been introduced by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) in Nigeria for candidates sitting for the 2017 UTME. Manyika's second novel, "Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun", on publication in spring 2016 was endorsed by many other writers, including Bernardine Evaristo ("Manyika's story about an elderly Nigerian woman is quiet, sophisticated and it expands the canon of contemporary African literature into welcome new territory"), Aminatta Forna ("gorgeous and finely crafted...Sarah Manyika's novel shows ordinary people at their best. Uplifting!"), NoViolet Bulawayo ("Astute, sensual, funny, and moving"), Jamal Mahjoub ("Manyika writes with great verve and gentle wit, illuminating her characters with subtle insight"), Peter Orner ("A beautiful, important new novel, and one that will continue to echo in a reader's mind for a long time after"), E. C. Osondu ("unforgettable...a powerful meditation on loss, memory, exile and loneliness. The characters in this novel will stay with you"), and Brian Chikwava ("A wonderfully constructed novel, always surprising"). It has been translated into several languages. "Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun" was shortlisted in September 2016 for the Goldsmiths Prize (alongside books by Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack and Anakana Schofield), "the first African novel to be considered for this prize", which was set up to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The novel was also shortlisted for the California Book Award in the fiction category (alongside works by such writers as Andrew Sean Greer, Percival Everett, and Viet Thanh Nguyen). Of the genesis for "Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun" Manyika has said: "I've met many older women who have lived colourful lives, and yet when it comes to fiction I don't find many stories that mirror this, especially so when it comes to the lives of black women. When I cannot find stories that I'd like to read, I try writing them for myself." The novel's title is an acknowledged line from a poem by Mary Ruefle called "Donkey On". Manyika is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent", edited by Margaret Busby, participating in associated events. Manyika's non-fiction writing includes personal essays and in-depth profiles of people she meets, including Evan Mawarire, Toni Morrison and Michelle Obama. Manyika serves on the boards of Hedgebrook and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. She has also hosted "OZY"′s video series, Write, and is currently the magazine's Books Editor. She has also served as a judge for literary competitions, the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Manyika hosts a series of monthly filmed interviews for MoAD, called "Conversations Across the Diaspora", and her guests from around the world have included Ibrahim Mahama, Jess Cole, Strive Masiyiwa, Tatyana Ali, Anna Deavere Smith, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Hannah Pool Hannah Azieb Pool (born 1974) is a British–Eritrean writer and journalist. She was born near the town of Keren in Eritrea during the war for independence from Ethiopia. She is a former staff writer for "The Guardian" newspaper, and writes regularly for national and international media. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK. Biography. Early life and education. At the age of six months, Pool was adopted by a British scholar working in Sudan. At first she was raised in Khartoum and then Norway, before finally settling in Manchester, England. She grew up believing that her genetic parents had died shortly after her birth. She was educated at Liverpool University, where she studied Sociology. Career. After leaving university, Pool became a journalist on the "Manchester Evening News" and has written extensively for "The Guardian" newspaper, where for several years she wrote the fashion column "The New Black". However, at the age of 19 she had received a letter informing her that her genetic father and siblings were alive in Eritrea. Her memoir, "My Fathers' Daughter: A story of family and belonging", was published in 2005 and is an account of the journey she made back to Eritrea, aged 29, and her encounters with her family. Pool was a Senior Programmer of Contemporary Culture at the Southbank Centre, London. She currently works at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham as the Artistic Director/CEO.

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Joan Anim-Addo Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Academic career. Born in Grenada in the Caribbean, Joan Amin-Addo joined the faculty of Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1994, as founder and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies. She has taught at Vassar College in the USA and lectured at many universities internationally, including SUNY Geneseo (USA), the University of Turku in Finland and the University of Trento (Italy). She has also led workshops on creative non-fiction writing. At Goldsmiths, she is the convenor for the undergraduate options "Caribbean Women's Writing" and "Black British Literature", as well as convenor of the "Literature of the Caribbean and its Diasporas" pathway within the Comparative Literary Studies MA programme. She is also co-convenor, with Deirdre Osborne, of the world's first MA in Black British Writing, which Hannah Pool described as a "landmark for black culture", while novelist Alex Wheatle sees it adding "to the fabric of British literature". Publishing and writing. In 1995 Anim-Addo founded Mango Publishing, specialising in the "Caribbean voice", with a particular focus on women's writing, the Mango list featuring books by such writers as Beryl Gilroy, Velma Pollard and Jacob Ross. In 2008 Anim-Addo wrote the libretto to "Imoinda", a re-writing of Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko" (first published in 1688). Anim-Addo's other published work includes poetry collections — "Haunted by History" in 2004 and "Janie: Cricketing Lady" in 2006 – and a literary history, "Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing" (2007). She co-edited "I Am Black, White, Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe and Interculturality and Gender" (2009), and is the founder-editor of "New Mango Season", a journal of Caribbean women's writing. In December 2016 Anim-Addo was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award for "invaluable contributions to literature and to literary and cultural studies" by the literary quarterly journal "Callaloo".

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Leila Hassan Leila Hassan Howe (born 13 June 1948) is a British editor and activist, who was a founding member of the Race Today Collective. She worked for the Institute of Race Relations and became editor of the "Race Today" journal in 1986. Hassan was also a member of the Black Unity and Freedom Party. She is co-editor of a collection of writings from "Race Today" published in 2019. Career. Hassan was a member of the Race Today Collective from its beginning, and eventually became editor of its journal, "Race Today", in 1986. She was deputy editor of the journal from 1973, with Darcus Howe as editor. She was a frequent writer for the journal, examining topics ranging from the Black Power movement in the USA to the lives of black women in the UK. During the 1980s she worked alongside Olive Morris running "Race Today's" "Basement Sessions" at Railton Road, where art, culture and politics were discussed. The Race Today Collective was led and organised by a number of women, including Hassan, whose influence on its direction needs further recognition (according to Robin Bunce and Paul Field, biographers of her husband). Women involved in the organisation included Alethea Jones-Lecointe, Barbara Beese and Mala Dhondy. In 1984 Hassan organised for the wives of striking coal miners to come to London to tell their stories to the journal. Hassan also campaigned for Arts Council England to recognise the Notting Hill Carnival as an art form. Following the New Cross Fire in January 1981, in which 13 young Black people died, Hassan was co-organiser of the 20,000-person Black People's Day of Action march through London that took place on 2 March and is now described as "a turning point in black British identity". Hassan became involved in the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. She worked for the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) from 1970, as Information Officer. During her time there she helped to overthrow the IRR's paternalistic organisation, moving it from a conservative to a more radical political stance. This change in the IRR came about through a membership vote, in which Hassan had been instrumental in recruiting more members who sympathised with the proposed new direction of the organisation. She was a member of the Black Unity and Freedom Party before she became involved in the collective. A 2013 exhibition about British Black Power Movements in Britain at the Photofusion Gallery in Brixton featured an interview with Hassan Howe. Alongside other former Panthers, she acted as a script advisor for John Ridley's 2017 television series "Guerrilla", which examines the movement. In 2019, Hassan Howe co-edited "Here to Stay, Here to Fight", a collection of writings from "Race Today", published by Pluto Press, which aimed to introduce new audiences to Britain's black radical politics. Personal life. Leila Ramadhan Hassan was born on 13 June 1948 in Zanzibar; her family were Muslim and she grew up as a devout member of the faith. Hassan was married to the civil rights activist Darcus Howe, who was her predecessor as editor of "Race Today".

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Bernardine Evaristo Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, (born 28 May 1959), is a British author and academic. Her eighth book, the novel, "Girl, Woman, Other", won the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first black woman and the first black British person to win it. In 2020 she won the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year, as well as the Indie Book Award for Fiction as well as many other awards. The novel was one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019 and Roxane Gay's Favourite Book of 2019. In June 2020 she became the first woman of colour and the first black British writer to get to number 1 in the UK paperback fiction charts, where she held the top spot for five weeks. There are over 50 foreign language translations of Evaristo's books in process. Evaristo's writing also includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books, "The Emperor's Babe" (2001) and "Hello Mum" (2010), have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. Her ninth book, "Manifesto: On Never Giving Up" is published by Penguin UK October 2021 and Grove Atlantic USA (2022). Evaristo is a longstanding advocate for the inclusion of writers and artists of colour, setting up many successful projects. She founded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012–present) and initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme (2007–2017). She co-founded Spread the Word writer development agency (1995–present) and Britain's first black women's theatre company (1982–1988), Theatre of Black Women. She organised Britain's first major black theatre conference, Future Histories, for the Black Theatre Forum, (1995) at the Royal Festival Hall, and Britain's first major conference on black British writing, "Tracing Paper" (1997) at the Museum of London. In October 2020 it was announced that she is curating a new book series with Hamish Hamilton at Penguin Random House publishers, "Black Britain: Writing Back", which involves bringing back into print and circulation books from the past. The first six books, novels, were published in February 2021, including "Minty Alley" (1936) by C. L. R. James and "The Dancing Face" (1997) by Mike Phillips. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, one of fewer than 30 black female professors in the UK out of around 20,000 professors overall. She was Vice-Chair of the Royal Society of Literature until 2020, when she became a lifetime Vice President. She is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford and International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2021 she succeeded Sir Richard Eyre as President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, her "alma mater" and one of Britain's major drama schools. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's 2009 Birthday Honours, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's 2020 Birthday Honours, both for services to literature. Biography. Evaristo was born in Eltham, south-east London, and christened Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo. She was raised in Woolwich, the fourth of eight children born to her white English mother, who was a schoolteacher, and her Nigerian father, Julius Taiwo Bayomi Evaristo (1927–2001), known as Danny, born in British Cameroon, raised in Nigeria, who migrated to Britain in 1949 and became a welder and the first black councillor in the Borough of Greenwich, for the Labour Party. Her paternal grandfather, Gregorio Bankole Evaristo, was a Yoruba Aguda who sailed from Brazil to Nigeria. He was a customs officer (d. 1927). Her paternal grandmother, Zenobia Evaristo, née Sowemima (d. 1967) was from Abeokuta in Nigeria. Her mother's paternal great-grandfather, Louis Wilkening, arrived in London from Germany in the 1860s and settled in Woolwich, while her mother's maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Robbins, arrived in London from Birr, County Offaly, in Ireland in the 1880s and settled in Islington. Evaristo was educated at Greenwich Young People's Theatre (now Tramshed, in Woolwich), Eltham Hill Grammar School for Girls, the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, and Goldsmiths College, University of London, receiving her doctorate in creative writing in 2013. In 2019 she was appointed Woolwich Laureate by the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, reconnecting to and writing about the home town she left when she was 18. Writer and editor. Evaristo is the author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. She notably experiments with form and narrative perspective, often merging the past with the present, fiction with poetry, the factual with the speculative, and reality with alternate realities (as in her 2008 novel "Blonde Roots"). Her verse novel "The Emperor's Babe" (Penguin, 2001) is about a black teenage girl, whose parents are from Nubia, coming of age in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago. It won an Arts Council Writers' Award 2000; a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003; it was chosen by "The Times" as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade in 2010; and it was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2013. Next Evaristo published "Soul Tourists" (Penguin, 2005), about a mismatched couple driving across Europe to the Middle East, which featured ghosts of real figures of colour from European history. Her novel "Blonde Roots" (Penguin, 2008) is a satire that inverts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and replaces it with a universe where Africans enslave Europeans. "Blonde Roots" won the Orange Youth Panel Award and Big Red Read Award, and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Evaristo's other books include the verse novel "Lara" (Bloodaxe Books, 2009, with an earlier version published in 1997), which fictionalised the multiple cultural strands of her family history going back over 150 years as well as her mixed-race London childhood. This won the EMMA Best Novel Award in 1998. Her novella "Hello Mum" (Penguin, 2010) was chosen as "The Big Read" for the County of Suffolk, and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012. As an editor, she guest-edited "The Sunday Times" Style magazine (UK) in July 2020 with a groundbreaking black-woman/-xn takeover, featuring an array of young artists, activists and change-makers. She guest-edited the September 2014 issue of "Mslexia" magazine, the Poetry Society of Great Britain's centenary winter issue of "Poetry Review" (2012), titled "Offending Frequencies"; a special issue of "Wasafiri" magazine called "Black Britain: Beyond Definition" (Routledge, 2010), with poet Karen McCarthy Woolf; "Ten", an anthology of Black and Asian poets, with poet Daljit Nagra (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) and in 2007, she co-edited the New Writing Anthology "NW15" (Granta/British Council). She was also editor of "FrontSeat" intercultural magazine in the 1990s, and one of the editors of "Black Women Talk Poetry" anthology (published in 1987 by the Black Womantalk Poetry collective of which Evaristo was part), Britain's first such substantial anthology, featuring among its 20 poets Jackie Kay, Dorothea Smartt and Adjoa Andoh. Her 2014 novel "Mr Loverman" (Penguin UK, 2013/ Akashic Books USA, 2014) is about a septuagenarian Caribbean Londoner, a closet homosexual considering his options after a 50-year marriage to his wife. It won the Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (USA) and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. In 2015 she wrote and presented a two-part BBC Radio 4 documentary, "Fiery Inspiration" – on Amiri Baraka, BBC Radio 4, 2015. Evaristo is a contributor to many anthologies and books including "New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent" (2019), edited by Margaret Busby. Evaristo's most recent novel, "Girl, Woman, Other" (May 2019, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK), is an innovative polyvocal "fusion fiction" about 12 primarily black British women. Their ages span 19 to 93 and they are a mix of cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, classes and geographies, and the novel charts their hopes, struggles and intersecting lives. In July 2019 the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and made the Booker Prize shortlist, announced on 3 September 2019, alongside books by Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak, and on 14 October it won the prize jointly with Atwood's "The Testaments". The win made her the first black woman and first black British author to win the prize. "Girl, Woman, Other" was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2020, Evaristo was recognised for her writing as one of the United Kingdom's most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage by being included in the 2021 edition of the annual "Powerlist". Teaching and touring. Evaristo has taught creative writing since 1994. She has also been awarded many writing fellowships and residencies including the Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2015; for the British Council at Georgetown University, Washington DC; Barnard College/ Columbia University, New York; University of the Western Cape, South Africa; the Virginia Arts Festival (Virginia, USA), and Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK. She taught the University of East Anglia-"Guardian" "How to Tell a Story" course for four seasons in London up to 2015. Since 1997, she has accepted more than 130 international invitations as a writer. These involve writer-residencies and visiting fellowships, British Council tours, book tours, teaching creative writing courses and workshops as well as keynotes, talks and panels at many conferences and literary festivals. She chaired the 32nd and 33rd British Council Berlin Literature Seminar in 2017 and 2018. She also tours the UK on an ongoing basis and regularly hosts and chairs events. Critic and advocate. Evaristo has written many articles, essays, fictions and book reviews for UK publications including: "The Times", "Vanity Fair", "The Guardian", "The Observer", "The Independent", "Vogue", "Harper's Bazaar UK", "The Times Literary Supplement", "Conde Naste Traveller", "Wasafiri", and the "New Statesman". Aside from founding the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she has judged many prizes and in 2012 was chair of judges for both the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2006, Evaristo initiated an Arts Council-funded report delivered by Spread the Word writer development agency into why black and Asian poets were not getting published in the UK, which revealed that less than 1% of all published poetry is by poets of colour. When the report was published, she then initiated The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, with Nathalie Teitler and Spread the Word. In this national development programme, 30 poets were mentored, each over a one- or two-year period, and many went on to publish books, win many awards and receive serious recognition for their poetry. (See The Complete Works alumnae list at the end.) Evaristo has also served on many key councils and advisory committees for various organisations including the Council of the Royal Society of Literature since 2017, the Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, the British Council Literature Advisory Panel, the Society of Authors, the Poetry Society (Chair) and "Wasafiri" international literature magazine. In the 1980s, together with Paulette Randall and Patricia Hilaire, she founded Theatre of Black Women, the first theatre company in Britain of its kind. In the 1990s she organised Britain's first black British writing conference, held at the Museum of London, and also Britain's first black British theatre conference, held at the Royal Festival Hall. In 1995 she co-founded and directed Spread the Word, London's writer development agency. Other activity. Evaristo was featured as the castaway on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs" on 20 September 2020, interviewed by Lauren Laverne. A portrait of Evaristo (2002) by photographer Sal Idriss is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Evaristo has delivered many keynotes, speeches and lectures worldwide since 1994. She delivered the "New Statesman"/Goldsmiths Prize lecture on 30 September 2020. In October 2020 she gave the opening keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair's Publishing Insights conference, in which she called on publishers to hire more people represent a wider range of communities: "We have to have people working in the industry from all these communities who are looking for something beyond the cliches and stereotypes." Personal life. She is married to writer David Shannon, whom she met in 2006, and whose debut novel was launched in March 2021. The Complete Works alumnae. "Group One" "Group Two" "Group Three"

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Beryl Gilroy Beryl Agatha Gilroy ("née" Answick; 30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a Guyanese teacher, novelist, an ethno-psychotherapist, and poet who has been described as "one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants", part of the so-called "Windrush generation". Born in what was then British Guiana, she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the wife of Patrick Gilroy, and the mother of academic Paul Gilroy, and Darla Gilroy. Early years. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868–1967), a herbalist, who managed the family small-holding, was a keen reader and imparted to the young Beryl stories of "Long Bubbies", Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial Guyanese proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was 12, this was influenced by her grandmother. Sally Louisa James, Gilroy's grandmother thought Gilroy would be able to learn more from life, if she had life different life experiences and more freedom, typically not something someone could gain from primary school. Gilroy was heavily influenced by her grandmother in all her aspects of life, she found inspiration from her grandmother's stories in her own writings. She also used the same methodology that her grandmother used when it came to schooling her own children. Gilroy homeschooled her son and daughter with the same focus on freedom that her grandmother had for her. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a UNICEF nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London, pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Teaching career. Gilroy's first teaching job was in Guiana in the late 1940s up until 1951. She later left Guiana and went to attend the University of London. Gilroy assumed since she was a qualified teacher, and respected teacher from Guiana she believed she would not have a problem looking for a teaching job in London. However, during this time in the early 1950s racism was still strongly prevalent. Her prospective employers denied her for a long time because she was a black woman. It was not until the late 1960s that Gilroy was actually able to teach again. She was employed by the Inner London Education Authority, at a "poor Catholic School" she taught for a couple of years, married scientist Patrick Gilroy (d. 1975), and spent the next 12 years at home bringing up and educating their children Darla and Paul, furthering her own higher education. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London, at Beckford School in West Hampstead. It was difficult for her during this time since many of her coworkers were prejudice against her, and the low wage she received compared to other teachers at her school, she continued teaching regardless of all of that.. Many of these experiences she had as a teacher in London lead her to write her novel "Black Teacher" (1976). "Black Teacher" (1976). "Black Teacher" was written to not only show the experience of a woman teacher but as a black woman teacher. It was received widely as disturbing information rather than it just being seen as a narrative. "The heroine of "Black Teacher" is at times boastful, defensive, aggressive, kind and humorous. She is a flawed human being in the process of finding her place in an alien society that failed to appreciate her and where racial abuse was rife. Reflecting this instability, the narrator's voice slips between a third-person 'pedantic' narrator who is confident, professional and self-assured and the autobiographical 'I' which is much more provisional and self-doubting. Gilroy moves the narrator between the multiple identities that she has created in order to deal with difficult situations." This book was meant to showcase Gilroy's personal experiences about teaching in London. Many publishers, and other writers tried to discredit her writing saying her experiences weren't that such of the ones she had written about in "Black Teacher." They tried to unjustify it by saying it was easier than she had described getting a job as a teacher, and that the racism in the book wasn't likely to be as bad as she perceived it to be. Other work. Gilroy had many other jobs than just teaching. Previously stated above before she was able to become a teacher in London, Gilroy worked in a cafe, she was a maid, a dishwasher, and a worked in a factory. While she homeschooling her children she would also read and review works for a publisher. Later she worked as a multi-cultural researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She was a co-founder in the early 1980s of the Camden Black Sisters group. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. Writing. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as "In Praise of Love and Children". Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children's series "Nippers", containing probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. Her 1976 memoir about her experiences as the first black headteacher in London is described by Sandra Courtman as "an unconventional autobiography ... ["Black Teacher"] is Gilroy's experiment with an intermediary form – somewhere between fiction and autobiography, with a distinct non-linear structure." It was not until 1986 that Gilroy's first novel, the award-winning "Frangipani House" was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person's home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. "Boy Sandwich" (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by "Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage" (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, "Echoes and Voices" (Vantage, 1991). Then came "Sunlight and Sweet Water", "Gather the Faces", "In Praise of Love and Children" and "Inkle and Yarico" (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, "The Green Grass Tango" (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy's death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled "Leaves in the Wind", came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews. In this book she stated that the purpose behind "Black Teacher" and much of her other writing was "to set the record straight. There had been Ted Braithwaite's "To Sir With Love" [1959] and Don Hinds’ "Journey to an Illusion" [1966] but the woman's experiences had never been stated." She also later noted: "In the tradition of Black women who write to come to terms with their trauma, or alternatively to understand the nature of their elemental oppression, I wrote to redefine myself and put the record straight." In Gilroy's writings she drew much of her inspiration from stories her grandmother would tell her about British Guiana. She also was inspired from her own life experiences, such her work before becoming a teacher, and the racism she experienced while being one of the first black head teachers in London. Although many of Gilroy's peers who were writing Caribbean Literature were being published, Gilroy was turned away very often in the beginning. Her writings were seen to be too "...colonial, and unknowing, and ... psychological and strange." Some of her writings weren't published for more than 30 years after she had written them. After many years she was finally able to share her work with the public, and to this day she is remembered as a part of black feminist movement, but that isn't how she wanted to be remembered. "She badly wanted to avoid being marginalised by any literary or black-feminist political label." Writing style. Beryl Gilroy was a Caribbean Fiction and nonFiction writer. Many of her writings at the beginning of her career were Postcolonial Fiction novels and short stories. While near the end of her career she published a collection of her journals, lecture notes, essays and personal review. Her fiction writings were inspired by her life, and stories she was told by her grandmother in her childhood in Guiana. Her writings typically were based on Caribbean characters, many of which are women Caribbean characters. She wrote from the woman's perspective because that is what she knew. She wanted to give black women something they could relate too. Although, at the time many of the other Caribbean writers that were published at the time were writing from the male point of view. Gilroy was often Criticized for "Writing at the ‘wrong’ time and in the ‘wrong’ gender, the work of Beryl Gilroy was subject to misunderstandings and neglect. But Gilroy was the ultimate outsider who broke down barriers to clear a cultural and creative space for subsequent generations." Death and legacy. Gilroy died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw: "Two days later over one hundred Anglophone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmiths College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable." Honours and recognition. After many years of neglect in Beryl Gilroy's life she finally began receiving recognition for her work. She eventually received many honours, and awards late in her career as a writer. Gilroy wrote "The Nippers Series" which was written throughout the 1960s-1970s"," they were several short stories made for children. This Series won her over sixteen awards. She received the GLC Creative Writing Prize for her novel "Frangipani House" from 1986. Gilroy was honoured in 1990 by the Greater London Council for all of her services in education. Five years later in 1995 Gilroy received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of North London. In 1996 Gilroy was honoured by the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Then in 2000 Gilroy was made an Honorary Fellow, which is a highly prestigious award that a University can give from the Institute of Education. In recognition of Beryl Gilroy, an orange skirt suit she wore was included in an exhibition titled "Black British Style" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. She also received a British Guiana Teacher's Certificate with first-class honours in the 1950s.

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Charlene James Charlene James is a British playwright and screenwriter. She won substantial acclaim for her play "Cuttin' It", which addresses the issue of female genital mutilation in Britain, for which she won numerous awards. Early life. James grew up in Birmingham, England. She became interested in acting as a child, and took acting classes at Stage2 in Birmingham. She went on to study acting at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago before becoming interested in playwriting, and earned a place in the young writers' program at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Playwriting. Her first play, "Maybe Father", was short-listed for the Alfred Fagon Award in 2009, and received a reading at the Young Vic theatre in London. She took a post as writer-in-residence at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 2013, where she focused on writing about teen mental health. She wrote "Tweet Tweet" for on a commission the Birmingham Youth Rep in 2014. The one-act play addresses issues of teen suicide and the pressures of social media. James came to greater public awareness with her 2014 play "Cuttin' It." The play focuses on two teenage girls, both Somalis living in England, who have different perspectives on the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). James was inspired to write the play after watching the documentary "The Cruel Cut" by filmmaker Leyla Hussein, and after learning that FGM is practiced in Britain. "Cuttin' It" earned James the George Devine Award, the Alfred Fagon Award, the Critics' Circle Theatre Award, the UK Theatre Award for Best New Play, and the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright . She was a finalist for the 2016-17 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, also honoring "Cuttin' It". James' play "Bricks and Pieces" was commissioned and performed in 2016 by Tiata Fahodzi in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The play examines themes of family, loss, masculinity, as well as communication and its lack, and addresses the challenges of being a gay man from an African family in Britain. Screenwriting. She has written for the BBC's "The Break" and Sky's "A Discovery of Witches". In November 2019, James was announced as one of the writers for the twelfth series of "Doctor Who", making her the second black writer on the television series, in its entire history, following Malorie Blackman. She co-wrote the seventh episode, "Can You Hear Me?" with the showrunner Chris Chibnall.

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Darren Jordon Darren Jordon (born 23 November 1960 in London, England) is a British journalist working for the Al-Jazeera 24-hour English-language news and current affairs channel, Al Jazeera English. He is also a former officer of the Jamaica Defence Force. Early life. Born in London to Jamaican parents, Jordon was brought up in the West Indies. Jordon was trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in the United Kingdom, and became a professional army officer. He spent eight years in the Jamaica Regiment, and was part of the 1983 American-led force in the invasion of Grenada. He retired from the army as a Captain. Jordon became an accomplished military and sports parachutist, setting a new record in 1983 for parachuting onto Jamaica's highest mountain. After his retirement from the army, he worked briefly as a parachute stunt double, appearing in the film "Club Paradise." Upon leaving the army, Jordon sold TV advertising, and was a group sales manager for Yorkshire Television, London Weekend Television, Granada Television with soap expert and TV critic Chris Stacey and M-Net in South Africa. Broadcasting career. Jordon started his media career as a sports broadcaster in South Africa. He joined the BBC in 1998 as a BBC Sport correspondent on BBC News 24, where he later presented the "Sportsday" programme. He became a regular newsreader on the channel in 1999, before moving to present the relaunched breakfast news programme "Breakfast" in 2000, working with co-presenters Sophie Raworth, Jeremy Bowen and Sarah Montague. He also later became deputy presenter of the "BBC One O'Clock News" and presented all types of bulletins on BBC One. Jordon left the BBC to join Al Jazeera at the end of October 2006, his departure having been announced on 5 October. In the announcement by Al Jazeera of his appointment, he was reported as saying "I think the world will benefit from a news channel like Al Jazeera English which will become the much needed channel of reference for Middle Eastern events with unique access to the region. We will set the news agenda rather than following others." He has become a regular newsreader based in Doha in Qatar.

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Lesley Lokko Lesley Naa Norle Lokko is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist. From 2019 to 2020 she was a professor and served as Dean of Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture City College of New York, in addition to juggling teaching positions and different careers in Johannesburg, London, Accra and Edinburgh. In 2015, Lokko established the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at University of Johannesburg – the first and only African school dedicated to postgraduate architecture education. Early life and education. Lesley Lokko was born in Dundee, the daughter of a Ghanaian surgeon and a Scottish Jewish mother, and grew up in Ghana and Scotland. At the age of 17 she went to a private boarding school in England. She began studying Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University, but left the programme to go to the United States. She graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, with a BSc(Arch) in 1992, and an March in 1995, and went on to earn a PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. Career. Much of Lokko's writing contains themes about cultural and racial identity. She regularly lectures in South Africa, and has also taught in the United Kingdom and the United States. She also writes regularly for "The Architectural Review". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa" (edited by Margaret Busby). Lokko has taught architecture all over the globe. Before exiting the United States, She was an Assistant Professor in Architecture at Iowa State University from 1997 to 1998 and at University of Illinois at Chicago from 1998 to 2000. In 2000, she became the Martin Luther King Visiting Professor of architecture at the University of Michigan. She then moved back to the United Kingdom for almost a decade, teaching architecture at Kingston University, University of North London and, finally, University of Westminster, where she established the current Master of Arts programme in the pathway of Architecture, Cultural Identity and Globalisation (MACIG). Lokko was first appointed Visiting African Scholar at the University of Cape Town upon her return to South Africa. Tired of "Europe’s hand-me-downs", Lokko, in partnership with the University of Johannesburg, established the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in 2014/2015 and became the director of School. The GSA, modelled after the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and London's Architectural Association, is the only school in the continent committed to post-graduate architecture education and the first one offering Unit System way of teaching. In 2015, Lokko became Head of the newly established Graduate School and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. She founded the GSA at a time of political imperatives in South Africa and witnessed the large-scale student protests, with the uprising conscious of national identity in postcolonial South Africa. In June 2019 she was named as dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, remaining in this position until 2020.

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Patricia Cumper Patricia Cumper, MBE, FRSA (born 1954), also known as Pat Cumper, is a British playwright, producer, director, theatre administrator, critic and commentator. Life. Cumper was born and grew up in Jamaica, with her English father and Jamaican mother. She followed her parents to study at Cambridge University, for which she won a scholarship from The Queen's School in Kingston, to study Archaeology and Anthropology at Girton College (1973–76). While there, Cumper was a College Exhibitioner and was also awarded a full swimming Blue, captaining the swim team. After graduating, Cumper returned to Jamaica, where she began a career writing for the radio, including two major soap operas, "Malvina's Revenge" and "Mortimer Simmonds". Returning to Britain in 1993 she continued her career as a playwright, writing for BBC Radio 4. In the 2013 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to the arts. She has sons and grandsons, whom she describes as "the great joys of her life". Career. Cumper has written a large number of plays both for the stage and radio, episodes of "Westway", short stories, and a novel, "One Bright Child", published in 1998. Cumper began writing after watching a play of which she was critical, and being challenged to do better. She wrote a play called "The Rapist", which ran for six months and won an award. She continued to write and also produced plays, winning four awards for her work, which was produced in the Caribbean, the USA and Canada. She moved to Britain in 1993 to pursue her career. Cumper worked for the UK's largest Black-led theatre company, Talawa, from about 1999, as a writer, script reader, tutor, assistant director and dramaturge. She went on to become artistic director of Talawa Theatre Company in 2006 and stepped down in 2012, after overseeing their 25th anniversary season. Cumper became a trustee of the British Museum in 2013. In January 2015, her adaptation of Toni Morrison's 1987 novel "Beloved" was broadcast in 10 episodes by BBC Radio 4 as part of its "15 Minute Drama" programme. Cumper's 2017 play "Chigger Foot Boys", which pays tribute to African and Caribbean soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War, was produced at Tara Arts to a positive reception. Paul Vale in a four-star review for "The Stage" called it a "Richly textured play delivered with clarity and touchingly performed", commenting that "the perspective is wholly enlightening", and Sonia Grant wrote in the "Huffington Post": "In the dexterous hands of acclaimed playwright Patricia Cumper MBE, Chigger Foot Boys accomplished what a good theatrical production should by being bold, entertaining and enlightening. Indeed, Cumper's year and a half's research in both Britain and Jamaica shows; the play is jam-packed with little-known information on Jamaica's involvement in World War I." In 2018, Cumper, Winsome Pinnock and Janice Okoh between them dramatised six of Maya Angelou's autobiographical books for BBC Radio 4. The drama series was entitled "The Amazing Maya Angelou", and Pippa Bennett-Warner and Adjoa Andoh respectively played the author as a young adult and in later life. Cumper's play "The Key Game", produced in October 2002 by Talawa at London's Riverside Studios to much acclaim, was premiered in the US at the New Perspectives Studio in Manhattan from 17 October to 28 October 2018. Awards. Cumper has won awards for her radio drama, encompassing original works as well as adaptations of the work of other writers, including Andrea Levy, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. She was runner-up in the inaugural BBC Screenplay First Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and in 2013 was awarded an MBE for services to Black British Theatre.

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E. R. Braithwaite Eustace Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (June 27, 1912 – December 12, 2016), publishing as E. R. Braithwaite, was a Guyanese-born British-American novelist, writer, teacher and diplomat best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was the author of the 1959 autobiographical novel "To Sir, With Love", which was made into a 1967 British drama film of the same title, starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu. Early life. Braithwaite was born in Georgetown, Guyana, on June 28, 1912. He had a privileged beginning in life; both of his parents went to Oxford University and he described growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. His father was a gold and diamond miner and his mother was a homemaker. He attended Saint Ambrose Primary School and Queen's College, Guyana, a high school, and then City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience in "To Sir, With Love" as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in physics. Career. After the war, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a school teacher in the East End of London. The book "To Sir, With Love" (1959) was based on his experiences there. It won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. "To Sir with Love" was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Sidney Poitier. Although the film was a box-office success, critical opinion and Braithwaite himself considered it too sentimental and he also objected to his mixed-race romance being given lower prominence in the film version. He is quoted as saying in a 2007 BBC Radio 4 programme entitled "To Sir With Love Revisited", written and presented by Burt Caesar, exploring the story behind the book: "I detest the movie from the bottom of my heart." While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in "Paid Servant: A Report About Welfare Work in London", published in the UK in 1962. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he subsequently visited the country. While there he was granted the status of "honorary white" which gave him significantly more privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites, an honorific he found detestable. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in his book "Honorary White" (London: The Bodley Head, 1975, ). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, the first permanent Guyana representative to the United Nations (1967–69), and later Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela. He taught English studies at New York University and in 2002, was a writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C. He associated himself with Manchester Community College (Connecticut), during the 2005–06 academic year as a visiting professor. Therein he also served as the aforementioned educational institution's commencement speaker for that year and received an honorary degree. He turned 100 in 2012, and on a visit to Guyana in his capacity as the patron of the Inter-Guiana Cultural festival he was conferred on August 23 that year with a national award, the Cacique Crown of Honour, by then-President Donald Ramotar. Personal life and death. Braithwaite lived in Washington, D.C. He lived with his partner, Genevieve Ast. Braithwaite died at the Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Maryland, on December 12, 2016, at the age of 104.

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Grace Nichols Grace Nichols FRSL (born 1950) is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, "I is a Long-Memoried Woman" (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Biography. Grace Nichols FRSL was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and lived in a small village on the country's coast until her family moved to the city when she was eight years old. She took a Diploma in Communications from the University of Guyana, and subsequently worked as a teacher (1967–70), as a journalist and in government information services, before she immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1977. Much of her poetry is characterised by Caribbean rhythms and culture, and influenced by Guyanese and Amerindian folklore. Her first collection of poetry, "I is a Long-Memoried Woman" won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has written several further books of poetry and a novel for adults, "Whole of a Morning Sky", 1986. Her books for children include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies. Her latest work, of new and selected poems, is "Startling the Flying Fish", 2006. Her poetry is featured in the AQA, WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee), and Edexcel English/English Literature IGCSE anthologies - meaning that many IGCSE students in the UK have studied her work. Her religion is Christianity after she was influenced by the UK's many religions and multi-cultural society. She lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with her partner, the Guyanese poet John Agard. Anthologise — annual poetry competition for schools. In 2011 Nichols was a member of the first ever judging panel for a new schools poetry competition named "Anthologise", spearheaded by Poet Laureate Carol-Ann Duffy. School students aged 11–18 from around the UK were invited to create and submit their own anthologies of published poetry. The first ever winners of Anthologise were the sixth form pupils of Monkton Combe School, Bath, with their anthology titled "The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead".

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SI Leeds Literary Prize The SI Leeds Literary Prize is a biennial award founded in 2012 by Soroptimist International of Leeds (SI Leeds) – a branch of the worldwide women's organization Soroptimist International – for unpublished fiction written by Black and Asian women resident in the UK. Submissions must be of more than 30,000 words of fiction and entrants must be aged 18 years and over. The prize offers support for writers to develop their work and to help build new audiences. Described as "groundbreaking", the prize has been developed and managed by SI Leeds in partnership with Ilkley Literature Festival and Leeds-based publishers Peepal Tree Press. Among other partners are The Literary Consultancy (TLC), Writing on the Wall (WOW), the Arvon Foundation, New Writing North, and Leeds Library and Information Service. According to TLC Director Aki Schulz: "The SI Leeds Prize offers a vital opportunity to women writers from black and Asian communities whose voices as we all know are often marginalised from the publishing landscape. It is encouraging to feel that that landscape is finally making shifts in the direction of genuinely more representative and inclusive publishing, with a springing-up of initiatives and a rallying cry from those demanding to be heard and for the right to tell their stories as well as be given the critical artistic freedom to write creatively." As of 2014, patrons of the prize include Bernardine Evaristo, Bidisha, Bonnie Greer, Carolyn Choa, Diana Evans, Diana Howse, Dreda Say Mitchell, Hannah Pool, Margaret Oldroyd (president of Soroptimist International Great Britain and Ireland), Maya Jaggi, Pippa Small, Sue Woodford-Hollick and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, with Margaret Busby as prize ambassador and Irenosen Okojie as prize advocate. Background. The SI Leeds Literary Prize "aims to act as a loudspeaker for Black and Asian women's voices, enabling fresh and original literary voices from a group disproportionately under-represented in mainstream literary culture to reach new audiences." Irenosen Okojie, speaking of the necessity for the prize, states: "There’s a big disparity between what we see reflected on the shelves and the wonderful diverse voices that are out there. The prize aims to address that imbalance somewhat and to provide a platform for marginalized voices that are largely ignored... There are also very few black and Asian professionals working within the industry which has an impact in terms of who the gatekeepers are. Who gets to decide what voices should be heard and which stories are worth publishing?...If we have more diversity within the infrastructure, that might filter through to work that gets commissioned. A national prize like the SI Leeds Literary Prize is about celebrating the voices of black and Asian women." Kerry Young, chair of the 2014 panel of judges, said in an interview for "Sable" magazine: "It’s the only prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women writers. That's the first thing. Secondly, it's the opportunities it offers not just in the cash awards but, for the winning author, to have a free place on an Arvon creative writing course of their choice; and for Peepal Tree Press to consider their manuscript for publication. That is huge. And for the runner-up and the other shortlisted authors there is a combination of writer development support and manuscript assessment from The Literary Consultancy; and one-to-one professional development support from Peepal Tree Press. So the prize is an all round package to help writers develop not just reward them for their existing achievements." In the words of patron Carolyn Choa, "The prize endeavours to encourage those not born into the mainstream of British culture, and offers a possible course towards the rich, all-embracing intellectual landscape of which Britain so rightly boasts." 2012 prize. The 2012 prize (judged by Margaret Busby, Hannah Bannister and Gail Bolland) was won by Minoli Salgado for "A Little Dust on the Eyes" (published in 2014 by Peepal Tree Press). In second place was "Borrowed Light" by Karen Onojaife, who also won the SI Readers’ Choice award; and tied third were "A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing" by Emily Midorikawa, and "Storybank: The Milkfarm Years" by Jane Steele. Also shortlisted were Katy Massey for "The Book of Ghosts" and Anita Sivakumaran for "The Weekend for Sex". 2014 prize. The 2014 judges – Kerry Young, Gail Bolland, Elise Dillsworth and Kadija George – chose as first prizewinner Mahsuda Snaith for "The Constellation of Ravine Roy". Season Butler won second prize for "Hanging from the Hammer of the Bell", and Anita Sivakumaran won third prize for "The Queen". The SI Readers' Choice award, chosen from the shortlist by some 20 SI members, went to Kit de Waal for "Blue in Green". 2016 prize. The 2016 winner — judged by Kadija George, Margaret Oldroyd, Karen Onojaife and Susan Yearwood — was Amita Murray for "Marmite and Mango Chutney", with second prize going to Winnie M. Li for "Dark Chapter" and third prize, and the SI Readers' Choice award, to Jamilah Ahmed for "Recognising Strangers". 2018 prize. The 2018 Aspire-igen first prize winner – chosen by a judging panel chaired by Susheila Nasta – was Shereen Tadros for "Say Goodbye to Her", second prize going to Yvonne Singh for "One Man’s Revolution", and third prize to Kavita Bhanot for "Baba ji on Boulton Road", with the SI Readers' Choice award, based on 22 votes from SI members across the UK and Nepal, going to Omega Douglas for "Hibiscus, Rose, Jacaranda". 2020 prize. The Aspire-igen first prize went to Wenyan Lu for "The Funeral Cryer", LM Dillsworth took the runner-up award for "The Sun Sets in the East" and Sumana Khan won third prize and the SI Readers' Choice award for "The Good Twin".

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Michael Salu Michael Salu, British-born of Nigerian heritage, is a creative director, art and photography editor, designer, brand strategist, writer and illustrator. Education and career. Born in London, England, to parents from Nigeria, Michael Salu lived in both countries during his childhood. He earned a BA (Hons) degree in Graphic Communication from the University of Wolverhampton. Artistic direction, editing and art publishing. In his role as Artistic Director of Granta Publications (2010–13), Salu was responsible for the creative concepts behind "Granta" magazine, Granta Books and Portobello Books, commissioning and creating work for print, covers and digital. During this period, he was also the art editor for "Granta" magazine, publishing new and established artists’ and photographers' work. Highlights of his works include curating a showcase of art to respond to the question "What is British Identity?" for "Granta" 119 and a photographic collaboration with Nadav Kander for "Granta"’s Best of Young British Novelists 4, which also appeared in "The New York Times". At "Granta" magazine, Salu was also responsible for art editing and commissioning on projects including Contacts and the Pakistan issue. Prior to "Granta", Salu worked for Random House, where he designed and art directed covers for authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as for more contemporary fiction including Xiaolu Guo and Chuck Palahniuk. Brand strategy. Salu was involved with shaping a new brand identity for Soda Pictures, launched in 2014, and was creative director for the Art Dubai Abraaj Art Prize 2014. Other work. Salu has done mentoring with The Photographers' Gallery, has lectured at various educational institutions such as The Royal College of Art, as well as being involved in a wide range of creative projects, including with Curzon Cinemas and musician Ticky. Salu has written fiction and essays for publications such as "Varoom", "Eye Magazine", "Under The Influence" magazine, "Freeman's Journal", "Catapult" and "Entropy". He also contributes original art to "Grey Magazine". He has conceived a variety of digital projects for "Granta" and other brands. For "Granta" 110: "Sex", he conceived and commissioned a viral website featuring several films to promote the issue. He was Creative Director on the "Granta" documentary on A. M. Homes, "May We Be Forgiven", in conjunction with her novel of the same title, in 2012. His essay "Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable" is in "Tales of Two Cities", an anthology on the socio-economic imbalances of New York, edited by John Freeman and published by OR Books, also including work by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Taiye Selasi, Mark Doty and other writers. Salu runs the multi-disciplinary creative consultancy SALU.io. Awards and recognition. Salu's many awards include "Best Cover of the Year" in the British Book Design Awards 2011 for "Granta" 110: "Sex", and the Images 36 Gold Award (art direction) in October 2012 from the Association of Illustrators.

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Ottobah Cugoano Ottobah Cugoano, also known as John Stuart (c. 1757 – after 1791), was an abolitionist, political activist and natural rights philosopher from West Africa who was active in Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Captured in the Gold Coast and sold into slavery at the age of 13, he was shipped to Grenada in the West Indies. In 1772 he was purchased by a merchant who took him to England, where he learnt to read and write, and was freed. Later working for artists Richard and Maria Cosway, he became acquainted with several British political and cultural figures. He joined the Sons of Africa, a group of African abolitionists in Britain. Early life. He was born Quobna Ottobah Cugoano in 1757 in Agimaque (Ajumako) in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana). He was a Fanti and his family was close to the local chief. At the age of 13, Cugoano was seized with a group of children, sold into slavery and transported from Cape Coast on a slave ship to Grenada. He worked on a plantation in the Lesser Antilles until he was purchased in 1772 by Alexander Campbell, a British merchant, who took him to England where he was given his freedom. On 20 August 1773, he was baptised at St James's Church, Piccadilly as "John Stuart – a Black, aged 16 Years". Abolitionist. In 1784, Cugoano was employed as a servant by the artists Richard Cosway and his wife, Maria. Through the Cosways, he came to the attention of leading British political and cultural figures of the time, including the poet William Blake and the Prince of Wales. Together with Olaudah Equiano and other educated Africans living in Britain, Cugoano became active in the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group whose members wrote frequently to the newspapers of the day, condemning the practice of slavery. In 1786 he played a key role in the case of Henry Demane, a kidnapped black man who was to be shipped back to the West Indies. Cugoano contacted Granville Sharp, a well-known abolitionist, who was able to have Demane removed from the ship before it sailed. In 1787, possibly with the help of his friend Olaudah Equiano, Cugoano published an attack on slavery entitled "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species" (1787). By now a devout Christian, he wrote work informed by that religion. His writing called for the abolition of slavery and immediate emancipation of all slaves. It argues that the slave's duty is to escape from slavery, and that force should be used to prevent further enslavement. The narrative was sent to King George III, the Prince of Wales and to Edmund Burke, a leading politician. George III, along with much of the royal family, remained opposed to abolition of the slave trade. Four years later, in 1791, Cugoano published a shorter version of his book, addressed to the "Sons of Africa". In it, he expressed qualified support for the failed British efforts to establish a colony in Sierra Leone for London's "Poor Blacks" (mostly freed African-American slaves who had been relocated to London after the American Revolutionary War. Other early settlers were the Nova Scotian Settlers, that is Black Loyalists, also former American slaves, from Nova Scotia, who chose to move to Sierra Leone.) Cugoano called for the establishment of schools in Britain especially for African students. In 1791 Cugoano moved with the Cosways to 12 Queen Street in Mayfair. His last known letter, written in 1791, mentions travelling to ‘upwards of fifty places’ to promote the book and that he found that ‘complexion is a predominant prejudice’. Cugoano wished to travel to Nova Scotia to recruit settlers for the proposed free colony of African Britons in Sierra Leone but it is not known if he did so. After 1791, Cugoano disappears from the historical record and it is likely that he died in 1791 or 1792. Commemoration. In November 2020, an English Heritage blue plaque honouring Cugoano was unveiled on Schomberg House in Pall Mall, London where he had lived and worked with the Cosways from 1784 to 1791.

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Mike Phillips (writer) Michael Angus Phillips, (born 8 August 1941), known as Mike Phillips, is a British writer and broadcast journalist of Guyanese descent. Early years. Mike Phillips was born in Georgetown, a port city in the equatorial colony British Guiana. In 1956 with his family he migrated to Islington in London, England, when he was aged about 14. He was educated at the University of London (English), the University of Essex (Politics), and received a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Goldsmiths College, London. Career. Phillips worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983, then became a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. In 1992 he became a full-time writer. He has said, "One of the experiences that made me a writer was the realisation that I was written out of a small piece of literary history in the film "Prick Up Your Ears", the biography of controversial playwright Joe Orton, author of "Entertaining Mr Sloane". Orton and his friend Kenneth Halliwell were frequent visitors to Essex Road Library where I worked as a library assistant. I regularly spoke to them and didn't know that they were defacing the books, an act that eventually put them in jail. When the scene was depicted on film I felt I should have been included, and realised that you can't rely on others to write your story, sometimes you have to do it yourself." Phillips is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: "Blood Rights" (1989; serialised on BBC TV starring Brian Bovell), "The Late Candidate" (1990), "Point of Darkness" (1994), "An Image to Die For" (1995). He is also the author of "London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain" (2001), a series of interlinked autobiographical essays and stories. He has said that he thinks of himself as both an English writer and a black British writer. With his brother, the political journalist Trevor Phillips, he wrote "Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain" (1998) to accompany a BBC television series. He writes for "The Guardian" newspaper, and was formerly cross-cultural curator at the Tate and a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund. External links.

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Afua Hirsch Afua Hirsch (born 1981) is a Norwegian-born British writer, broadcaster and former barrister. She has worked as a journalist for "The Guardian" newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. Early life. Afua Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway, to a British father and an Akan mother from Ghana, and was raised in Wimbledon, southwest London. Her paternal grandfather, Hans (later John), who was Jewish, had fled Berlin in 1938. Her great-uncle is the metallurgist, Sir Peter Hirsch. Her maternal grandfather, who graduated from the University of Cambridge, was involved in establishing the post-independence education system in Ghana but later became a political exile. Hirsch was educated at the private Wimbledon High School, and then studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Peter's College, Oxford (1999–2002). After her graduation with a Bachelor of Arts degree, she took the Graduate Diploma in Law at the BPP Law School. She qualified as a barrister in 2006 and trained at Doughty Street Chambers. Career. Hirsch began working as a lawyer in criminal defence, public and international law. Journalism and writings. Hirsch was a legal correspondent for "The Guardian". She has lived in Britain and Senegal, and served as "The Guardian"s West Africa correspondent, based in Accra, Ghana. From 2014 to 2017, she was the Social Affairs and Education Editor at Sky News. Hirsch contributed the piece "What Does It Mean to Be African?" to Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa". "Guardian" article about Nelson's Column. In August 2017, in "The Guardian", Hirsch questioned whether Nelson's Column should remain in place, with the implication it might be removed. Not long afterward, the art historian and former museum director Sir Roy Strong said the suggestion the column should be taken down was a "ridiculous" viewpoint, commenting that "Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won't be a statue or a historic house standing...The past is the past. You can't rewrite history". The following May, Hirsch said the idea of removing Nelson's Column distracted from her main point that Britain should look more carefully at its past to understand itself better today. In an article introducing her television documentary, "The Battle for Britain's Heroes", Hirsch stated that she "wasn't actually waiting in a bulldozer, ready to storm Trafalgar Square, as some people seemed to believe". "Brit(ish)". Hirsch's book "Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging" () was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2018. The book is part-memoir and discusses black history, culture and politics in the context of Britain, Senegal and Ghana. It is a Sunday Times bestseller and was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016. Television and audio. Hirsch is currently one of the panellists on the Sky News discussion programme "The Pledge" (UK TV programme). In June 2020, following the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Hirsch spoke on "Tell A Friend" podcast about the challenges of navigating Britain's media landscape and the racism she faced along the way. "The Battle for Britain's Heroes". In the television programme "The Battle for Britain's Heroes", first broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 in late May 2018, Hirsch raised lesser-known aspects of the career of former British prime minister Winston Churchill, such as his attitude to Indians and advocacy of gassing "uncivilised tribes" in Mesopotamia (now partly modern-day Iraq) after the First World War. In his review of the programme, Hugo Rifkind in "The Times" wrote that the "subtext is often that Hirsch is attacking Britain in even mentioning this stuff", which itself implies, because of her own background that it "is frankly uppity of her", but Hirsch does not let "her views be defined in opposition to those of her detractors". "African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power". In 2020, Hirsch presented the three-year documentary series "African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power" on BBC Four. Hirsch visited Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya, meeting musicians and artists, and recounting the history of each country. Recognition. Hirsh was on the panel of judges for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction that made Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo joint winners, causing much controversy. Later that year, Hirsch was included in the 2020 edition of the "Powerlist" of the most influential Britons from African/African-Caribbean heritage. Hirsch was cited as one of the top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2020. Furthermore, in the "Powerlist 2021", she made the top 10, ranking ninth-most influential person of African or African Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom. Personal life. Hirsch met Sam, her partner, while each was pursuing a legal career. He is from Tottenham, North London, and of Ghanaian descent. The couple's daughter was born in 2011.

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Barbara Burford Barbara Yvonne Veronica Burford (9 December 1944 – 20 February 2010) was a British medical researcher, civil servant and writer. She was born in Jamaica and moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 10. Burford attended Dalston County Grammar School and studied medicine at the University of London. Biography. Early years. Burford was born in Jamaica on 9 December 1944 and was raised there by her grandmother until the age of seven. In 1955 Burford moved to London with her family, where she attended Dalston County Grammar School, which later became Kingsland Secondary School. The school is now known as Petchey Academy and specialises in health, care and medical science. Burford described herself as a "descendent of three different diasporas: African, Jewish and Scots", as well as claiming her lesbian identity. Burford was open about being a lesbian, although this was not widely known until Stephen Maglott (1953-2016) published a biographical tribute to Burford describing her as a "distinguished LGBTQ person of color/African descent. Medical career. Burford joined the National Health Service in 1964 as a specialist in electron microscopy at postgraduate teaching hospitals. She later began working at the Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital in a team with Sheila Haworth. Haworth is a professor of developmental cardiology at the Institute of Child Health and was in 2006 appointed Commander of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to the National Health Service. Writing. Burford was an active writer, having written plays, short stories, poems, and science fiction stories. The 1980 anthology "A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black Women Poets", to which Burford was a contributor, was the first anthology to be published in the field of black British women's writing. The anthology was described in the academic journal "Hecate" as "a gift" and a "testimony to the depth of Black feeling and the complex power inherent in Black love". Burford's 1984 play "Patterns" was commissioned by Changing Women's Theatre. The play focused on women's labour and was performed at the Oval Theatre in London. "The Threshing Floor" (1986), an eponymous novella and collection of short stories, features in many school and college reading lists across the United Kingdom, and individual works from the collection have been republished in other anthologies. Burford's writing was included in the anthology "Daughters of Africa" (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). Burford's works were selected multiple times by the journal "The Women's Review of Books" as works that readers of the journal might find interesting. Equality and diversity. In 1999 Burford was appointed Director of Equality for the Department of Health, a post she held until 2002. University of Bradford. Burford assisted with the creation of Bradford's healthcare apprenticeship scheme, led by Bradford University, which is credited with helping transform the diversity of the city's healthcare workforce. Burford was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2001 from the University of Bradford to recognise her contributions to equality and diversity. After her retirement in 2005 Burford became the first deputy director of the university's Centre for Inclusion and Diversity. Death and legacy. Burford died of respiratory failure on 20 February 2010. The University of Bradford set up an annual lecture in memory of Burford known as the Barbara Burford Annual Memorial Lecture, given as part of the international annual Making Diversity Interventions Count conference. The lecture is given each year by one of her colleagues from the field of equality and diversity who had direct links to Burford and her work. The Barbara Burford Honour (Excellence in STEM) was founded in 2017 by British magazine "Gay Times" as part of the Gay Times Honours, a series of honours to recognise LGBT individuals who have made a difference in their field. The inaugural Barbara Burford Honour was won by Rachel Padman, a transgender astrophysics lecturer from the University of Cambridge.

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Kwame Kwei-Armah Kwame Kwei-Armah (born Ian Roberts; 24 March 1967 in Hillingdon, London) is a British actor, playwright, director, singer and broadcaster. He is best known for playing paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC medical drama "Casualty" from 1999 until 2004. In 2005 he became the second black Briton to have a play staged in the West End of London. (Ray Harrison Graham's Fringe First award-winning play "GARY" played at the Arts Theatre in 1990.) Kwei-Armah's award-winning piece "Elmina's Kitchen" transferred to the Garrick Theatre in 2005. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to drama. He is currently the artistic director of the Young Vic theatre in London, succeeding David Lan. Brought up in Southall, he changed his name at the age of 19 after tracing his family history, through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana. His parents were born in Grenada. He has four children. Kwei-Armah was chancellor of the University of the Arts from 2011 to 2015. He served as the Artistic Director of the Baltimore's Center Stage theater in the United States from 2011 to 2018. In 2018 he became the Artistic Director of the Young Vic in London. Kwei-Armah's son, who goes by the stage name of KZ, contributed production and vocals to Wretch 32 and Avelino's 2015 mixtape "Young Fire, Old Flame", and Wretch 32's third studio album, "Growing Over Life", released in September 2016. Early life. Kwei-Armah was born in Hillingdon Hospital and named Ian Roberts. He changed his name when he was aged 19 after tracing his family history (in which he first became interested as a child after watching the TV series "Roots"), through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana, descendant of Coromantins. His parents were born in Grenada, then a British colony. His maternal grandmother moved to Trinidad, where she died, leaving her five children including Kwei-Armah's mother as orphans in Grenada. Kwei-Armah's mother moved to Britain in 1962. His father, Eric, moved to Britain in 1960, at a time when there was high unemployment in Grenada, and found work in London at the local Quaker Oats factory. When he was one year old, Kwei-Armah's family moved to a two-storey terraced house in Southall, London, where they let two rooms to help to pay for the mortgage. Kwei-Armah started at his first primary school as a five-year-old, and after a teacher disciplined him by kicking him in the back, his mother took on three jobs to pay for him and his two siblings to go to a private stage school, the Barbara Speake Stage School in London – working as a child minder, as a night nurse at Hillingdon Hospital, and doing some hairdressing work. He also attended The Salvation Army, and received musical training there. At the age of about 35 years his mother had a stroke leading to left-sided weakness, from which she slowly recovered. Kwei-Armah grew up in Southall in the 1970s at a time when Asian families were moving in and white families were moving out, and he perceived animosity from the Asian community towards the Afro-Caribbean community. One day, at the time of the April 1979 Southall riots, his father came home after the evening work-shift and took him out to see the Hambrough Tavern on fire. Kwei-Armah saw a police van arrive, and when the police started to charge at the crowd using batons and shields he ran home frightened. From the upstairs front room he claims to have seen the police chasing black and Asian boys along the street followed by skinheads, who also had batons and shields, chasing behind the police. The event shocked him making him feel that he was living in an alien environment, and reinforced his resolve to do well in his education. He later wrote about the event in his first play, "A Bitter Herb". Appearances on stage, television and radio. Kwei-Armah appeared in the original London production of "Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens", which played at the Criterion Theatre in 1993. Kwei-Armah first achieved fame playing the paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC drama series "Casualty" from 1999 to 2004. His other television credits include appearances in episodes of "Casualty"′s sister series "Holby City", the BBC's "Afternoon Play", "Between the Lines" and "The Bill". In 2003 he appeared as a contestant on the "Reality TV programme Comic Relief does Fame Academy" and subsequently released an album, "Kwame". In 2007, he starred as E. R. Braithwaite in the two-part BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Braithwaite's novel "To Sir, with Love". Kwei-Armah was seen in the episode "Who Shot the Sheriff?" in the 2006 BBC One revival of "Robin Hood", as an ambitious town planner in "Lewis", and in the feature film "Fade to Black" opposite Danny Huston, Christopher Walken and Diego Luna. He is also a regular on "TheatreVoice". He presented 15 February 2009 episode of the Channel 4 documentary "Christianity: A History", during which he spoke about his own Christian faith and African identity, in addition to the African origins of Christianity in Ethiopia. In the summer of 2009, he presented the Channel 4 series, "On Tour with the Queen", which looked at the impact of Queen Elizabeth II's tour of the Commonwealth that took place between November 1953 and May 1954. He also met with King George Tupou V of Tonga, Sitiveni Rabuka and Queen Elizabeth II herself on the trip. In March 2010, Kwei-Armah appeared in the penultimate and final episodes of the fourth series of "Skins". For a number of years Kwei-Armah has appeared as a panellist on the arts discussion show "Newsnight Review". He also appeared on "Question Time" on two occasions and reported for "The Culture Show". On 15 May 2011 he was the stranded person on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs". His musical selections included the political power-rap of Chuck D and his band Public Enemy, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley and Lord Kitchener. Kwei-Armah said living with his parents was like existing with two very different types of theatre in the family home: he would be serving rum to his father and his pals, while his mother was hosting church meetings in the living-room. In 2011 Kwei-Armah chose Marcus Garvey as his subject for BBC Radio 4 "Great Lives". Work as a playwright. Kwei-Armah's first play, "Bitter Herb" (1998), won him a Peggy Ramsay award, and was subsequently put on by the Bristol Old Vic, where he also became writer-in-residence. His "Blues Brother, Soul Sister" was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1999, and "Big Nose" was performed in 1999 at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. Kwei-Armah's fifth play, "Elmina's Kitchen", premiered in May 2003 at the National Theatre, and was shortlisted in the "Best New Play" category at the 2004 Laurence Olivier Awards. That same year, Kwei-Armah received the "Evening Standard" Award for the Most Promising New Playwright of 2003. In 2005, he was nominated for a BAFTA award for the television version of "Elmina's Kitchen". "Walter's War", a drama written by Kwei-Armah and based on the wartime experiences of footballer Walter Tull's life, was made by UK TV channel BBC Four and screened on 9 November 2008 as part of the BBC's "Ninety Years of Remembrance" season in November 2008. Kwei-Armah also had a cameo role in the film. Kwei-Armah is a member of the board of the National Theatre and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Open University in 2008, and in 2009 was a judge for the BBC World Service's International Radio Playwriting Competition. On 28 February 2011, he was named as the new artistic director at Baltimore's Center Stage Theatre, replacing Irene Lewis, who had served in the position for 19 years. Kwei-Armah's play "Elmina's Kitchen" had been staged in 2005, followed by "Let There Be Love" in 2010, and in 2007 he directed Naomi Wallace's "Things of Dry Hours". Kwei-Armah was involved in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project "Sixty-Six Books", for which he wrote a piece based on a chapter of the King James Bible. He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. Kwei-Armah wrote and directed the world premiere of "Marley", a musical based on the life and music of Bob Marley which ran at Center Stage, Baltimore in May and June 2015. In March and April 2017 the musical made its UK premiere in a new production (rewritten by Kwei Armah) at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre under a new title "". In October 2016 Kwei-Armah directed the European premiere of "One Night in Miami" by the award-winning, black, US playwright Kemp Powers. "One Night in Miami" ran 6 October – 3 December 2016 at Donmar Warehouse in London's West End. The all-black cast portrays the friendship between four of the most celebrated black icons in American history at a pivotal moment in their lives: 22-year-old boxing champion Cassius Clay, on the brink of becoming Muhammad Ali, celebrates his world heavyweight championship title with controversial civil rights activist Malcolm X, along with singer songwriter Sam Cooke and NFL champion footballer Jim Brown. The action takes place in a Miami hotel room, watched over by Nation of Islam security. He collaborated with Idris Elba on the musical "Tree", which premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2019. Controversy surrounding "Tree". On 2 July 2019, "The Guardian" published a story describing how Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley claimed they had been removed from the production of "Tree". In 2015, Elba had asked them to develop and workshop his idea for a musical based on his album "Idris Elba Presents mi Mandela", on which Allen-Martin had also collaborated. Allen-Martin and Henley said they had worked on the project for four years. In 2018, the show was commissioned by Manchester International Festival for their 2019 festival and Kwei-Armah was asked to join the project by Elba and Manchester International Festival as writer and director of the show. "Tree" was later billed as "created by Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah". Allen-Martin and Henley claim that their creative input had included research, script-writing as well as the play's title, and that they were threatened with legal action if they went public with the story. The co-producers of "Tree" released a statement refuting their claims. Kwei-Armah and Elba both published personal responses to Allen-Martin and Henley's claims on Twitter. Elba said it was his "contractual right as beholder of the original idea, the album" to take the show in a different creative direction. The producers state that the two versions of "Tree" are "different projects...Any similarities between the 2019 production of "Tree", and Tori and Sarah’s 2016 workshopped script can be attributed to the fact that both were based upon the same original concept created by Idris Elba."

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Linda Bellos Linda Ann Bellos (born 13 December 1950) is a British businesswoman, radical feminist and gay-rights activist. In 1981 she became the first black woman to join the "Spare Rib" collective. She was elected to Lambeth Borough Council in London in 1985 and was the leader of the council from 1986 to 1988. Early life. Bellos was born in London to a white Polish Jewish mother, Renee Sackman, and a black Nigerian father, Emmanuel Adebowale, who came from Uzebba and joined the merchant navy during the Second World War. Renee Sackman was disowned by her family for marrying an African Christian. Raised in Brixton, Bellos was educated at Silverthorne Girls' Secondary Modern School, Dick Sheppard Comprehensive School, and the University of Sussex (1978–81). Career. Feminism. Bellos is a radical feminist and was the first non-white lesbian to join the "Spare Rib" feminist collective in 1981. She criticises the movement's "point scoring" and the manner in which the women's movement was, in her view, dominated by white, middle-class women. She rejects the term "mixed race" because she considers that every attempt to define race is reduced to definitions of skin colour. She uses the term "mixed heritage" instead. Bellos is a person of African and Eastern European Jewish heritage. She uses the inclusive political term of "Black" to describe herself. Politics. She was vice-chair of the successful Labour Party Black Sections campaign to select African, Caribbean and Asian parliamentary and local candidates within the Labour Party. In 1985 Bellos was elected as a Labour councillor to Lambeth London Borough Council and was leader of the council between 1986 and 1988. She was the second Black woman to become leader of a British local authority, after Merle Amory in the northwest London Borough of Brent. Bellos resigned as leader on 21 April 1988, after disputes within the Labour Party over the setting of the council budget. She was a prominent figure in left-wing politics in London in the 1980s and was labelled by "The Sun" as a member of the "Loony Left". Bellos attempted to become a parliamentary candidate, without success, most notably for Vauxhall, south London, in the Lambeth borough, where there was a by-election in 1989, following the resignation of Stuart Holland MP. Fellow Black Sections vice-chair Martha Osamor was chosen by the local party to be the prospective parliamentary candidate but she was rejected as too left-wing by Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who got Kate Hoey imposed by the national party. Bellos was the treasurer of the Africa Reparations Movement (UK). She was co-chair of the Southwark LGBT Network until February 2007 and an adviser to Southwark Council. From 2000 to 2003, she was co-chair of the LGBT Advisory Group to the Metropolitan Police. She remains a community activist. Equality. As a lesbian feminist, Bellos argued strongly in the early 1980s that an inclusive approach to women's issues must take account of social class, minority and majority ethnic identity, disability, sexual identity and religion. This approach was unpopular at the time but has since become accepted as equality law and social attitudes have changed. No longer regarded as "loony left", Bellos now teaches employers and their staff to apply the Equality Act 2010, the Human Rights Act 1998 and other equality law. She notably originated Black History Month in the UK whilst chair of the London Strategic Policy Unit. Bellos has worked on mainstreaming equality within many public bodies, including the British Army and the Metropolitan Police Service. She was an Independent Advisor to the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Association of Chief Police Officers. She is a founder member and former Chair of The Institute of Equality and Diversity Practitioners. Consulting. Bellos provides equality, diversity and human rights consultancy and training services to the UK's commercial, public and not-for-profit sectors. Her company is called Linda Bellos Associates. Radio, TV, and writing. Bellos is a regular guest on radio and television programmes, contributing to discussions on many topics including equality, human rights and feminism. As an author, she has contributed to a number of anthologies, including "IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain". Personal life. In 1970 she married Jonathan Bellos, they had two children, in 1974 and 1976. She came out as a lesbian in 1980, and her marriage ended in divorce in 1983. Linda left her children to live in an all-female commune. On 21 December 2005, Bellos and her partner, Caroline Jones, entered into a civil partnership in the UK. She currently resides in Norwich, England. Awards. On 9 December 2002, she was presented (together with Stephen Bourne) with the Metropolitan Police Volunteer Awards "in recognition of outstanding contribution in supporting the local community." In 2006, she was awarded an OBE in the Queen's New Year's Honours for services to diversity. She was reticent about receiving the award because she considers its association with a defunct Empire as outdated and the Honour should be renamed. She was encouraged to accept it by her family.

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Advolly Richmond Advolly Richmond is a garden writer, historian and a television presenter, who regularly appears on BBC "Gardener's World". Career. Richmond formerly worked in the automobile industry, before choosing to retrain in horticulture. She is a graduate of the Work and Retrain As a Gardener Scheme (WRAG) which was developed by the Women's Farm and Garden Association. After completing her traineeship, she studied for and was awarded an MA in Garden History from the University of Bristol. She also studied for the Royal Horticultural Society Certificate in Horticulture, prior to her WRAG role. Richmond is a presenter on BBC "Gardener's World", where she presents regular sections on garden history. She has worked on the life of Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman and his influence on horticulture in the nineteenth century. She has also worked on the gardens of Capability Brown, Harare Botanic Garden and nineteenth century African botanical stations. She has spoken out about her experiences of racism in horticulture. Eponym. Richmond has a variety of snowdrop named after her.

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Layla Saad Layla Saad is a British social-media figure and author. After starting an Instagram trend #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, she developed her work into the digital "Me and White Supremacy Workbook". It was published in 2020 as the book "Me and White Supremacy", which entered "The New York Times" Best Seller list. Early life. Saad's mother was from Zanzibar, Tanzania, while her father was from Mombasa, Kenya. They both moved to Wales, where they met and where Saad was born and raised. She also lived in Tanzania and Swindon, United Kingdom, while growing up. As a child, she was a fan of detective fiction. The family moved to Qatar when Saad was aged 15. Returning to the United Kingdom for university, Saad received a Bachelor of Law degree from Lancaster University. Career. In 2017, Saad wrote a blog post "I Need to Talk to Spiritual White Women About White Supremacy". Well received by some, it also received a backlash from some white people. In 2018, Saad started an Instagram challenge under the hashtag #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, which encouraged people to consider their relation to white supremacy for 28 days. It was popular among teachers. Following this, she wrote the digital "Me and White Supremacy Workbook", which was downloaded by 100,000 people over the course of six months, with public figures including Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Gilbert, Robin DiAngelo and Glennon Doyle endorsing the book. In 2020, this work was developed into her first book, "Me and White Supremacy". The book reached number 10 on "The New York Times" Best Seller list on 16 February, 2020, in the category Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction. As of 2019, a young readers' edition to the book is planned. The book received renewed attention following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, with a surge in sales of books about race. The book reached number five on the "New York Times" Hardcover Nonfiction list on 12 July 2020. It was third on the Sunday Times Bestsellers list on 26 June 2020. On the audiobook sales website Audible, the book was sixth in non-fiction sales for the week ending 5 June 2020. Saad hosts the "Good Ancestor Podcast", interviewing people about "ancestors" in their family or in wider society who have influenced them. Personal life. Saad lives in Doha, Qatar. She is married and has two children, Maya and Mohamed. Saad is a Muslim.

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Yvonne Brewster Yvonne Jones Brewster (née Clarke; born 7 October 1938) is a Jamaican actress, theatre director and businesswoman, known for her role as Ruth Harding in the BBC soap opera "Doctors". She co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica. Biography. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Yvonne Brewster went to the UK to study drama in the mid-1950s at the Rose Bruford College – where she was the UK's first Black woman drama student – and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she received a distinction in Drama and Mime. She returned to Jamaica to teach Drama and in 1965 she also jointly founded (with Trevor Rhone) The Barn in Kingston, Jamaica's first professional theatre company. Upon her return to England she worked extensively in radio, television, and directing for stage productions. Between 1982 and 1984, she was Drama Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1985 she co-founded Talawa Theatre Company with Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe and Inigo Espejel, using funding from the Greater London Council (then led by Ken Livingstone). Brewster was Talawa's artistic director until 2003, directing a production of C. L. R. James's play "The Black Jacobins" in 1986 at the Riverside Studios as the first play to be staged by the black-led company, with Norman Beaton in the principal role of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Another landmark came in 1991 when she directed the first all-black production of William Shakespeare`s "Antony and Cleopatra", starring Doña Croll and Jeffery Kissoon. Brewster is a patron of the Clive Barker Centre for Theatrical Innovation. Awards. In 1993, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts in the Queen’s New Years Honours list; and in 2001 she was granted an honorary doctorate from the Open University. She received a living legend award from the National Black Theatre Festival in 2001. In 2005, the University of London's Central School of Speech and Drama conferred an honorary fellowship on Brewster in acknowledgment of her involvement in the development of British theatre. In 2013 she was named one of BBC's "100 Women". Publications. In 2004, Brewster published her memoirs, entitled "The Undertaker’s Daughter: The Colourful Life of a Theatre Director" (Arcadia Books). She has also edited five collections of plays, including Barry Reckord's "For the Reckord" (Oberon Books, 2010) and "Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays", published by Oberon Books in 2012. In 2018 she published "Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica's Barn Theatre 1966–2005".

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John Agard John Agard (born 21 June 1949 in British Guiana) is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Biography. Agard grew up in Georgetown, British Guiana. He loved to listen to cricket commentary on the radio and began making up his own, which led to a love of language. He went on to study English, French and Latin at A Level, writing his first poetry when he was in sixth-form, and left school in 1967. He taught the languages he had studied and worked in a local library. He was also a sub-editor and feature writer for the "Guyana Sunday Chronicle", publishing two books while he was still in Guyana. His father (Ted) settled in London and Agard moved to Britain with his partner Grace Nichols in 1977, settling in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He worked for the Commonwealth Institute and the BBC in London. His awards included the 1997 Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry, the Cholmondeley Award in 2004 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012. Agard was poet in residence at the National Maritime Museum in 2008. His poems "Half Caste" and "Checking Out Me History" have been featured in the AQA English GCSE anthology since 2002, meaning that many students (aged 14–16) have studied his work for their GCSE English qualifications. Archival literary records consisting of "letters and proofs relating to the published poetry works of John Agard" are held at Newcastle University Special Collections, in the Bloodaxe Books Archive. He lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with his partner, the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols.

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David Dabydeen David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organisation) from 1997 to 2010 and the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity. Early life and education. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His Indo-Guyanese family trace their heritage back to East Indian indentured workers who had been brought to Guyana between 1838 and 1917. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, a teacher then attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours and with the English Prize for Creative Writing (the first time the Sir Arthur Quiller Couch Prize was awarded, in 1978). He then gained a PhD in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a Resident Fellowship at the Centre for British Art, Yale University, followed by a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Career. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton, the political territory of Enoch Powell.He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. In 1993 he elected by the member states of UNESCO to its Executive Board and in 1997 to 2010, Ambassador at UNESCO. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana's Ambassador to China, holding the post until the change of government in Guyana at the 11 May 2015 elections. One of his major achievements, in the field of education, was to persuade the Government of China to establish and fund a Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana. He was Professorial Fellow in the Office of the Vice Chancellor and President of the University of Warwick (2016-2019) having served at Warwick from 1984 to 2010 as Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies and Professor of Postcolonial Literature, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Black British History and Culture; The Literature of Slavery; Caribbean Literature; Immigrant writers in Britain. He was instrumental in raising funds to rename the Centre, the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, and to ensure its permanence at Warwick. In 2020, he established , in London, the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, and currently serves as its Director. Its Honorary Patrons include Professor Uma Mesthrie (Mahatma Gandhi's great granddaughter), Dr Patricia Rodney, Lord Parekh and Professor David Olusoga. Writing. Dabydeen is the author of seven novels, three collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as author. His first book, "Slave Song" (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, "Turner: New and Selected Poems", was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, "Turner", is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon coming on" (1840). Dabydeen's first novel, "The Intended" (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, was shortlisted for the UK John Llewellyn Rhys Prize won the Guyana Prize for Literature. "Disappearance" (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. "The Counting House" (1996) is set at the end of the 19th century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. The novel was shortlisted for the 1998 Dublin Literary Prize. His 1999 novel, "A Harlot's Progress", is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of the black boy in the series of paintings. The novel was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Britain's oldest literary prize. His novel "Our Lady of Demerara" was published in 2004 and also won the Guyana Prize for Literature. he then published two other novels, "Molly" "and" "the" "Muslim" "Stick" (2009) and "Johnson's" "Dictionary" (2013) In 2000 Dabydeen was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was the third West Indian writer (V. S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to be awarded the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented "The Forgotten Colony", a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary "Painting the People" was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. "The Oxford Companion to Black British History", co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.

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Mary Prince Mary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was a British abolitionist and autobiographer, born in Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. Subsequent to her escape, when she was living in London, England, she and Thomas Pringle wrote her slave narrative "The History of Mary Prince" (1831), which was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It was reprinted twice in its first year. Prince was illiterate and had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Pringle, secretary of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (aka Anti-Slavery Society, 1823–1838). She had gone to London with her master and his family in 1828 from Antigua. Early life and education. Mary Prince was born into enslavement at Devonshire Parish (originally named "Cavendish", after William Cavendish, First Earl of Devonshire (1552–1626), the name was subsequently changed to Devonshire, but it was also sometimes referred to as "Brackish Pond"). The area of Devonshire in which she grew up (and the various houses in which she had lived) was to be mostly acquired by the War Office later in the 19th Century to enable the growth of Prospect Camp. Her father (whose only given name was Prince) was a sawyer owned by David Trimmingham, and her mother a house-servant held by Charles Myners. She had three younger brothers and two sisters, Hannah and Dinah. When Myners died in 1788, Mary Prince, her mother and siblings were sold as household servants to Captain Darrell. He gave Mary and her mother to his daughter, with Mary becoming the companion servant of his young granddaughter, Betsey Williams. At the age of 12, Mary was sold for £38 sterling (2021: ~£3,300; ~US$4,500) to Captain John Ingham, of Spanish Point. Her two sisters were also sold that same day, all to different enslavers. Mary's new enslaver and his wife were cruel and often lost their tempers, Mary and others were often severely flogged for minor offences. Ingham sold Mary in 1806 to an enslaver on Grand Turk in The Turks and Caicos Islands, who owned salt ponds. The Bermudians had used these seasonally for a century for the extraction of salt from the ocean. The production of salt for export was a pillar of the Bermudian economy, but the production was labour-intensive. Originally, raking had been performed by whites due to the fear of black enslaved people being seized by Spanish and French raiders (the enslaved were considered property, and could be seized as such during hostilities). Blacks crewed the Bermuda sloops that delivered the rakers to and from the Turks Islands and delivered salt to markets in North America, engaging in maritime activities while the whites raked. When the threats posed by the Spanish and French in the region decreased, however, the enslaved were put to work in the salt pans. As a child Mary worked in poor conditions in the salt ponds up to her knees in water. Due to the nature of salt mining, Mary and others were often forced to work up to 17 hours straight as owners of the ponds were concerned that if the workers were gone for too long rain would come and soil the salt. Generally, men were the salt rakers, forced to work in the salt ponds, where they were exposed to the sun and heat, as well as the salt in the pans, which ate away at their uncovered legs. Women did packaging of salt. Mary Prince was returned to Bermuda in 1810, where her master at the time had moved with his daughter. While here, she was physically abused by her master, and forced to bathe him under threat of further beatings. Mary resisted her master's abuse on two occasions: once, in defence of his daughter, whom he also beat; the second time, defending herself from her master when he beat her for dropping kitchen utensils. After this, she left his direct service and was hired out to Cedar Hill for a time, where she earned money for her master by washing clothes. In 1815, Mary was sold a fourth time, to John Adams Wood of Antigua for $300 (2021: ~$8,900). She worked in his household as a domestic slave, attending the bedchambers, nursing a young child, and washing clothes. There she began to suffer from rheumatism, which left her unable to work. When Adams Wood was travelling, Mary earned money for herself by taking in washing and by selling coffee, yams and other provisions to ships. In Antigua, she joined the Moravian Church, where she also attended classes and learned to read. She was baptised in the English church in 1817 and accepted for communion, but she was afraid to ask Adams Wood for permission to attend. In December 1826, Prince married Daniel James, a formerly enslaved man who had bought his freedom by saving money from his work. He worked as a carpenter and cooper. According to Mary, her floggings increased after her marriage because Adams Wood and his wife did not want a free black man living on their property. Travel to England. In 1828 Adams Wood and his family travelled to London, visiting and arranging their son's education, and to bring their daughters home to the islands. At her request, they took Mary Prince with them as a servant. After the case of Somerset v Stewart in 1772, it was ruled that it was illegal to transport slaves out of England. That, however, did not make slavery illegal in England, even though public opinion believed it did. Even if she could leave the Adam Wood's household, however, she had no means to support herself alone in England. Additionally, unless Wood formally emancipated her, she could not return to her husband in Antigua without being re-enslaved there. Although she had served the Woods for more than ten years, they had increasing conflict in England. Four times Wood told her to obey or leave. They gave her a letter that nominally gave her the right to leave but suggested that no one should hire her. After leaving the household, Prince took shelter with the Moravian church in Hatton Garden. Within a few weeks, she started working occasionally for Thomas Pringle, an abolitionist writer, and Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society, which offered assistance to black people in need. Prince found work with the Forsyth household, but the couple moved away from England in 1829. The Woods also left England in 1829 and returned with their daughter to Antigua. Pringle tried to arrange to have Wood manumit Prince, so she would have legal freedom. In 1829 Adams Wood refused either to manumit Mary Prince or allow her to be purchased out of his control. His refusal to sell or free her meant that as long as slavery remained legal in Antigua, Prince could not return to her husband and friends without being re-enslaved and submitting to Wood's power. After trying to arrange a compromise, the Anti-Slavery Committee proposed to petition Parliament to grant Prince's manumission, but did not succeed. At the same time, a bill was introduced to free all slaves from the West Indies in England whose owners had freely brought them there; it did not pass but was an indication of growing anti-slavery sentiment. In December 1829, Pringle hired Prince to work in his own household. Encouraged by Pringle, Prince arranged for her life narrative to be transcribed by Susanna Strickland. Pringle served as editor, and her book was published in 1831 as "The History of Mary Prince." The book caused a commotion as it was the first account published in Great Britain of a black woman's life; at a time when anti-slavery agitation was growing, her first person account touched many people. In the first year, it sold out three printings. Two libel cases arose out of it, and Prince was called to testify at each. Prince's life after her book was published is not much known. It is not clear whether she ever returned to Antigua and her husband as she had wished. She is known to have remained in England until at least 1833, when she testified in the two libel cases. That year, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, to be effective August 1834. In 1808, Parliament had passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which outlawed the slave trade but not slavery itself. The 1833 law was intended to achieve a two-staged abolition of West Indian slavery by 1840, allowing the colonies time to transition their economies. Because of popular protests in the West Indies among the freedmen, the colonies legally completed abolition two years early in 1838. In Bermuda, which was not dependent on the institution of slavery, emancipation took place immediately on the law going into effect in 1834. If Prince was still alive and in good health, she may then have returned as a free woman to her homeland. The History of Mary Prince. When Prince's book was published, slavery was still legal in England, and had not been abolished by the 1772 Somerset v Stewart ruling, as previously believed by some historians. Parliament had also not yet abolished it in the colonies. There was considerable uncertainty about the political and economic repercussions that might arise if Britain imposed an end to slavery throughout the empire, as the sugar colonies depended on it for labour to raise their lucrative commodity crop. As a personal account, the book contributed to the debate in a manner different from reasoned analysis or statistical arguments. Its tone was direct and authentic, and its simple but vivid prose contrasted with the more laboured literary style of the day. An example is Prince's description of being sold away from her mother at a young age: It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it that night. I saw too much of it afterwards. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners. Prince wrote of slavery with the authority of personal experience, something her political opponents could never match. She wrote: I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra "(white)" man say so, till I heard tell of it in England. Her book had an immediate effect on public opinion and was published in three impressions the first year. It generated controversy, and James MacQueen, the editor of "The Glasgow Courier", challenged its accuracy by a lengthy letter in "Blackwood's Magazine". MacQueen was a defender of white West Indian interests and vigorous critic of the anti-slavery movement. He depicted Prince as a woman of low morals who had been the "despicable tool" of the anti-slavery clique, who had incited her to malign her "generous and indulgent owners." He attacked the character of the Pringle family, suggesting they were at fault for accepting the slave in their household. In 1833 Pringle sued MacQueen for libel, receiving damages of £5. Not long afterwards, John Wood, Prince's master, sued Pringle for libel, holding him responsible as the editor of Prince's "The History", and claiming the book generally misrepresented his character. Wood won his case and was awarded £25 in damages. Prince was called to testify in both these trials, but little is known of her life after this.

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Ukawsaw Gronniosaw Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (c. 1705 – 28 September 1775), also known as James Albert, was an enslaved man and is considered the first published African in Britain. Gronniosaw is known for his 1772 narrative autobiography "A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself" and which is the first slave narrative published in England. His groundbreaking autobiography recounted his early life in present-day Nigeria, and subsequent times under and after enslavement. Life. Gronniosaw was born in Bornu (now north-eastern Nigeria) in 1705. He said that he was doted on as the grandson of the king of Zaara. At the age of 15, he was taken by a Gold Coast ivory merchant and sold to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. He was bought by an American in Barbados, who took him to New York and resold him to a Calvinist minister, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, based in New Jersey. There Gronniosaw was taught to read and was brought up as a Christian. Gronniosaw said in his autobiography that he wanted to return to his family in Africa, but Frelinghuysen denied this request and told him to focus on the Christian faith. During his time with Frelinghuysen, Gronniosaw attempted suicide, distressed by his perceived failings as a Christian. When the minister died, he freed Gronniosaw in his will. The young man worked for the minister's widow, and subsequently their orphans, but all died within four years. Planning to go to England, where he expected to meet other pious people like the Frelinghysens, Gronniosaw travelled to the Caribbean, where he enlisted as a cook with a privateer, and later as a soldier in the British army to earn money for the journey. He served in Martinique and Cuba, before obtaining his discharge and sailing to England. At first he settled in Portsmouth, but, when his landlady swindled him out of most of his savings, was forced to seek his fortune in London. There he married a young English widow, Betty, a weaver. She already had a child and bore him at least two more. She lost her job because of the financial depression and industrial unrest, and moved to Colchester. There they were saved from starvation by Osgood Hanbury (a Quaker lawyer and grandfather of the abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton), who employed Gronniosaw in building work. Moving to Norwich, Gronniosaw and his family again fell on hard times, as the building trades were largely seasonal. Once again, they were saved by the kindness of a Quaker, Henry Gurney (coincidentally, the grandfather of Fowell Buxton's wife, Hannah Gurney) who paid their rent arrears. A daughter died and was refused burial by the local clergy on the grounds that she was not baptised. One minister at last offered to allow her to be buried in the churchyard, but he would not read the burial service. After pawning all their possessions, the family moved to Kidderminster, where Betty supported them by working again as a weaver. On Christmas Day 1771, Gronniosaw had their remaining children, Mary Albert (aged six), Edward Albert (aged four), and newborn Samuel Albert, baptised in the Old Independent Meeting House in Kidderminster by Benjamin Fawcett, a Calvinist minister and associate of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon and a major figure in Calvinist Methodism. At around the same time, Gronniosaw received a letter and a charitable donation from Hastings herself. On 3 January 1772, he responded by thanking her for her 'favour', which arrived 'at a time of great necessity', and explained that he had just returned from 'Mrs Marlowe's' in nearby Leominster, 'were I was shewed kindness to from my Christian friends'. On 25 June 1774, Gronniosaw's fifth child, James Albert Jr, was baptised, again by Fawcett. Shortly after his arrival in Kidderminster, Gronniosaw began work on his life story, with the help of an amanuensis from Leominster, possibly the 'Mrs Marlowe' he had mentioned in his letter to Hastings. Gronniosaw's "Narrative" has been studied by scholars as a groundbreaking work by an African in English. It is the first known slave narrative published in England and received wide attention, with multiple printings and editions at the time. Gronniosaw's "Narrative" concludes with its author still living in Kidderminster, having "appear[ed] to be turn'd sixty"; for a long time, nothing was known of his later life. However, at some point during the late twentieth century, an obituary for Gronniosaw was discovered in the "Chester Chronicle". The article, from 2 October 1775, reads:On Thursday [28 September] died, in this city, aged 70, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, of Zaara. He left his country in the early part of his life, with a view to acquire proper notions of the Divine Being, and of the worship due to Him. He met with many trials and embarrassments, was much afflicted and persecuted. His last moments exhibited that chearful ["sic"] serenity which, at such a time, is the certain effect of a thorough conviction of the great truths of Christianity. He published a narrative of his life. The burial record for 'Chester St Oswald' - a church which met in the south transept of Chester Cathedral from 1448 to 1881 - includes an entry from 28 September for 'James Albert (a Blackm[an])'. However, the record does not include mention of where Gronniosaw was ultimately laid to rest. The autobiography. Gronniosaw's autobiography was produced in Kidderminster in 1772. It is entitled "A Narrative of the Most remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, As related by himself." The title page explains that it was "committed to paper by the elegant pen of a young LADY of the town of LEOMINSTER." It is the first slave narrative by an African in the English language, a genre related to the literature of enslaved persons who later gained freedom. Published in Bath, Somerset, in December 1772, it gives a vivid account of Gronniosaw's life, from his leaving home to his enslavement in Africa by a native king, through a period of being enslaved, to his struggles with poverty as a free man in Colchester and Kidderminster. He was attracted to this last town because it was at one time the home of Richard Baxter, a 17th-century Calvinist minister whom Gronniosaw had learned to admire. The preface was written by the Reverend Walter Shirley, cousin to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who was the chief patron of the Calvinist wing of Methodism. He interprets Gronniosaw's experience of enslavement and his being transported from Bornu to New York as an example of Calvinist predestination and election. Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has noted that Gronniosaw's narrative was different from later slave narratives, which generally criticised slavery as an institution. In his account, Gronniosaw referred to his "white-skinned sister," said that he had been willing to leave Africa because his family believed in many deities instead of one almighty God (which he learned more about under Christianity), and suggested that he became happier as he assimilated to white English society, through clothing but mostly via language. In addition, he described another black servant at his master's house as a "devil." Gates, Jr. has concluded that the narrative does not have an anti-slavery view, as was ubiquitous in subsequent slave narratives. Until the recent discovery of an obituary published in 1775, and a manuscript letter written by Gronniosaw to Hastings, the "Narrative" was the only significant source of information for his life. Adaptations. The short, 6-minute animation entitled "The Most Remarkable Particulars" draws from Gronniosaw's narrative and features him and his wife Betty as characters. It was written and directed by Jason Young. He published the short story "Annals of an Afro-Briton." Actors Grahame Edwards and Sarah Hannah voice the two leads.

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Catherine Ugwu Catherine Oliaku Ugwu (born 1964) is a British executive producer, artistic director, and consultant working in large-scale ceremonies and events, including for the Summer and Winter Olympics, the Summer Paralympics, the Asian, European, Islamic Solidarity, and Commonwealth Games, and the Millennium Dome. Ugwu began her career as a live arts curator, writer and editor, working in the main at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) with Lois Keidan. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Career. Live arts. Ugwu first became involved in the area of performance and related practice in 1986, working freelance with a range of arts organisations and companies, including the Albany Empire Theatre, the Cheek by Jowl theatre company, the Black Theatre Co-operative, Chisenhale Dance Space, the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), and the Islington International Festival. She joined the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1991, working with Lois Keidan as Deputy Director of Live Arts, and holding programming, curatorial, and commissioning responsibilities. The platform they created at the ICA is considered to have contributed to the growth of live art (as an artistic practice distinct from theatre or visual arts) in London and the UK during the 1990s. In a 1994 article contributed by Bernardine Evaristo to the black arts listings magazine "Artrage", Ugwu described live art as "a way of examining cultural and ethnic identity and its effectiveness as a means of constructing and deconstructing identities and representations of ourselves". While at the ICA, Ugwu compiled and edited a book of artworks and essays titled "Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance" that included contributions by bell hooks and Paul Gilroy, and an essay of her own. It was “the first book to offer detailed analysis of black live art in Britain” and, as a “response to the absence of black live art history”, the publication has been described as a “landmark collection”, and "path-breaking". It received an Honourable Mention from the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award Committee of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) in 1998. As a writer, Ugwu also contributed to the Iniva/ICA exhibition catalogue "Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire" on the work of Frantz Fanon, and the "Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture". In 1997, Ugwu and Keidan left the ICA to form Keidan/Ugwu, “a company dedicated to locating time-based performance within a critical framework, but outside the institutional context”. In 1999, Ugwu co-founded the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) with Keidan, serving as co-director until 2000. LADA has been described as “the most significant catalyst for the development of the Live Art sector in London and the UK more widely”. Ugwu and Keidan also worked as curators and consultants at international festivals around the world, including the 1999 Festival De Beweeging in Antwerp. Artists that Ugwu and Keidan collaborated with, both at the ICA and independently, include Forced Entertainment, La Ribot, Marina Abramović, ORLAN, Stelarc, Ron Athey, Ron Vawter, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Ugwu was also a combined arts, dance and drama advisor for Arts Council England and the London Arts Board, chaired the boards of the intercultural arts organisation Motiroti (1996-1998), The Showroom gallery (1996-2000), and the Talawa Theatre Company (1998-2000), and contributed to UK and international conferences on issues of cultural diversity and live arts practice. Ceremonies and events. Ugwu produced the Millennium Dome Opening Ceremony, held on 31 December 1999. In 2000, she left her position as co-director of the Live Art Development Agency to work as an independent producer on large-scale international events, and was a producer of the Manchester Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony in 2002. A Senior Producer for the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Doha Asian Games, and for the strategic phase of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Opening, Victory, and Closing Ceremonies, Ugwu went on to work as Executive Producer of the Glasgow Handover Ceremony at the Closing Ceremony of the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games. In 2010, Ugwu was appointed Executive Producer – Production of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Ceremonies, alongside Stephen Daldry (Executive Producer – Creative) and Danny Boyle (Artistic Director of the Olympic Opening Ceremony). The Olympic Opening Ceremony was widely praised by the media: "The Times" described it as “a masterpiece”, while "The Daily Telegraph" called it “brilliant, breathtaking, bonkers and utterly British”. Ugwu was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for her work on London 2012. Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the writer of the Opening Ceremony, revealed that the London 2012 cauldron designed by Thomas Heatherwick was codenamed “Betty” after Ugwu's dog, in order to maintain secrecy. A portrait of Ugwu with her dog Betty, taken by the photographer Jillian Edelstein, was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London for its “Road to 2012: Aiming High” exhibition and primary collection. In 2013, Ugwu founded her own production company, Betty Productions. Ugwu executive produced the Save the Children “IF” Campaign in 2013, with the involvement of Danny Boyle, Bill Gates, Tamsin Greig, and Myleene Klass, and a live film event for Goldfrapp in 2014 – a 30-minute anthology film inspired by their album "Tales of Us", and live performance at Air Studios in London, both transmitted into cinemas across the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Ugwu was Director of Ceremonies for the Baku 2015 European Games, for which she was awarded the “Dostlug” Order of Friendship by the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Opening Ceremony was an Olympic-scale stadium show that reportedly cost twice as much as that of the London 2012 Olympics. Directed by Dimitris Papaioannou, who also created the Opening Ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, the Baku 2015 Opening Ceremony included a performance by Lady Gaga that was coordinated by Ugwu. Ugwu served once more as Director of Ceremonies for the Baku 2017 Islamic Solidarity Games, and was also Executive Producer of the Baku 2017 Ceremonies. Ugwu was the Lead Consultant for the Baku World Expo 2025 Bid, vying against three other candidate cities: Osaka, Paris, and Yekaterinberg. Ugwu also served as a Dubai World Expo 2020 Ceremonies Consultant. In 2019, Ugwu was both Artistic Director and Executive Producer of the Official 48th UAE National Day Celebration in Abu Dhabi, a large-scale show held at the Zayed Sports City Stadium. In 2020, Ugwu was appointed to the Education, Culture and Wellness Commission of the Global Esports Federation (GEF).

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Constance Briscoe Constance Briscoe (born 18 May 1957) in England is a former barrister, and was one of the first black female recorders in England and Wales. In May 2014, she was jailed for three counts of doing an act tending to pervert the course of justice in "R v Huhne and Pryce". She was disbarred and removed from the judiciary. Legal career. Briscoe studied Law at Newcastle University graduating with a 2:2, financing her studies with several casual jobs, including working in a hospice. She took an MA at the University of Warwick. She was called to the bar in 1983. After pupillage with Michael Mansfield, she joined the chambers of Barbara Calvert. In 1996 she became an assistant recorder, a part-time judge. Briscoe practised in criminal law and fraud, principally defending. She also undertook tribunal work, public inquiries, inquests and acted as president of Mental Health Tribunals. A room was named after her in the Newcastle University Students' Union building, which was later renamed after her conviction. In 2007 she unsuccessfully applied to become a QC. In October 2012 Briscoe was suspended from the judiciary after arrest and questioning by police. On 6 August 2014, Briscoe was removed as a member of the judiciary. Her honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Wolverhampton awarded to her in 2011 was removed by the university's nominations committee in August 2014. On 15 April 2016, Briscoe was disbarred as a barrister for three professional misconduct charges, which were: "engaging in conduct which was dishonest and discreditable to a barrister; engaging in conduct which was prejudicial to the administration of justice; and engaging in conduct which was likely to diminish public confidence in the legal profession, the administration of justice, or bring the profession into disrepute." Personal life. Briscoe's parents emigrated to the United Kingdom from Jamaica in the 1950s. Constance's mother Carmen had seven children, including Constance, by her husband George Briscoe. She then had another four children by Garfield Eastman. Constance attended Sacred Heart Catholic School, Camberwell. Briscoe is known for her books "Ugly" (2006) and "Beyond Ugly" (2008), in which she claims she was verbally and physically abused by her mother and stepfather as a child. She underwent facial and other cosmetic surgery at university. She often spoke publicly about her experiences. Her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, denies these claims and sued her daughter and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel. The case was concluded in Briscoe's favour, when a jury in the High Court unanimously accepted her contention that her allegations were substantially true. Briscoe's mother stated she wished to have this civil decision reversed in the light of Briscoe's later criminal conviction for perverting the course of justice. Police have confirmed she also faces criminal investigation in relation to the evidence supporting the civil judgment in her favour. Briscoe has two children from a relationship with lawyer Adam Wilson. A later long relationship with barrister Anthony Arlidge QC ended in 2010. Conviction. On 6 October 2012, Briscoe was arrested in Clapham and subsequently bailed pending further enquiries, as a result of a police investigation. No announcement was made at that time as to the nature of any allegations against her. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor suspended Briscoe from the judiciary pending the outcome of the police investigation. In February 2013, at the trial of Vicky Pryce, police stated that Briscoe's arrest related to the release of information to the press on behalf of Pryce contrary to statements Briscoe had made, and the police could not rely upon Briscoe as a "witness of truth". Pryce was a friend and neighbour of Briscoe. Briscoe was not charged but remained on police bail. On 12 June 2013 it was announced she would be charged with two counts of intending to pervert the course of justice and would attend court on 24 June 2013. The first count alleged that she provided police with two inaccurate statements, and the second alleged that she produced a copy of her witness statement that had been altered. On 1 May 2014 she was found guilty at the Old Bailey of three charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice, by lying to police, falsifying a witness statement, and providing a false document to an expert witness. On 2 May 2014 she was jailed for 16 months, she began her sentence at HM Prison Holloway. Briscoe received an early release from jail in November 2014, before she had served half her sentence.

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Simi Bedford Simi Bedford is a Nigerian novelist based in Britain. Her 1991 debut book "Yoruba Girl Dancing" (1991), an autobiographical novel about a young Nigerian girl who is sent to England to receive a private school education, was well reviewed on publication and was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 abridgement. Her second novel, "Not With Silver", was published in 2007. Biography. Bedford was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to parents who had come there from Sierra Leone. Her great-grandparents were from Nigeria and were rescued from a slave ship. Bedford spent her early years in Lagos, before being sent for her education to Britain, where she attended boarding-school from the age of six. She read Law at Durham University, and subsequently worked in the media, including as a radio presenter and a television researcher. Living in London, she married and raised three children. She is now divorced from her artist husband, Martin Bedford, but they still maintain a friendly relationship, even sharing space together in a house in Devon. Writing. Bedford's debut novel "Yoruba Girl Dancing" is semi-autobiographical, recounting the experience of a Nigerian girl's education in Britain, which Francine Prose described in a "Washington Post" review as: "[b]eautifully written ... at once acerbic and moving, painfully honest about the cost of emigration and adjustment." A five-part abridgement of "Yoruba Girl Dancing" (by Margaret Busby, read by Adjoa Andoh and produced by David Hunter) was broadcast on BBC Radio 4's "Book at Bedtime" in October 1991. The novel is extracted in the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa". Bedford's second novel, "Not With Silver" (2007), is historical fiction, focusing on mid-18th-century West Africa, slavery and court intrigue. Drawing on its author's own ancestral history, "Not With Silver" is unique among books about slavery in depicting the lives of people in Africa before they were enslaved. "The Spectator"′s reviewer concluded: "This relentlessly honest book has no false or sentimental notes, absolutely no prettifying. A black warrior facing unexpected danger is taught to imagine the worst, ‘look the leopard in the eye.’ Simi Bedford does just that. A brave and uncomfortable labour of love."

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Chioma Okereke Chioma Okereke is a Nigerian-born poet, author and short story writer. Her debut novel, "Bitter Leaf" (2010), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize - Africa Best First Book 2011. Biography. Okereke was born in Benin City, Nigeria. She moved to Britain at the age of six and attended several boarding-schools, before completing her sixth-form education at North London Collegiate School in Canons, Middlesex. Okereke graduated with an LLB degree from University College London. A poet and short story writer who performed internationally, Okereke had her early work published in "Bum Rush The Page" and "Callaloo" literary magazine. She was shortlisted for the Undiscovered Authors Competition in 2006, as well as for the "Daily Telegraph"'s Write a Novel in a Year Competition 2007. Her debut novel "Bitter Leaf" was published in 2010 by Virago Press and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize - Africa Best First Book 2011. Her short story "Trompette de la Mort" was First Runner up for the inaugural Costa Short Story Award in the 2012 Costa Book Awards and her work was included in the "Virago is 40" anthology (2013).

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Ade Solanke Adeola Solanke, commonly known as Ade Solanke, is a British-Nigerian playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for her debut stage play, "Pandora's Box", which was produced at the Arcola Theatre in 2012, and was nominated as Best New Play in the Off West End Theatre Awards. Her other writing credits include the award-winning BBC Radio drama series "Westway" and the Nigerian feature film "Dazzling Mirage" (2014). She is the founder and creative director of the company Spora Stories, whose aim is to "create original drama for stage and screen, telling the dynamic stories of the African diaspora." Solanke has previously worked as an arts journalist and in radio and television, and in 1988 set up Tama Communications, offering a writing and publicity service, whose clients included the BBC, the Arts Council and the Midland Bank. Early years and education. Born to Nigerian parents in London, Ade Solanke was brought up with her three sisters in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, in the west of the capital. She earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa international scholar. She also has a postgraduate diploma in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an honours degree in English literature from the University of Sheffield. Career. She worked as a story analyst for several Hollywood companies, including Sundance, New Line and Disney. Her first screenplay, "Femi’s Thirtieth", was a semi-finalist in the annual Nicholl screenwriting contest in Los Angeles. It was also a semi-finalist in the Amblin/Chesterfield Screenwriting contest, also in LA. Her second screenplay, "Finishing School", also reached the Nicholl semi-finals. For some years she worked as an arts journalist, writing for publications including "The Times Literary Supplement", "The Voice", "The Guardian", the "New Statesman" and "West Africa Magazine". In 1988 she set up Tama Communications, a writing, research and publicity service "sympathetic to the needs of the voluntary sector and black organisations", that was judged an "outstanding enterprise" and won the "London's Top Youth Enterprise" title in the 1989 London Livewire competition to find the best young business brains. She has also taught at several universities, among them Goldsmiths, University of London, and Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria, as well as at such institutions as London's City Lit and in Zimbabwe at the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. Her work for radio includes being on the writing team of the award-winning BBC drama series "Westway". In 2009 she was commissioned by the NHS to write "Family Legacy", a Nollywood-style film drama drawing on the real-life experiences of people living with sickle-cell disease, which has been disseminated widely on television channels and elsewhere in the UK, USA and West Africa, reaching more than 12 million people in outreach campaigns. She subsequently wrote the screenplay for "Dazzling Mirage" (2014), adapted from the novel of the same name by Olayinka Abimbola Egbokhare, produced and directed by Tunde Kelani. Solanke's first stage play to be produced, "Pandora's Box", which was initially showcased in July 2008 as part of Tiata Fahodzi's Tiata Delights at the Almeida Theatre, had its world premiere and sold-out shows at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney, in 2012, subsequently touring nationally in 2014 to 16 venues around the UK; the largest-ever tour for a black play in the UK. "An exuberant and thought-provoking mix of comedy, tragedy and family drama", "Pandora's Box" deals with the dilemma of a British-Nigerian mother, on holiday in Lagos with her streetwise son, about whether to leave him in a strict Nigerian boarding-school or bring him back to the battlefields of inner-city London. It won five-star reviews and was praised as "Honest, simple, enthralling … absolutely brilliant" ("The Public Reviews") and "Firecracker theatre … touching … hilarious" ("The Stage"). Reviewing it for "The Guardian", Lyn Gardner wrote: "Pandora's Box buzzes with life and the tensions of real people struggling to make the best of their lives while dealing with the legacies left from the choices made by a previous generation." Another of several positive notices came from Sarah Lewis of the "Hackney Citizen", who described the play as "At times laugh out loud funny, at times heartbreaking...essentially a very moving and funny play. Excellent." "Pandora's Box" is published by Oberon Books. In 2015, Solanke made her directorial debut with her second play, "East End Boys, West End Girls", in a London tour that began at the Arcola Theatre before playing in venues including CLF Arts Cafe in Peckham, the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, and the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham. Reviews variously described the play as "a grim view of a vast and disparate city...occasionally quite sweet and always earnest" and "thought-provoking... It goes beyond mere entertainment and poses some knotty but ever pertinent questions. The artful Solanke handles the social commentary with sensitivity and intelligence." Solanke's latest play is "The Court Must Have a Queen" about Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleves. It features African Tudor musician John Blanke, who played in the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII and is the first black person for whom there is both an image and a record in the UK. The play was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces and produced by Hampton Court Palace. It premiered in June 2018, performed in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, where Shakespeare's acting company the King's Men performed in 1603. Solanke is also developing a project and play about Phillis Wheatley entitled "Phillis in London", which was showcased at the Greenwich Book Festival in 2018. Solanke is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa" edited by Margaret Busby. Awards and recognition. In 1989, Ade Solanke was named London's Top Youth Entrepreneur for her writing and media business, Tama Communications. In September 2012 she won the award for Best Playwright at the Nigerian Entertainment and Lifestyle Awards. She also won Best Playwright at the Afro-Hollywood Awards. During the 2012 London Olympics she was featured along with other writers, including Diran Adebayo, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Zainabu Jallo, Nnorom Azuonye, Chibundu Onuzo, and Rotimi Babatunde, at the Nigeria House Literature Showcase curated by the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Solanke is also the recipient of various academic scholarships and literary awards, including:

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Zadie Smith Zadie Adeline Smith FRSL (born Sadie Adeline Smith; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, "White Teeth" (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010. Early life. Smith was born in Willesden in the north-west London borough of Brent to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, who was 30 years his wife's senior. At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie. Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969. Smith's parents divorced when she was a teenager. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers (one is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown, and the other is the rapper Luc Skyz). As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing, and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz singer, and wanted to become a journalist. Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest. Education. Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature. In an interview with "The Guardian" in 2000, Smith corrected a newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. She graduated with upper second-class honours. Smith seems to have been rejected for a place in the Cambridge Footlights by the popular British comedy double act Mitchell and Webb, while all three were studying at Cambridge University in the 1990s. At Cambridge, Smith published a number of short stories in a collection of new student writing called "The Mays Anthology". They attracted the attention of a publisher, who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by A. P. Watt. Smith returned to guest-edit the anthology in 2001. Career. Smith's début novel "White Teeth" was introduced to the publishing world in 1997 before it was completed. On the basis of a partial manuscript, an auction for the rights was begun, which was won by Hamish Hamilton. Smith completed "White Teeth" during her final year at the University of Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel immediately became a best-seller and received much acclaim. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. The novel was adapted for television in 2002. In July 2000, Smith's debut was also the subject for discussion in a controversial essay of literary criticism by James Wood entitled "Human, All Too Inhuman", where Wood critiques the novel as part of a contemporary genre of hysterical realism where "‘[i]nformation has become the new character" and human feeling is absent from contemporary fiction. In an article for "The Guardian" in October 2001, Smith responded to the criticism by agreeing with the accuracy of the term and that she agreed with Wood's underlying argument that "any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped". However, she rejected her debut being categorised alongside major authors such as David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, and Don DeLillo and the dismissal of their own innovations on the basis of being hysterical realism. Responding earnestly to Wood's concerns about contemporary literature and culture, Smith describes her own anxieties as a writer and argued that fiction should be "not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both". Smith served as writer-in-residence at the ICA in London and subsequently published, as editor, an anthology of sex writing, "Piece of Flesh", as the culmination of this role. Smith's second novel, "The Autograph Man", was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although it was not as well received by critics as "White Teeth". After the publication of "The Autograph Man", Smith visited the United States as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She started work on a still-unreleased book of essays, "The Morality of the Novel" (a.k.a. "Fail Better"), in which she considers a selection of 20th-century writers through the lens of moral philosophy. Some portions of this book presumably appear in the essay collection "Changing My Mind", published in November 2009. Smith's third novel, "On Beauty", was published in September 2005. It is set largely in and around Greater Boston. It attracted more acclaim than "The Autograph Man": it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Later in the same year, Smith published "Martha and Hanwell", a book that pairs two short stories about two troubled characters, originally published in "Granta" and "The New Yorker" respectively. Penguin published "Martha and Hanwell" with a new introduction by the author as part of their pocket series to celebrate their 70th birthday. The first story, "Martha, Martha", deals with Smith's familiar themes of race and postcolonial identity, while "Hanwell in Hell" is about a man struggling to cope with the death of his wife. In December 2008 she guest-edited the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme. After teaching fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts, Smith joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010. Smith's novel "NW" was published in 2012. It is set in the Kilburn area of north-west London, the title being a reference to the local postcode, NW6. "NW" was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. "NW" was made into a BBC television film directed by Saul Dibb and adapted by Rachel Bennette. Starring Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox, it was broadcast on BBC Two on 14 November 2016. In 2015 it was announced that Smith, along with her husband Nick Laird, was writing the screenplay for a science fiction movie to be directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis. Smith later said that her involvement had been overstated and that she had simply helped to polish the English dialogue for the film. Smith's fifth novel, "Swing Time", was published in November 2016. It drew inspiration from Smith's childhood love of tap dancing. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Between March and October 2011, Smith was the monthly New Books reviewer for "Harper's Magazine". She is also a frequent contributor to "The New York Review of Books". In 2010, "The Guardian" newspaper asked Smith for her "10 rules for writing fiction". Among them she declared: "Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied." Smith's first collection of short stories, "Grand Union", was published on 8 October 2019. In 2020 she published six essays in a collection entitled "Intimations", the royalties from which she said she would be donating to the Equal Justice Initiative and New York’s COVID-19 emergency relief fund. Personal life. Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. Smith dedicated "On Beauty" to "my dear Laird". She also uses his name in passing in "White Teeth": "An' all the good-lookin' men, all the "rides" like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead." The couple lived in Rome, Italy, from November 2006 to 2007, and lived in New York City and Queen's Park, London for about 10 years before relocating to Kilburn, London in 2020. They have two children. Smith describes herself as "unreligious", and was not raised in a religion, although retains a "curiosity" about the role religion plays in others' lives. In an essay exploring humanist and existentialist views of death and dying, Smith characterises her worldview as that of a "sentimental humanist". Awards and recognition. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural researchers, Smith was named among the top twenty most influential people in British culture. In 2003, she was included on "Granta's" list of 20 best young authors, and was also included in the 2013 list. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on 1 September 2010. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006 and her novel "White Teeth" was included in "Time" magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

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Diriye Osman Diriye Osman (, ) (born in 1983) is a Somali-British short story writer, essayist, critic and visual artist. He is the author of the short story collection "Fairytales For Lost Children", which won the 2014 Polari First Book Prize. His writing has also been published in varied publications. Additionally, Osman's visual art is known for its surrealism. Biography. Osman was born in 1983 in Mogadishu, Somalia. When the civil war broke out in the early 1990s, he and his family relocated to Nairobi, Kenya. As a child, Osman developed an interest in fashion design. His parents encouraged his desire to become a designer. An avid reader, he was also enthralled with the works of C. S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, as well as "The Adventures of Tintin" and "Calvin and Hobbes". In 2001, Osman and his family moved again to London, England. In 2002, at the age of 18, Osman was diagnosed with psychosis and institutionalised in a mental hospital in Woolwich, South London. He was so traumatized by the experience that he did not speak for nearly six months. After he was released from the hospital, his mother encouraged him to apply for a library card and he began to read Nuruddin Farah, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Manil Suri, Alice Munro, Alison Bechdel, ZZ Packer, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz. By reading as widely as possible, Osman regained the confidence to speak. Reading extensively also made him want to learn about characters and stories that echoed his own experiences. For his post-secondary education, Osman studied English Literature, Linguistics and Fine Art at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a BA (hons) degree. He later attended Royal Holloway, University of London, where he earned an MA in Creative Writing. Writing. In 2008, after recovering from another period of poor health, Osman began to write short stories. He has commented that although he writes for a general audience, his main interest is in positively representing the universal Somali experience. Much of his literary work has also been based on his own life as a gay man, as well as other personal experiences. Osman published "Earthling", a short story about a young lesbian recently released from a psychiatric unit. Ellah Allfrey in "The Daily Telegraph" called it "a moving exploration of family, sexuality and mental breakdown set in south-east London". Shortly afterwards, Osman wrote "Pavilion", a story about a "six-foot" Somali transvestite working in a "mental clink". These and other stories were published as part of his 2013 debut collection "Fairytales for Lost Children". Osman personally designed the illustrations for the book over several weeks. With the assistance of his cousin Osob Dahir, a poet, he translated the title of each story using Arabic calligraphy. "Fairytales for Lost Children" was well received by literary critics, with Magnus Taylor of "New Internationalist" calling Osman "a startlingly original voice". Similarly, the "Lambda Literary Review" described the work as "texturally beautiful and tonally gorgeous"; Binyavanga Wainaina hailed the book as "taut, feral, sinewy, fearless", and proclaimed Osman "a new Baldwin". Jameson Fitzpatrick of "Next Magazine" noted that the "stories are suffused with the possibility of joy and pleasure"; Alison Bechdel added that through storytelling Osman creates a shelter for his displaced characters, "a warm place which is both real and imaginary, in which they find political, sexual, and ultimately psychic liberation;" Bernardine Evaristo, writing in "The Independent", hailed Osman as a courageous and original writer, remarking that his language is "crafted with all the concision and riches of poetry." Roxane Gay in "The Nation" also summarized the piece as a "raw collection of short stories"; Eden Wood of "Diva Magazine" praising Osman's "vivid and intimate" style; Will Davis, writing in "Attitude Magazine", likewise noted that "Fairytales for Lost Children" was "a rich, complex and lyrical set of tales," adding that "this collection of stories is sure to move and enthral in equal measure." Dominique Sisley of "Dazed & Confused" commended the collection for exploring subjects "often ignored by mainstream media – namely being LGBT in Africa, and being torn between your sexual impulses and your cultural heritage". Additionally, Somali writer Nuruddin Farah described Osman's prose as "fantastic", indicating that he "read some of the stories more than once and saw in each one of them plenty of talent everywhere". Osman's writing has appeared in a number of publications, including the "Poetry Review", "Time Out London", "Prospect", "Kwani?", "Under The Influence", "The Guardian", "The Huffington Post", "Vice", "Jungle Jim", "Attitude" and "SCARF Magazine", the latter of which was founded by Osman's editor Kinsi Abdulleh. Visual art. As a child, Osman was encouraged to draw. He began creating visual art at the age of eight, spending hours alone conjuring up fairy-like fantasies infused with his experience as an immigrant. Walt Disney, Fritz Lang, Gustav Klimt, H. R. Giger and the Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki were among his main influences. An overall "Vogue" magazine sensibility is also evident in the sensuous physiques and catwalk poses of his figures. According to Osman, his art was a creative outlet through which he could channel his frustrations at growing up in a society that did not tolerate homosexuality. His painted images of "goddess-like" women were thus for him "the acceptable, alluring face of what was a dangerous transgression". He also describes his visual creations as "a way of distilling mania and transforming it into something beautiful." Writing in "Another Africa", Elmi Ali notes that Osman's images, "which usually feature female heroines, adorned in intricate lines, decadent and colourful", are "reminiscent of the Art Nouveau masters of the past[...] The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt is hinted at but his work finds an uncanny kinship in Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, a brilliant Scottish artist also of the Art Nouveau period." However, Ali remarks that Osman's work, like that of William S. Burroughs, "goes a step further, and incorporates Arabic calligraphy and Hebrew". To this end, Osman's piece "The Goddess Complex – Aquatic Arabesque", which he painted during a three-week commission for an Omani-English couple with whom he was friends, features a poem entitled "Your Love" by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani. Osman's "At The Altar of Imagination", a non-commissioned drawing, likewise contains Hebrew script in addition to Arabic verses by the Sufi poet Ibn ‘Arabi. Osman usually paints using 3D textile paint, glow-in-the-dark glue, powder dye and temporary tattoo stickers, among other craft-based materials. He also utilizes Swarovski crystals for a more lavish effect. Awards. In 2014, Osman's short story collection "Fairytales for Lost Children" won the Polari First Book Prize. He is the first writer from Africa to receive the award. "The Guardian" also named the work one of the best books of the year. In 2015, "Dazed & Confused" named him one of the top ten LGBT writers to watch. In the same year his short story "If I Were A Dance" was listed by "The Guardian" as one of the best representations of LGBT sex in literature. Osman was named one of the most influential LGBTI people in Britain by "The Independent on Sunday".

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Olaudah Equiano Olaudah Equiano (/əˈlaʊda/) (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa (), was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin (today southern Nigeria). Enslaved as a child in Africa, he was taken to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but purchased his freedom in 1766. As a freedman in London, Equiano supported the British abolitionist movement. He was part of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group composed of Africans living in Britain, and he was active among leaders of the anti-slave trade movement in the 1780s. He published his autobiography, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano" (1789), which depicted the horrors of slavery. It went through nine editions in his lifetime and helped gain passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade. Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen in 1792 and they had two daughters. He died in 1797 in Westminster. Since the late 20th century, when his autobiography was published in a new edition, he has been increasingly studied by a range of scholars, including from his homeland. Early life and enslavement. According to his memoir, Equiano was born in Essaka, Eboe, in the Kingdom of Benin. The village was in the southeastern part of present-day Nigeria. In his autobiography he wrote "My father, besides many slaves, had a numerous family, of which seven lived to grow up" and that he was the youngest son. He stated that his father was one of the elders or chiefs who sat in judgement with other elders to decide what to do about disputes or crimes. He refers to men called the Oye-Eboe who brought goods like guns, gunpowder and dried fish. In return Equiano says "Sometimes indeed we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other crimes, which we esteemed heinous." He proceeded, "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares ... and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as little reluctance as the enlightened merchant". This was usually the cause of war in order to obtain the slaves to gratify 'his avarice'. Equiano recounted an incident of an attempted kidnapping of children in his Igbo village, which was foiled by adults. When he was around the age of eleven, he and his sister were left alone to look after their family premises, as was common when adults went out of the house to work. They were both kidnapped and taken far from their hometown, separated and sold to slave traders. He tried to escape but was thwarted. After his owners changed several times, Equiano happened to meet with his sister but they were separated again. Six or seven months after he had been kidnapped, he arrived at the coast where he was taken on board a European slave ship. He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the British West Indies. He and a few other slaves were sent on for sale in the Colony of Virginia. Literary scholar Vincent Carretta argued in his 2005 biography of Equiano that the activist could have been born in colonial South Carolina rather than Africa, based on a 1759 parish baptismal record that lists Equiano's place of birth as Carolina and a 1773 ship's muster that indicates South Carolina. Carretta's conclusion is disputed by other scholars who believe the weight of evidence supports Equiano's account of coming from Africa. In Virginia, Equiano was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal renamed the boy "Gustavus Vassa", after the 16th-century King of Sweden Gustav Vasa who began the Protestant Reformation in Sweden. Equiano had already been renamed twice: he was called Michael while onboard the slave ship that brought him to the Americas; and Jacob, by his first owner. This time, Equiano refused and told his new owner that he would prefer to be called Jacob. His refusal, he says, "gained me many a cuff" and eventually he submitted to the new name. He used this name for the rest of his life, including on all official records; he only used Equiano in his autobiography. Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War with France (1756–1763). Equiano gives eyewitness reports of the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), the Battle of Lagos (1759) and the Capture of Belle Île (1761). Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain so that he could attend school and learn to read and write. Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptised at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 9 February 1759, when he was described in the parish register as "a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old". His godparents were Mary Guerin and her brother, Maynard, who were cousins of his master Pascal. They had taken an interest in him and helped him to learn English. Later, when Equiano's origins were questioned after his book was published, the Guerins testified to his lack of English when he first came to London. In December 1762, Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the "Charming Sally" at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There, he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean. Release. Robert King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds () he could buy his freedom. King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his owner's behalf. Equiano sold fruits, glass tumblers and other items between Georgia and the Caribbean islands. King allowed Equiano to buy his freedom, which he achieved in 1766. The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner. However, Equiano found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into enslavement. Freedom. By about 1768, Equiano had gone to England. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the Royal Navy ship HMS "Racehorse", he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition towards the North Pole. On that voyage he worked with Dr Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Equiano for a project on the Mosquito Coast in Central America, where he was to use his African background to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar-cane plantations. Irving and Equiano had a working relationship and friendship for more than a decade, but the plantation venture failed. Equiano left the Mosquito Coast in 1776 and arrived at Plymouth, England, on 7 January 1777. Pioneer of the abolitionist cause. Equiano settled in London, where in the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement. The movement to end the slave trade had been particularly strong among Quakers, but the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787 as a non-denominational group, with Anglican members, in an attempt to influence parliament directly. Under the Test Act, only those prepared to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of England were permitted to serve as MPs. Equiano had been influenced by George Whitefield's evangelism. As early as 1783, Equiano informed abolitionists such as Granville Sharp about the slave trade; that year he was the first to tell Sharp about the "Zong" massacre, which was being tried in London as litigation for insurance claims. It became a "cause célèbre" for the abolitionist movement and contributed to its growth. On 21 October 1785 he was one of eight delegates from Africans in America to present an 'Address of Thanks' to the Quakers at a meeting in Gracechurch Street, London. The address referred to "A Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies" by Anthony Benezet, founder of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors. His lectures and preparation for the book were promoted by, among others, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Memoir. Entitled "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African" (1789), the book went through nine editions in his lifetime. It is one of the earliest-known examples of published writing by an African writer to be widely read in England. By 1792, it was a best seller and had been published in Russia, Germany, Holland and the United States. It was the first influential slave narrative of what became a large literary genre. But Equiano's experience in slavery was quite different from that of most slaves; he did not participate in field work, he served his owners personally and went to sea, was taught to read and write, and worked in trading. Equiano's personal account of slavery, his journey of advancement, and his experiences as a black immigrant caused a sensation on publication. The book fuelled a growing anti-slavery movement in Great Britain, Europe and the New World. His account surprised many with the quality of its imagery, description and literary style. In his account, Equiano gives details about his hometown and the laws and customs of the Eboe people. After being captured as a boy, he described communities he passed through as a captive on his way to the coast. His biography details his voyage on a slave ship and the brutality of slavery in the colonies of the West Indies, Virginia and Georgia. Equiano commented on the reduced rights that freed people of colour had in these same places, and they also faced risks of kidnapping and enslavement. Equiano embraced Christianity at the age of 14 and its importance to him is a recurring theme in his autobiography. He was baptised into the Church of England in 1759; he described himself in his autobiography as a "protestant of the church of England" but also flirted with Methodism. Several events in Equiano's life led him to question his faith. He was distressed in 1774 by the kidnapping of his friend, a black cook named John Annis, who was taken forcibly off the British ship "Anglicania" on which they were both serving. His friend's kidnapper, William Kirkpatrick, did not abide by the decision in the Somersett Case (1772), that slaves could not be taken from England without their permission, as common law did not support the institution in England & Wales. Kirkpatrick had Annis transported to Saint Kitts, where he was punished severely and worked as a plantation labourer until he died. With the aid of Granville Sharp, Equiano tried to get Annis released before he was shipped from England but was unsuccessful. He heard that Annis was not free from suffering until he died in slavery. Despite his questioning, he affirms his faith in Christianity, as seen in the penultimate sentence of his work that quotes the prophet Micah (): "After all, what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn 'to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God?'" In his account, Equiano also told of his settling in London. He married an English woman and lived with her in Soham, Cambridgeshire, where they had two daughters. He became a leading abolitionist in the 1780s, lecturing in numerous cities against the slave trade. Equiano records his and Granville Sharp's central roles in the anti-slave trade movement, and their effort to publicise the "Zong" massacre, which became known in 1783. Reviewers have found that his book demonstrated the full and complex humanity of Africans as much as the inhumanity of slavery. The book was considered an exemplary work of English literature by a new African author. Equiano did so well in sales that he achieved independence from his benefactors. He travelled throughout England, Scotland and Ireland promoting the book. He worked to improve economic, social and educational conditions in Africa. Specifically, he became involved in working in Sierra Leone, a colony founded in 1792 for freed slaves by Britain in West Africa. Later years. During the American Revolutionary War, Britain had recruited blacks to fight with it by offering freedom to those who left rebel masters. In practice, it also freed women and children, and attracted thousands of slaves to its lines in New York City, which it occupied, and in the South, where its troops occupied Charleston, South Carolina. When British troops were evacuated at the end of the war, their officers also evacuated these American slaves. They were resettled in the Caribbean, in Nova Scotia, in Sierra Leone in Africa, and in London. Britain refused to return the slaves, which the United States sought in peace negotiations. In 1783, following the United States' gaining independence, Equiano became involved in helping the Black Poor of London, who were mostly those African-American slaves freed during and after the American Revolution by the British. There were also some freed slaves from the Caribbean, and some who had been brought by their owners to England and freed later after the decision that Britain had no basis in common law for slavery. The black community numbered about 20,000. After the Revolution some 3,000 former slaves had been transported from New York to Nova Scotia, where they became known as Black Loyalists, among other Loyalists also resettled there. Many of the freedmen found it difficult to make new lives in London or Canada. Equiano was appointed "Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor going to Sierra Leone" in November 1786. This was an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, in present-day Sierra Leone. The blacks from London were joined by more than 1,200 Black Loyalists who chose to leave Nova Scotia. They were aided by John Clarkson, younger brother of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Jamaican maroons, as well as slaves liberated from illegal slave-trading ships after Britain abolished the slave trade, also settled at Freetown in the early decades. Equiano was dismissed from the new settlement after protesting against financial mismanagement and he returned to London. Equiano was a prominent figure in London and often served as a spokesman for the black community. He was one of the leading members of the Sons of Africa, a small abolitionist group composed of free Africans in London. They were closely allied with the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Equiano's comments on issues were published in newspapers such as the "Public Advertiser" and the "Morning Chronicle". He replied to James Tobin in 1788, in the "Public Advertiser", attacking two of his pamphlets and a related book from 1786 by Gordon Turnbull. Equiano had more of a public voice than most Africans or Black Loyalists and he seized various opportunities to use it. Equiano was an active member of the radical working-class London Corresponding Society, which campaigned to extend the vote to working men. In 1792 he lodged with the society's founder Thomas Hardy. At this time, due to the excesses of the French Revolution, British society was tense because of fears of revolution. Reformers were considered more suspect than in other periods. In the 1794 Treason Trials, Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall were tried for high treason but acquitted. Marriage and family. On 7 April 1792, Equiano married Susannah Cullen, a local woman, in St Andrew's Church, Soham, Cambridgeshire. The original marriage register containing the entry for Vassa and Cullen is held today by the Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies. He included his marriage in every edition of his autobiography from 1792 onwards. The couple settled in the area and had two daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857) who were baptised at Soham church. Susannah died in February 1796, aged 34, and Equiano died a year after that on 31 March 1797. Soon after, the elder daughter died at the age of four, leaving the younger child, Joanna Vassa, to inherit Equiano's estate when she was 21; it was then valued at £950 (). Anna Maria is commemorated by a plaque at St Andrew's Church, Chesterton, Cambridge. Joanna Vassa married the Reverend Henry Bromley, a Congregationalist minister, in 1821. They are both buried at the non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London; the Bromleys' monument is now a Grade II listed building. Last days and will. He drew up his will on 28 May 1796. At the time he made this will he was living at the Plaisterers' Hall, then on Addle Street, in Aldermanbury in the City of London. He moved to John Street (now Whitfield Street), close to Whitefield's Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road. At his death on 31 March 1797, he was living in Paddington Street, Westminster. Equiano's death was reported in American as well as British newspapers. Equiano was buried at Whitefield's Tabernacle on 6 April. The entry in the register reads "Gustus Vasa, 52 years, St Mary Le bone". His burial place has been lost. The small burial ground lay either side of the chapel and is now Whitfield Gardens. The site of the chapel is now the American International Church. Equiano's will, in the event of his daughters' deaths before reaching the age of 21, bequeathed half his wealth to the Sierra Leone Company for a school in Sierra Leone, and half to the London Missionary Society. Controversy related to memoir. Following publication in 1967 of a newly edited version of his memoir by Paul Edwards, interest in Equiano revived; additional editions of his work have been published since then. Nigerian scholars have also begun studying him. He was valued as a pioneer in asserting "the dignity of African life in the white society of his time". In researching his life, some scholars since the late 20th century have disputed Equiano's account of his origins. In 1999, Vincent Carretta, a professor of English editing a new version of Equiano's memoir, found two records that led him to question the former slave's account of being born in Africa. He first published his findings in the journal "Slavery and Abolition". At a 2003 conference in England, Carretta defended himself against Nigerian academics, like Obiwu, who accused him of "pseudo-detective work" and indulging "in vast publicity gamesmanship". In his 2005 biography, Carretta suggested that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa, as he was twice recorded from there. Carretta wrote: Equiano was certainly African by descent. The circumstantial evidence that Equiano was also African-American by birth and African-British by choice is compelling but not absolutely conclusive. Although the circumstantial evidence is not equivalent to proof, anyone dealing with Equiano's life and art must consider it. According to Carretta, Equiano/Vassa's baptismal record and a naval muster roll document him as from South Carolina. Carretta interpreted these anomalies as possible evidence that Equiano had made up the account of his African origins, and adopted material from others. But Paul Lovejoy, Alexander X. Byrd and Douglas Chambers note how many general and specific details Carretta can document from sources that related to the slave trade in the 1750s as described by Equiano, including the voyages from Africa to Virginia, sale to Pascal in 1754, and others. They conclude he was more likely telling what he understood as fact, rather than creating a fictional account; his work is shaped as an autobiography. Lovejoy wrote that: circumstantial evidence indicates that he was born where he said he was, and that, in fact, "The Interesting Narrative" is reasonably accurate in its details, although, of course, subject to the same criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the genre of autobiography. Lovejoy uses the name of Vassa in his article, since that was what the man used throughout his life, in "his baptism, his naval records, marriage certificate and will". He emphasises that Vassa only used his African name in his autobiography. Other historians also argue that the fact that many parts of Equiano's account can be proven lends weight to accepting his account of African birth. As historian Adam Hochschild has written: In the long and fascinating history of autobiographies that distort or exaggerate the truth. ... Seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate; among autobiographers ... both dissemblers and truth-tellers tend to be consistent. He also noted that "since the 'rediscovery' of Vassa's account in the 1960s, scholars have valued it as the most extensive account of an eighteenth-century slave's life and the difficult passage from slavery to freedom". Legacy. Representation in other media. Numerous works about Equiano have been produced for and since the 2007 bicentenary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade:

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Adam Lowe Adam Lowe (born 1985) is a writer, performer and publisher from Leeds, UK, though he currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012 (the county's selected poet for the 2012 Olympics). He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs as Beyonce Holes. Biography. Adam Lowe is of Caribbean (St. Kitts), British and Irish descent. He is the son of Councillor Alison Lowe, and like her graduated with both a BA and MA from the University of Leeds. His family was the subject of the 1999 ITV docu-soap "Family Life" (Lion TV). Writing, publishing and performance. Adam Lowe writes about disability, LGBT experiences and the lives of mixed race/Black British communities. Carol Rumens of "The Guardian" describes him as a 'versatile and widely published young writer'. Lowe is LGBT History Month Poet Laureate; founded and runs Young Enigma, a writer development project for young writers; is Editor-in-Chief of Vada Magazine and Dog Horn Publishing; and is Publicity Officer for Peepal Tree Press. He has performed around the world, at festivals and conferences, including the Black and Asian Writers Conference. He is an advocate for LGBT rights and sits on the management committee for Schools OUT UK, the charity that founded LGBT History Month in the UK. He was formerly Features Editor for Bent Magazine and Editor of a speculative fiction magazine called Polluto. In 2010, he was writer-in-residence at I Love West Leeds Arts Festival in Armley, where he lived. He studied under Madani Younis at Freedom Studios in Leeds' sister city, Bradford. He was also announced as a finalist for the 22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards with his novella "Troglodyte Rose" (later, a selection from the book would be a Wattpad featured story getting over 190,000 reads). In 2011, Lowe was writer on attachment at West Yorkshire Playhouse, and partnered with composer Nikki Franklin for Leeds Lieder+ at Leeds College of Music, before the two collaborated on a new work, 'Mary', for the BBC Singers. In 2012, his pamphlet "Precocious" (Fruit Bruise Press) was a reader nomination for the Guardian First Book Prize, which the publication described as, 'A vivid picture of emotions, deeply felt, but with a clear-eyed view of the ways we humans live, love and sometimes betray'. He had a residency at Zion Arts Centre. That year he was Yorkshire's poet for the 12 Poets of 2012 scheme, celebrating the 2012 Olympics and the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, where he visited boxer Anthony Ogogo on a training session to inspire the writing of an Olympic-themed poem for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The final poem was performed by the National Lottery Draw Show's Voice of the Balls Alan Dedicoat at the National Lottery Plot in the Olympic Park on 3 September 2012. He rounded the year off with inclusion in MTV Books' "Chorus: A Literary Mixtape", edited by Saul Williams and Dufflyn Lammers. In 2013, he was announced as one of 10 Black and Asian 'advanced poets' for The Complete Works II (founded by Bernardine Evaristo) with Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Kayo Chingonyi, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Inua Ellams, Sarah Howe, Eileen Pun and Warsan Shire, which resulted in the anthology "Ten: The New Wave", edited by Karen McCarthy-Woolf. He was mentored on the programme by Patience Agbabi. He also made the list of '20 under 40' writers in Leeds for the LS13 Awards, where Lowe was given as an example of 'the non-conformist and boundary-breaking approach to writing in Leeds'. In 2014, he toured his solo show, "Ecstasies", which began at Contact Theatre's Queer Contact. He performed a poem about cruising for 4thought.tv on Channel 4. In 2015, his Polari poem "Vada That" was selected as The Guardian Poem of the Week. His play "Friend Roulette" ran for a week at the Amersham Arms in London. A four-star review in "Theatre Bubble" said: 'Friend Roulette by LGBT writer Adam Lowe, directed by Rachel Owens, sheds light on a gay friendship that is pushed by.. society? inhibitions? fear? into the confines of a chat room (Friend Roulette). But it could also be a comment on the real life app, Grindr, where users meet for sex and chance encounters. The intensity of the meetings that can only be virtual and therefore 'not real' for one of the friends, played by Robert Wallis, causes him to break free for the real world, leaving his internet friend Jonathan Woodhouse, stuck in the hell of a darkened room.' The Guardian referred to the short play, in published form, as 'a fine playlet that I was very impressed by'. In 2017, he performed with composer Nikki Franklin in the Speaker's Chambers at the House of Commons for LGBT History Month. In 2018-9, he featured in the British Library's Windrush Stories exhibition, performing a poem based on the Lord's Prayer. In 2019, his poem 'Bone Railroad', about slavery and the Middle Passage was selected as Poem of the Week by The Yorkshire Times. Songwriting. In 2006, Lowe wrote the lyrics and performed the vocals for a hard house/trance single called 'Some Justice' with DJ GRH & Paul Maddox. Teaching and mentoring. Lowe tutors for The Poetry School, he is a facilitator with English PEN and he teaches at the University of Leeds on the MA Writing for Performance & Publication. Through Young Enigma, he has worked with and supported writers such as Andrew McMillan and Afshan D'souza Lodhi. Young Enigma writers have performed alongside Patience Agbabi, Gerry Potter and Jackie Kay. He is currently a Slate Enabler for Eclipse Theatre, advocating for BAME artists in Greater Manchester.

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Sharna Jackson Sharna Jackson is a British writer of children's fiction. She is the author of a mystery series, aimed at middle-grade readers, featuring Nik and Norva, a pair of black sisters, who solve crimes on an estate, the Tri estate, in South London. Jackson is also an influential curator in the arts, including working with Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum and Design museum in London, and working as artistic director for Site Gallery in Sheffield from July 2018 to November 2020, engaging children in developing digital initiatives in the arts. Life. Jackson grew up in Luton. Before writing children's books she worked as a curator engaging children in the arts. The first novel in Jackson's series, "High-Rise Mystery", has Nik and Norva solve a murder in their tower block during the hottest summer on record. "High-Rise Mystery" was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize in 2020. In the second novel in the series, "Mic Drop", Nik and Norva investigate the death of an up-and-coming pop star TrojKat, who has fallen from the tower roof.

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Yemi Ajibade Yemi Ajibade (28 July 1929 – 24 January 2013), usually credited as Yemi Ajibade, Yemi Goodman Ajibade or Ade-Yemi Ajibade, was a Nigerian playwright, actor and director who, after settling in England in the 1950s, made significant contributions to the British theatre and the canon of Black drama. In a career that spanned half a century, he directed and wrote several successful plays, as well as acting in a wide range of drama for television, stage, radio and film. Biography and education. Adeyemi Olanrewaju Goodman Ajibade was born a royal prince of the house of Ọ̀ràngún from Ìlá Òràngún, Osun State, in the south-west of Nigeria. He attended Abeokuta Grammar School, and later pursued studies in London, at Kennington College of Law and Commerce (1955), at The Actors' Workshop (1960), and from 1966 to 1968 at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School), where he was a contemporary of filmmaker Horace Ové (who has recalled that they were the only two black students in the school at the time). Works. From early in his stay in the UK, Ajibade acted in radio drama for the BBC African Service. As producer Fiona Ledger recalled in 2007: "It was back in 1960 that the late BBC producer John Stockbridge was asked by the Head of the African Service to devise some kind of drama for African listeners. He came up with a series, a soap opera set in London. No copy survives, but" Yemi Ajibade "took the role of a social worker, moving around England and settling quarrels." Continuing to develop his acting career, he was hailed in 1963 as "one of the most promising actors from West Africa". Alongside performers who included Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Leslie Palmer, Eddie Tagoe, Karene Wallace, Basil Wanzira, and Elvania Zirimu, among others, Ajibade featured in a production of Lindsay Barrett's "Blackblast!" filmed in 1973 for a special edition of the BBC Two arts and entertainment programme "Full House" devoted to the work of West Indian writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. Ajibade's acting portfolio would eventually encompass roles in television series such as "Armchair Theatre" (starring in 1963 in "The Chocolate Tree" by Andrew Sinclair, together with Earl Cameron and Peter McEnery), "Danger Man" (1965), "Dixon of Dock Green" (1968), Douglas Botting's "The Black Safari" (1972), "The Fosters" (1976), "Prisoners of Conscience" (1981), and "Silent Witness" (1996), and work on the stage – for instance, in "Plays Umbrella", a season of five specially commissioned new plays, at Riverside Studios (in association with Drum Arts Centre, London) in August 1980, and Nicholas Wright's plays "One Fine Day" (1980 at Riverside Studios) and "The Custom of the Country" (1983 at The Pit, Barbican Centre), and in Lorraine Hansberry's "Les Blancs" (Royal Exchange Theatre, 2001) – as well as film appearances including in Terence Fisher's "The Devil Rides Out" (1968), Monte Hellman's "Shatter" (1974), Hanif Kureshi's "London Kills Me" (1991), "Skin" (1995, written by Sarah Kane)," Dirty Pretty Things" (2002), "" (2004) and "Flawless" with Demi Moore and Michael Caine (2007). In 1966 Ajibade led a delegation of British, West Indian and African members to the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, directing a production of Obi Egbuna's play "Wind Versus Polygamy"; at the 2nd World Black Arts Festival in Lagos in 1977 Ajibade was supervisor of Drama Events. In 1975 he was appointed as a tutor by the Inner London Education Authority, and he also became artistic director of the Keskidee Centre in north London, where he directed a production of Wole Soyinka's "The Swamp Dwellers" (13–23 March 1975). Among Ajibade's best known work as a playwright is "Parcel Post", which had 29 performances by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in 1976–77, directed by Donald Howarth, with a cast featuring the likes of Rudolph Walker, Christopher Asante, and Taiwo Ajai (who has said that her own acting career started by chance "when she stumbled across Yemi Ajibade on a production"). Ajibade's subsequent plays included "Fingers Only" (originally entitled "Lagos, Yes Lagos" when it was broadcast by the BBC in 1971 and published in "Nine African Plays for Radio" in 1973), which in its 1982 production for the Black Theatre Co-operative (now NitroBeat) was directed by Mustapha Matura at The Factory Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre, and Albany Empire. "Waiting for Hannibal" opened in June 1986 at the Drill Hall, followed by a national tour, with Burt Caesar and Ajibade directing a cast that included Judith Jacobs, Wilbert Johnson and others; and "A Long Way From Home" was produced by Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle Theatre in 1991, with Ajibade himself heading the cast. Ajibade also worked in Ibadan during the late 1970s, as a writer and director (1976–79) with the Unibadan Masques, the University of Ibadan's School of Drama acting company. In February 2008, at an All-Star Gala held at Theatre Royal Stratford East on the 10th anniversary of Tiata Fahodzi, Ajibade was honoured as a leader of British-African theatre, alongside Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, Dotun Adebayo, Dona Croll, Femi Oguns, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Hugh Quarshie and others. Yemi Ajibade died in the UK on 13 January 2013 at the age of 83.

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Kodwo Eshun Kodwo Eshun (born 1967) is a British-Ghanaian writer, theorist and filmmaker. He is perhaps best known for his 1998 book "More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction". He currently teaches on the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at (Geneva School of Art and Design). Early life and education. Kodwo Eshun was born and raised in the far northern suburbs of London. His father was a prominent diplomat to the United Kingdom. His family is of the Fante people of Ghana, and his younger brother is the author and journalist Ekow Eshun. As a youth, Eshun undertook a study of comic books, J. G. Ballard, and rock music. According to his brother, Eshun was heavily disturbed and influenced by the 1979 coup of Ghana carried out by J. J. Rawlings. He studied English Literature (BA Hons, MA Hons) at University College, Oxford University, and Romanticism and Modernism MA Hons at Southampton University. In his first book, Kodwo Eshun devised a unique page-numbering system, beginning in negative numbers. On page −01[-017], he wrote: He later described his decision to pursue music journalism professionally as a devotional act that included a vow of poverty. Writing. Eshun's writing deals with cyberculture, science fiction and music with a particular focus on where these ideas intersect with the African diaspora. He has contributed to a wide range of publications, including "The Guardian", "The Face", "The Wire", "i-D", "Melody Maker", "Spin", "Arena", "Frieze", "CR: The New Centennial Review" and "032c". As of 2002, he has quit music journalism. He now publishes academically, and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the Department of Visual Cultures, founded by Irit Rogoff. In the 1990s, he was affiliated with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a cross-disciplinary research group out of the University of Warwick. "More Brilliant Than The Sun". Eshun's book "More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction" was published in 1998 and is "At its simplest ... a study of visions of the future in music from Sun Ra to 4 Hero". Written in a style that makes extensive use of neologism, re-appropriated jargon and compound words, the book explores the intersection of black music and science fiction from an afrofuturist viewpoint. Architechtronics. "Architechtronics" is a collaboration by Kodwo Eshun and Franz Pomassl recorded live at the AR-60-Studio (ORF/FM4) Vienna in 1998. Eshun's contribution is the recitation of a text entitled "Black Atlantic Turns on the Flow Line" which condenses much of the thematic content of "More Brilliant Than The Sun". "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism". Eshun's article "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism" was published in "CR: The New Centennial Review", Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2003. Through this article, he expounds upon the history and trajectory of Afrofuturism. He illuminates the specific functions of this genre, specifically its ability "to engineer feedback between [a] preferred future and [a] becoming present" and "to encourage a process of disalienation." Eshun deploys an unconventional framing device, inviting the reader to imagine "a team of African archaeologists from the future" attempting to reconstruct 20th-century Afrodiasporic subjectivity through a comparative study of various cultural media and artefacts. This framing technique can be read in terms of Eshun's notion of the "chronopolitical," the "temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that dis- turb the linear time of progress, adjust[ing] the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory." Kodwo, following Toni Morrison among others, positions African slaves as the first modern subjects, as well as “real world” subjects of science fiction scenarios. Thus, while hegemonic future projections implicitly or explicitly exclude black subjects from (post)modernity and its attendant techno-scientific innovations and alienations, Afrofuturism highlights the Afrodiasporic subject’s fundamental role in initiating and producing modernity. In other words, Afrofuturism “reorient[s] history,” in part in order to offer counter- or alternative futures. This article can be used as a lens through which to read prominent Afrofuturistic texts, such as Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo" (1972) and Samuel Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" (1984). The Otolith Group. In 2002, Eshun co-founded The Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar, the name derived from a structure found in the inner ear that establishes our sense of gravity and orientation. Based in London, the group's work engages with archival materials, with futurity and with the histories of transnationality. The group's projects include film production and exhibition curation as part of an integrated practice with the intended aim to "build a new film culture". The group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010 for its project "A Long Time Between Suns".

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Diana Evans Diana Omo Evans FRSL (born 1972) is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written three full-length novels. Her first novel, "26a", published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel "Ordinary People" was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. As well as writing fiction, Evans contributes essays and literary criticism to the national press. She was honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. Background and education. Evans is the daughter of a Nigerian mother and an English father. She was born and grew up in Neasden, north-west London, with her parents and five sisters, one of whom was her twin. She also spent part of her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria. She completed a Media Studies degree at the University of Sussex. While in Brighton she was a dancer in the African dance troupe Mashango. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. At the age of 25 she became a journalist. She contributed human-interest features and art criticism to a range of magazines, journals and newspapers in the UK; published interviews with celebrities; worked as an editor for "Pride Magazine" and the literary journal "Calabash". Writing. Her first novel, "26a", "a Bildungsroman that centres its storyline on the growing process of a pair of identical twins of Nigerian-British origin, Georgia and Bessi" growing up in Neasden, was published in 2005 to wide critical acclaim and has since been translated into 12 languages. It was shortlisted in the first novel category for both the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Literary critic Maya Jaggi said in "The Guardian" of "26a": "The writing is both mature and freshly perceptive, creating not only a warmly funny novel of a Neasden childhood [. . .] but a haunting account of the loss of innocence and mental disintegration." Carol Birch, writing in "The Independent", said of "26a" that "Evans writes with tremendous verve and dash. Her ear for dialogue is superb, and she has wit and sharp perception" and though she has her criticisms, concludes that Evans "has produced a consistently readable book filled with likeable characters: a study of loss that has great heart and humour." According to Diriye Osman in the "Huffington Post": "Here was a Bildungsroman of such daring and sustained elegance that it felt like a gorgeous dance of a novel. In many ways, it is apropos that this book which focused on the secret bond that exists between twins was followed in 2009 by the equally masterful "The Wonder", a novel rooted in the world of dance." Evans' second novel, "The Wonder" (2009), explores the world of dancing in the context of Caribbean immigration to the UK, London gentrification, and the bond between father and son. Maggie Gee, writing in "The Independent", called it "a serious work of art, with sentences like ribbons of silk winding around a skeleton of haunting imagery.. . . "The Wonder"'s most central achievement is to explore what art means in human life. [. . .] This second novel, both powerful and delicate, lacking in linear plot but rich in the poetry of human observation, proves that Evans has what she calls 'the watch-me, the grace note' that marks a true artist." Her third novel, "Ordinary People" (2018), is a portrait of family life for two black couples in their 30s in South London in a year bookended by the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson. "Ordinary People" was the winner of the South Bank Sky Arts Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Also a journalist, Evans has contributed essays and literary criticism to "Marie Claire", "The Independent", "The Observer", "The Guardian", "The Daily Telegraph", the "Financial Times, Time, The New York Review of Books" and "Harper’s Bazaar". She is an associate lecturer of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK. She is also a 2014–16 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the London College of Fashion and a 2016–17 Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent.

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Dean Atta Dean Atta is a British poet of Greek Cypriot and Caribbean descent. He has been listed by "The Independent" newspaper as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in the United Kingdom. In 2012, his poem "I Am Nobody's Nigger," written in response to the use of the racial slur by the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, achieved much social media coverage, and he was profiled in "The Guardian". Born to a Greek mother and Jamaican father, he earned a BA degree (2006) in Philosophy and English from the University of Sussex, where he was president of the African Caribbean Society. His poetry, which often deals with questions of identity and social justice, has been featured on BBC Radio 4, and he has been commissioned to write for museums and galleries including the Keats House Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. In 2018, Atta served as a judge for the BBC Young Writers Award. In 2019 Atta's verse novel, "The Black Flamingo", was published by Hachette UK. For "The Black Flamingo", Atta was one of two winners of the Stonewall Book Award 2020 in the Children's and Young Adults category.

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Dorothea Smartt Dorothea Smartt (born 1963) is an English-born poet of Barbadian descent. Biography. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants from Barbados, Dorothea Smartt was born in London and grew up there. She earned a BA degree in Social Sciences from South Bank Polytechnic and an MA in Anthropology from Hunter College (CUNY). Smartt was poet in residence at Brixton Market and attached live artist at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She has lectured on creative arts at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Leeds University. She has been poetry editor for "Sable LitMag" and guest writer at Florida International University and Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including "Bittersweet" (Women's Press, 1998), "The Fire People" (Payback Press, 1998), "Mythic Women/Real Women" (Faber, 2000), "IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain" (2000), "A Storm Between Fingers" (Flipped Eye, 2007) and "New Daughters of Africa" (Myriad Editions, 2019). Her multi-media play, "Fallout" toured primary schools in and around London. Smartt also created and performed the solo work "Medusa", which incorporates poetry and visuals. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Claudia Jones Claudia Jones, "née" Claudia Vera Cumberbatch (21 February 1915 – 24 December 1964), was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major black newspaper the "West Indian Gazette" (WIG) in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second largest annual carnival in the world. Early life. Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in Trinidad, then a colony of the British Empire, on 21 February 1915. When she was eight years old, her family emigrated to New York City following the post-war cocoa price crash in Trinidad. Her mother died five years later, and her father eventually found work to support the family. Jones won the Theodore Roosevelt Award for Good Citizenship at her junior high school. In 1932, due to poor living conditions in Harlem, she was struck with tuberculosis at the age of 17, The tuberculosis caused irreparable damaged to her lungs leading to lengthy stays in hospitals throughout her life. She graduated from high school, but her family could not afford the expenses to attend her graduation ceremony. United States career. Despite being academically bright, being classed as an immigrant woman severely limited Jones' career choices. Instead of going to college she began working in a laundry, and subsequently found other retail work in Harlem. During this time she joined a drama group, and began to write a column called "Claudia Comments" for a Harlem journal. In 1936, trying to find organisations supporting the Scottsboro Boys, she joined the Young Communist League USA. The American communist movement's opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, was another factor which prompted Jones to join the communists. In 1937 she joined the editorial staff of the "Daily Worker", rising by 1938 to become editor of the "Weekly Review". After the Young Communist League became American Youth for Democracy during World War II, Jones became editor of its monthly journal, "Spotlight". After the war, Jones became executive secretary of the Women's National Commission, secretary for the Women's Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and in 1952 took the same position at the National Peace Council. In 1953, she took over the editorship of "Negro Affairs". Black feminist leader in the Communist Party. As a member of the Communist Party USA and a black nationalist and feminist, Jones' main focus was on creating "an anti-imperialist coalition, managed by working-class leadership, fueled by the involvement of women." Jones focused on growing the party's support for black and white women. Not only did she work towards getting Black women equal respect within the party, Jones also worked for getting Black women specifically respect in being a mother, worker, and woman. She campaigned for job training programs, equal pay for equal work, government controls on food prices, and funding for wartime childcare programs. Jones supported a subcommittee to address the "women's question". She insisted on the development in the party of theoretical training of women comrades, the organization of women into mass organizations, daytime classes for women, and "babysitter" funds to allow for women's activism. "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!". Jones' best known piece of writing, "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!", appeared in 1949 in the magazine "Political Affairs". It exhibits her development of what later came to be termed "intersectional" analysis within a Marxist framework. In it, she wrote: Deportation. An elected member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA, Jones also organised and spoke at events. As a result of her membership of CPUSA and various associated activities, in 1948 she was arrested and sentenced to the first of four spells in prison. Incarcerated on Ellis Island, she was threatened with deportation to Trinidad. Following a hearing by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she was found in violation of the McCarran Act for being an alien (non-US citizen) who had joined the Communist Party. Several witnesses testified to her role in party activities, and she had identified herself as a party member since 1936 when completing her Alien Registration on 24 December 1940, in conformity with the Alien Registration Act. She was ordered to be deported on 21 December 1950. In 1951, aged 36 and in prison, she suffered her first heart attack. That same year, she was tried and convicted with 11 others, including her friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, of "un-American activities" under the Smith Act, specifically activities against the United States government. The charges against Jones related to an article she had written for the Political Affairs magazine under the title "Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security". The Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal. In 1955, Jones began her sentence of a year and a day at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She was released on 23 October 1955. She was refused entry to Trinidad and Tobago, in part because the colonial governor Major General Sir Hubert Elvin Rance was of the opinion that "she may prove troublesome". She was eventually offered residency in the United Kingdom on humanitarian grounds, and federal authorities agreed to allow it when she agreed to cease contesting her deportation. On 7 December 1955, at Harlem's Hotel Theresa, 350 people met to see her off. United Kingdom activism. Jones arrived in London two weeks later, at a time when the British African-Caribbean community was expanding. Upon her arrival, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) sent several Caribbean communists to greet her. These communist activists included Billy Strachan, Winston Pinder, and Jones's cousin Trevor Carter. However, on engaging the political community in the UK, she was disappointed to find that many British communists were hostile to a black woman. She immediately joined the CPGB upon her arrival in Britain and remained a member until her death. Activism. Jones found a community that needed active organisation. She became involved in the British African-Caribbean community to organise both access to basic facilities, as well as the early movement for equal rights. Supported by her cousin Trevor Carter, and her friends Nadia Cattouse, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Beryl McBurnie, Pearl Prescod and her lifelong mentor Paul Robeson, Jones campaigned against racism in housing, education and employment. She addressed peace rallies and the Trade Union Congress, and visited Japan, Russia, and China, where she met with Mao Zedong. In the early 1960s, her health failing, Jones helped organise campaigns against the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill (passed in April 1962), which would make it harder for non-whites to migrate to Britain. She also campaigned for the release of Nelson Mandela, and spoke out against racism in the workplace. "West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News", 1958. From her experiences in the United States, Jones believed that "people without a voice were as lambs to the slaughter." In March 1958 above a barber's shop in Brixton, she founded and thereafter edited the "West Indian Gazette", its full title subsequently displayed on its masthead as "West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News" ("WIG"). The paper became a key contributor to the rise of consciousness within the Black British community. Jones wrote in her last published essay, "The Caribbean Community in Britain", in "Freedomways" (Summer 1964): Always strapped for cash, "WIG" folded eight months and four editions after Jones's death in December 1964. Notting Hill riots and "Caribbean Carnival", 1959. In August 1958, four months after the launch of "WIG", the Notting Hill race riots occurred, as well as similar disturbances in Robin Hood Chase, Nottingham. In view of the racially driven analysis of these events by the existing daily newspapers, Jones began receiving visits from members of the black British community and also from various national leaders responding to the concern of their citizens, including Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, Norman Manley of Jamaica, Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Carl La Corbinière of the West Indies Federation. As a result, Claudia identified the need to "wash the taste of Notting Hill and Nottingham out of our mouths". It was suggested that the British black community should have a carnival; it was December 1958, so the next question was: "In the winter?" Jones used her connections to gain use of St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959 for the first Mardi-Gras-based carnival, directed by Edric Connor (who in 1951 had arranged for the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra to appear at the Festival of Britain) and with the Boscoe Holder Dance Troupe, jazz guitarist Fitzroy Coleman and singer Cleo Laine headlining; the event was televised nationally by the BBC. These early celebrations were epitomised by the slogan: "A people's art is the genesis of their freedom." A footnote on the front cover of the original 1959 souvenir brochure states: "A part of the proceeds [from the sale] of this brochure are to assist the payments of fines of coloured and white youths involved in the Notting Hill events." Jones and the "West Indian Gazette" also organised five other annual indoor Caribbean Carnival cabarets at such London venues as Seymour Hall, Porchester Hall and the Lyceum Ballroom, which events are seen as precursors of the celebration of Caribbean Carnival that culminated in the Notting Hill Carnival. Death. Jones died on Christmas Eve 1964, aged 49, and was found on Christmas Day at her flat. A post-mortem declared that she had suffered a massive heart attack, due to heart disease and tuberculosis. Her funeral on 9 January 1965 was a large and political ceremony, with her burial plot selected to be that located to the left of the tomb of her hero, Karl Marx, in Highgate Cemetery, North London. A message from Paul Robeson was read out: Legacy and influence. The National Union of Journalists' Black Members' Council holds a prestigious annual Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture every October, during Black History Month, to honour Jones and celebrate her contribution to Black-British journalism. The Claudia Jones Organisation was founded in London in 1982 by Yvette Thomas and others to support and empower women and families of African-Caribbean heritage. Winsome Pinnock's 1989 play "A Rock in Water" was inspired by the life of Claudia Jones. Jones is named on the list of "100 Great Black Britons" (2003 and 2020) and in the 2020 book. In August 2008, a blue plaque was unveiled on the corner of Tavistock Road and Portobello Road commemorating Claudia Jones as the "Mother of Caribbean Carnival in Britain". In October 2008, Britain's Royal Mail commemorated Jones with a special postage stamp. She is the subject of a documentary film by Z. Nia Reynolds, "Looking for Claudia Jones" (2010). In 2018 Jones was named by the "Evening Standard" on a list of 14 "Inspirational black British women throughout history" (alongside Phillis Wheatley, Mary Seacole, Adelaide Hall, Margaret Busby, Olive Morris, Connie Mark, Joan Armatrading, Tessa Sanderson, Doreen Lawrence, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Sharon White, Malorie Blackman, Diane Abbott and Zadie Smith). "Bustle" magazine included Jones on a list of "7 Black British Women Throughout History That Deserve To Be Household Names In 2019", together with Mary Prince, Evelyn Dove, Olive Morris, Margaret Busby, Olivette Otele, and Shirley Thompson. On 14 October 2020, Jones was honoured with a Google Doodle. Many British communists have argued that her participation in the British communist movement has been both obscured and denied by organisations keen to use her image. Commemoration of the 100th anniversary of her birth. Various activities took place from June 2014 onwards. The most successful were possibly those organised by Community Support, which put substantial resources into basic research into aspects of her life and work. This led to new revelations and rediscoveries about Claudia Jones, not included in the three printed biographies, or the film biography. Community Support organised A Claudia Jones 100 Day on the 100th anniversary of her birth at Kennington Park Estate Community Centre on Saturday, 21 February 2015. This began with a guided tour showing her two main residences while she lived in London, and the former "West Indian Gazette" office nearby. There was also a celebration at The Cloth, in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, near to her birthplace, on the same day. The Day was associated with an event held on the previous evening at Claudia Jones Organisation in Hackney, which featured a screening of the film "Looking for Claudia Jones" by Z. Nia Reynolds.

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C. L. R. James Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989), who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work "World Revolution" outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins". Characterised by one literary critic as an "anti-Stalinist dialectician", James was known for his autodidactism, for his occasional playwriting and fiction – his 1936 book "Minty Alley" was the first novel by a black West Indian to be published in Britain — and as an avid sportsman. He is also famed as a writer on cricket, and his 1963 book "Beyond a Boundary", which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography", is commonly named as the best single book on cricket, and even the best book about sports ever written. Biography. Early life in Trinidad. Born in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, C. L. R. James was the first child of Elizabeth James and Robert Alexander James, a schoolteacher. In 1910 he won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer and distinguished himself as an athlete (he would hold the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), as well as beginning to write fiction. After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who would become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist "Beacon Group", a circle of writers associated with "The Beacon" magazine, in which he published a series of short stories. British years. In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his help writing his autobiography "Cricket and I" (published in 1933). James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932. During this time James took a job as cricket correspondent with the "Manchester Guardian". In 1933 he moved to London. The following year he joined a Trotskyist group that met to talk for hours in his rented room. Louise Cripps, one of its members, recalled: "We felt our work could contribute to the time when we would see Socialism spreading." James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad. An abridged version of his "Life of Captain Cipriani" was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet "The Case for West-Indian Self Government". He became a champion of Pan-Africanism, and was named Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, later renamed the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) – a group formed in 1935 in response to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia (the Second Italo-Abyssinian War). Leading members included Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Braithwaite. When the IAFE was transformed into the International African Service Bureau in 1937, James edited its newsletter, "Africa and the World", and its journal, "International African Opinion". The Bureau was led by his childhood friend George Padmore, who would be a driving force for socialist Pan-Africanism for several decades. Both Padmore and James wrote for the "New Leader", published by the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which James had joined in 1934 (when Fenner Brockway was its General Secretary). In 1934, James wrote a three-act play about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture (entitled Toussaint Louverture - The story of the only successful slave revolt in history), which was staged in London's West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson, Orlando Martins, Robert Adams and Harry Andrews. The play had been presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. In 1967 James went on to write a second play about the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins", which went on to become the first production from Talawa Theatre Company in 1986, coinciding with the overthrow of Baby Doc Duvalier. Also in 1936, Secker & Warburg in London published James's novel, "Minty Alley", which he had brought with him in manuscript from Trinidad. (Fenner Brockway had introduced him to Fredric Warburg, co-owner of the press.) It was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK. Amid his frenetic political activity, James wrote what are perhaps his best known works of non-fiction: "World Revolution" (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, E. H. Carr and Fenner Brockway; and "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian Revolution, which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. James went to Paris to research this work, where he met Haitian military historian Alfred Auguste Nemours. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the ILP to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation. Speaking tour in the United States. At the urging of Trotsky and James P. Cannon, in October 1938, James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), then the US section of the Fourth International, to facilitate its work among black workers. Following several meetings in New York, which garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events," James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia. He gave lectures in cities including New Haven, Youngstown, Rochester, and Boston, before finishing the tour with two lectures in Los Angeles and another in Pasadena in March 1939. He spoke on topics such as "Twilight of the British Empire" and "The Negro and World Imperialism." Constance Webb, who would later become James' second wife, attended one of his 1939 lectures in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now I was hearing a third. The three men were masters of the English language, a skill that gave them extraordinary power." One Trotskyist, John Archer, encouraged him to leave in the hope of removing a rival. James's relationship with Louise Cripps had broken up after her second abortion, so that intimate tie no longer bound him to England. Meeting Trotsky. In April 1939, James visited Trotsky in Coyoacán, México. James stayed there about a month and also met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, before returning to the United States in May 1939. A key topic that James and Trotsky discussed was the "Negro Question". Parts of their conversation were transcribed, with James sometimes referred to by his pen-name, J. R. Johnson. Whereas Trotsky saw the Trotskyist Party as providing leadership to the Black community, in the general manner that the Bolsheviks provided guidance to ethnic minorities in Russia, James suggested that the self-organised struggle of African Americans would precipitate a much broader radical social movement. U.S. and the Johnson–Forest Tendency. James stayed in the United States until he was deported in 1953. By 1940, he had begun to doubt Trotsky's view of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. He left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers' Party (WP). Within the WP, James formed the Johnson–Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym was "Johnson" and Dunayevskaya's was "Forest") and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) to spread their views within the new party. While within the WP, the views of the Johnson–Forest Tendency underwent considerable development. By the end of the Second World War, they had definitively rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. Instead, they classified it as state capitalist, a political evolution shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, the Johnson–Forest Tendency was focusing increasingly on the liberation movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James's thought in his 1939 discussions with Trotsky. Such liberation struggles came to take centre stage for the Johnson–Forest Tendency. After the Second World War, the WP witnessed a downturn in revolutionary sentiment. The Tendency, on the other hand, was encouraged by the prospects for revolutionary change for oppressed peoples. After a few short months as an independent group, during which they published a great deal of material, in 1947, the Johnson–Forest Tendency joined the SWP, which it regarded as more proletarian than the WP. James would still describe himself as a Leninist despite his rejection of Vladimir Lenin's conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party. He argued for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, James rejected the idea of a vanguard party. This led the Johnson–Forest Tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955 after James had left for Britain, about half the membership of the Committee withdrew, under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya, to form a separate tendency of Marxist-humanism and found the organisation News and Letters Committees. Whether Dunayevskaya's faction had constituted a majority or a minority in the Correspondence Publishing Committee remains a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester says that Dunayevskaya's supporters formed a majority, but Martin Glaberman says in "New Politics" that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962, as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman, reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality. James advised the group from Great Britain until it dissolved in 1970, against his urging. James's writings were also influential in the development of Autonomist Marxism as a current within Marxist thought. He himself saw his life's work as developing the theory and practice of Leninism. Return to Britain. In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa. In his attempt to remain in America, he wrote a study of Herman Melville, "Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In", and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book while being detained at the immigration station on Ellis Island. In an impassioned letter to his old friend George Padmore, James said that in "Mariners" that he was using "Moby Dick" as a parable for the anticommunism sweeping the United States, a consequence, he thought, of Americans' uncritical faith in capitalism. Returning to Britain, James appeared to Padmore and his partner Dorothy Pizer to be a man adrift. After James started reporting on cricket for the "Manchester Guardian", Padmore wrote to American novelist Richard Wright: "That will take him out of his ivory tower and making his paper revolution..." Grace Lee Boggs, a colleague from the Detroit group, came to London in 1954 to work with James, but she too, saw him "at loose ends, trying to find his way after fifteen years out of the country." In 1957, James travelled to Ghana for the celebration of its independence from British rule in March that year. He had met Ghana's new head of state, Kwame Nkrumah, in the United States when Nkrumah was studying there and sent him on to work with George Padmore in London after the Second World War; Padmore was by this point a close Nkrumah advisor and had written "The Gold Coast Revolution" (1953). In correspondence sent from Ghana in 1957, James told American friends that Nkrumah thought he too ought to write a book on the Convention People's Party, which under Nkrumah's leadership had brought the country to independence. The book would show how the party's strategies could be used to build a new African future. James invited Grace Lee Boggs, his colleague from Detroit, to join in the work, though in the end, James wrote "Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution" on his own. The book was not published until 1977 (by Allison & Busby), years after Nkrumah's overthrow, exile and subsequent death. Trinidad and afterwards. In 1958 James went back to Trinidad, where he edited "The Nation" newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement (PNM) party. He also became active again in the Pan-African movement. He believed that the Ghana revolution greatly encouraged the anticolonialist revolutionary struggle. James also advocated the West Indies Federation. It was over this issue that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Great Britain, where he joined Calvin Hernton, Obi Egbuna and others on the faculty of the Antiuniversity of London, which had been set up by a group of left-wing thinkers led by American academic Joseph Berke. In 1968 James was invited to the US, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately returning to Britain, he spent his last years in Brixton, London. In the 1980s, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from South Bank Polytechnic (later to become the University of the South Bank, in London) for his body of socio-political work, including that relating to race and sport. James died in London from a chest infection on 19 May 1989, aged 88. His funeral took place on Monday, 12 June in Trinidad, where he was buried at Tunapuna. A state memorial service was held for him at the National Stadium, Port of Spain, on 28 June 1989. Personal life. James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later to Britain led to their estrangement. He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress and author, after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in California. James and Webb married in 1946 and their son, C. L. R. James Jr, familiarly known as Nobbie, was born in 1949. Separated forcibly in 1952, by James's arrest and detention on Ellis Island, the couple divorced in 1953, when James was deported to Britain, while Webb remained in New York with Nobbie. A collection of James's letters to Webb was posthumously published as "Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948", edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Stories written by James for his son were published in 2006 as "The Nobbie Stories for Children and Adults", edited and introduced by Constance Webb. In 1956 James married Selma Weinstein ("née" Deitch), who had been a young member of the Johnson–Forest Tendency; they remained close political colleagues for more than 25 years, but divorced in 1980. She is best known as one of the founders of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Archives. Collections of C. L. R. James papers are held at the University of the West Indies Alma Jordan Library, St Augustine, Trinidad, and at Columbia University Libraries. Duke University Press publish the series "The C. L. R. James Archives", edited by Robert A. Hill, literary executor of the estate of C. L. R. James, producing new editions of books by James, as well as scholarly explorations of his oeuvre. Writings on cricket. He is widely known as a writer on cricket, especially for his autobiographical 1963 book, "Beyond a Boundary", which he himself described as "neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography". It is considered a seminal work on the game, and is often named as the best single book on cricket (or even the best book on any sport) ever written. John Arlott called it "so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need … in the opinion of the reviewer, it is the finest book written about the game of cricket." A conference to mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication was held 10–11 May 2013. The book's key question, frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists, is inspired by a line in Rudyard Kipling's poem "English Flag" – "What do they know of England who only England know?" James asks in the Preface: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" Acknowledging that "To answer involves ideas as well as facts", James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how it meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. The literary quality of the writing attracts cricketers of all political views. While editor of "The Nation", he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team. James believed that the relationship between players and the public was a prominent reason behind the West Indies' achieving so much with so little.

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Talia Hibbert Talia Hibbert is a British romance novelist. She writes contemporary and paranormal romance. Critics describe her as a writer of diverse narratives, with characters of varying race, ethnicity, body shape, sexual orientation, and life experience. Career. During her childhood, Hibbert dealt with negative comments about her dream to be a writer. She used an inheritance from her great-grandmother to finance the beginning of her writing career, and began self-publishing in 2017, She put out her first nine books within one year. Her first traditionally published book, "Get a Life, Chloe Brown", was released in 2019 with Avon Romance, and is the first book of a family romance trilogy. Themes. Many of Hibbert's characters fall under the hashtag #OwnVoices, meaning they are part of a marginalized group Hibbert identifies with. Many of her protagonists are black women. The main character in "Get a Life, Chloe Brown" lives with chronic pain. In her book "A Girl Like Her", the main character, Ruth, is autistic. The third book in "The Brown Sisters" series, "Act Your Age, Eve Brown", features two autistic leads. Hibbert's stories include characters with a diverse range of body types. She has stated, "...it’s always been really, really important to me that I represent diverse body types in my romance to show that all different kinds of people can be attractive and all different kinds of people deserve happy endings." Hibbert's books reflect a change in the romance genre toward explicit consent during intimate scenes. In the author's LGBTQ romance "Work For It", one of the protagonists deals with finding love even while living with depression. Personal life. For much of her life, Hibbert struggled with undiagnosed health issues, until she was diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Hibbert's multiple issues with doctors inspired the topic of medical discrimination in "Get a Life, Chloe Brown". Hibbert is autistic.

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Andrea Levy Andrea Levy (7 March 1956 – 14 February 2019) was an English author best known for the novels "Small Island" (2004) and "The Long Song" (2010). She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities. Early life. Levy was of primarily Afro-Jamaican descent. She had a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather. She said in a 2004 article: "Jews went to Jamaica in the 1600s. My paternal grandfather was born Orthodox Jewish, from a very strict family, but after fighting in the First World War he became a Christian and came back and married my grandmother. His family disowned him, so I don’t know much about them." Her father came to Britain on the in 1948, with her mother following later that year on a banana boat. Levy was born in Archway, London, "the fourth, and baby, of the family, by a long way". She grew up on a council estate in Highbury, north London, and had a typical working-class upbringing. She attended Highbury Hill Grammar School and studied textile design and weaving at Middlesex Polytechnic. Career. Levy began her career as a costume assistant, working part-time in the costume departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House while starting a graphic design company with her husband Bill Mayblin. During this time, she experienced a form of awakening to her identity concerning both her gender and her race. At a racial-awareness session with colleagues at an Islington sex education project, she found herself having to choose between a "white" and "black" side, which she found a "rude awakening". Having not read a book until the age of 23, she subsequently became aware of the power of books and began to read "excessively". It was easy enough to find literature by black writers from the United States, but she could find very little literature from black writers in the United Kingdom. (A similar recognition led Marsha Hunt in 1995 to initiate the Saga Prize, for which Levy would become a judge.) Levy began writing in her mid-30s after her father died. It was not a therapeutic attempt to deal with her loss, but rather a need to understand where she came from. In 1989, she enrolled in Alison Fell's Creative Writing class at the City Lit, continuing with the course for seven years. She struggled initially to get her work published, her first novel being rejected by several companies that were unsure of how to market her writing. Levy spoke in a 1999 interview of the "herd mentality" of publishers worried about the possibly limited market appeal of her work: "the main problem was that they perceived it as being just about race, and thought it would only appeal to black readers." However, as Margaret Busby noted, Levy "proved that to write about... migration from the specific yet complex perspective of being a black English female is not a limitation to finding a wide and appreciative readership, but in fact the exact opposite." Work. In 1994 Levy's first novel, the semi-autobiographical "Every Light in the House Burnin"', was published and attracted favourable reviews. The "Independent on Sunday" stated: "This story of a young girl in the 60s in north London, child of Jamaican migrants, stands comparison with some of the best stories about growing up poor – humorous and moving, unflinching and without sentiment". Her second novel, "Never Far from Nowhere" (1996), is a coming-of-age story about two sisters of Jamaican parentage, Vivian and Olive, growing up in Finsbury Park, London in the 1970s. It was long-listed for the Orange Prize. After "Never Far from Nowhere", Levy visited Jamaica for the first time and what she learned of her family's past provided material for her next book, "Fruit of the Lemon" (1999). The novel is set in England and Jamaica during the Thatcher era, highlighting the differences between Jamaican natives and their British descendants. "The New York Times" noted the novel "illuminates the general situation facing all children of postcolonial immigrants". Levy's fourth novel, "Small Island" (2004), which looks at the immediate outcomes of World War II and migration on what became known as the Windrush generation, was a critical success. "The Guardian"s Mike Phillips praised the writing and the subject matter, calling it Levy's "big book". Levy herself said in 2004: "When I started "Small Island" I didn’t intend to write about the war. I wanted to start in 1948 with two women, one white, one black, in a house in Earls Court, but when I asked myself, 'Who are these people and how did they get here?' I realised that 1948 was so very close to the war that nothing made sense without it. If every writer in Britain were to write about the war years there would still be stories to be told, and none of us would have come close to what really happened. It was such an amazing schism in the middle of a century. And Caribbean people got left out of the telling of that story, so I am attempting to put them back into it. But I am not telling it from only a Jamaican point of view. I want to tell stories from the black and white experience. It is a shared history." "Small Island" won three awards, namely the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The novel was subsequently made into a two-part television drama of the same title that was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009. A stage adaptation written by Helen Edmundson premiered at the National Theatre in 2019. Levy's fifth and final novel, "The Long Song", won the 2011 Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. "The Daily Telegraph" called it a "sensational novel". Kate Kellaway in "The Observer" commented: ""The Long Song" reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work". The novel was adapted as a three-part BBC One television series that was broadcast in December 2018. Her short book "Six Stories and an Essay" was published in 2014. It begins with an autobiographical essay and includes stories that are drawn from various life experiences. Levy contributed to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa" (edited by Margaret Busby), which has enabled an annual scholarship at SOAS University of London. Bonnie Greer paid tribute to Andrea Levy: "For every great writer, their own story is in their work, and is all that you really need to know... What she described was a people integral to what the UK is. Now and forever. And their bard, Andrea Levy, is immortal." "The Bookseller" noted in 2019 that, in the UK, Levy had sold "a total of 1.23 million books for £7.9m, with "Small Island" her bestseller, selling 758,203 copies in paperback and a further 120,749 for the TV tie-in. It is the biggest-selling winner of the Women's Prize to date." Legacy. Documentary film. Levy was the subject of a profile in Alan Yentob's BBC One television series "Imagine" entitled "Andrea Levy: Her Island Story", first shown in December 2018. "Andrea Levy: In Her Own Words". The BBC Radio 4 programme "Andrea Levy: In Her Own Words" was broadcast on 8 February 2020 in the "Archive on 4" series, drawing on an in-depth interview in 2014 with oral historian Sarah O'Reilly for the British Library's Authors' Lives project, in which Levy spoke on condition that the recording would only be released after her death. The interview was accompanied by contributions from friends of Levy's including Gary Younge, Baroness Lola Young, Louise Doughty, and Margaret Busby, as well as Levy's husband Bill Mayblin. Literary archive. It was announced in February 2020 that Levy's literary archive had been acquired by the British Library, including notebooks, research material, correspondence, emails and audio recordings. Commemorative plaque. An Islington Heritage Plaque was unveiled in Levy's honour on her childhood home at Twyford House, Elwood Street, in Highbury in March 2020, at a ceremony attended by her husband Bill Mayblin and family members, Islington Councillors, Baroness Lola Young, and other friends. Royal Society of Literature pen collection. In November 2020 it was announced that Levy would be the first writer of colour whose pen would join the Royal Society of Literature's historic collection, which includes pens belonging to George Eliot and Lord Byron. Personal life and death. Levy was married to Bill Mayblin. She died on 14 February 2019, aged 62, after living with metastatic breast cancer for 15 years.

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Pride Magazine Pride Magazine is a magazine targeting black British, mixed race, African and African-Caribbean women in the United Kingdom. The lifestyle magazine has been in publication since 1991. The magazine has a circulation of more than 30,000 copies each month and is seen by many advertisers as the most effective method to reach Black British in the UK. "Pride" magazine is also the only black media company of any size that still remains in black British ownership alongside uk record label Dice Recordings, and in 2012 celebrated its 21st year as the market leader. "The Guardian" newspaper stated back in 2007 that "Pride magazine has dominated its market for over 15 years." The magazine changed its format in 2011 as it turned 20 to the popular "Glamour"-sized format and is still seen as an inspiring and aspiring magazine for the Black British community.

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Sharon Dodua Otoo Sharon Dodua Otoo (born 1972) is a British writer, publicist and activist. In 2016 she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her first short story in the German language. Life. Sharon Otoo was born in Ilford, London. Her parents were both originally from Accra, Ghana, before moving to Ilford, London where Otoo was born and grew up. Otoo has two siblings. After completing her schooling, she travelled to Hanover in 1992 where she stayed for a year to work as an au pair and developed an interest in the German language. On her return Otoo studied German and Management Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and graduated with a BA (Hons) in 1997. After graduating from Royal Holloway, Otoo returned to Germany, where she has lived ever since, living in Berlin since 2006 with her four sons. In an interview with "The Guardian" newspaper in 2016, Otoo described herself as a “Black British mother, activist, author and editor” and spoke of having mixed feelings towards Britain. “I have a British passport and London is my home,” she said, “but there was still this something in the background music that said: ‘You don’t really belong here’.” Activism. As an activist Otoo has been involved with the Initiative for Black People in Germany ("Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD-Bund)"), serving on the board of directors between 2010 and 2013 as well as a number of other groups. She edits the English-language book series "Witnessed" and has published numerous politically engaged articles on the subjects of culture, diversity and feminism. In her "Guardian" interview of 2016 she explained: “Politics can be very polarising and confrontational. With my writing, I would like to say: we can go out and demonstrate, but at the end of the day all we all want is to be understood and be treated with empathy.” Since 2014 she has worked as a project coordinator for the "Regionale Arbeitsstelle Berlin", an organisation which furthers the social integration and development of children of immigrant families from their early schooling up to professional training. Writing. Otoo’s first novella was entitled "the things i am thinking while smiling politely" [sic], published in February 2012 by Edition Assemblage, a small left-wing German publisher. This was followed in 2014 by another novella "Synchronicity". Both works were originally written in English and translated into German by Mirjam Nuenning. Otoo’s creative writing encompasses magical realism, Afrofuturism, identity issues, relationships and empowerment. She cites German-language writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as inspiration, for “combining sharp analysis of society with humour”, as well as Toni Morrison and Mildred D Taylor, “women writers who made the black experience in the US very tangible to me”. The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2016. Otoo was invited to take part in the 2016 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize competition by "Frankfurter Allgemeine" editor Sandra Kegel. At the time Otoo said she was not aware of the prize’s significance in the German-speaking world. “That was probably a good idea,” she said, “otherwise I wouldn’t have submitted anything.” Otoo’s winning entry was “Herr Gröttrup setzte sich hin” (“Herr Gröttrup sat down”), the story of engineer and V2 rocket-scientist Helmut Gröttrup and his wife Irmgard sitting down to breakfast. Herr Gröttrup’s breakfast egg takes over the narration and rebels against the orderly household by remaining soft despite being boiled for the regulation seven and a half minutes: and so commences a story hailed for its ‘changeling’ character, gentle satire and humour. The award was presented by the Mayor of Klagenfurt, Maria Luise Mathiasschitz, who praised Otoo as “a new voice for a new society”. When questioned by "The Guardian" whether the award represented the jury’s desire to make a stand against the growing xenophobia and right-wing populism in Europe, Otoo said it might have played a part, “but I think in the end they voted for the quality of the story”. The award has a prize of 25,000 Euros and Otoo has said that she intends to use the opportunity to write her first full-length novel.

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Andra Simons Andra Simons is a Bermudian writer, director and actor now residing in London. Biography. Born in Bermuda, Simons graduated from George Brown Theatre School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was well known in the spoken-word movement in Toronto, notably for his collaboration with Sandra Alland in the performance poetry-music band Stumblin' Tongues. In 1997 Simons returned to Bermuda, where in 1999 he co-founded Waterspout Theatre company. He settled in the UK in 2004, and now focuses on poetry and performance. His first volume, "The Joshua Tales", was published by Treehouse Press in 2009, and features collagraphs by Kendra Ezekiel. The work describes the relationship between a poet and another figure, Joshua, who can be seen as a little boy or the poet's shadow, and is set on the fictional island of Pocaroja. One reviewer, on Goodreads, called the book "startling, shocking and brilliant. Indeed mysterious and magical (and controversial)". Simons was selected to represent Bermuda in "Poetry Parnassus", an international gathering of poets at London’s Southbank Centre in June 2012, featuring one poet from each of the 204 nations competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics.

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Reni Eddo-Lodge Reni Eddo-Lodge (born 25 September 1989) is a British journalist and author, whose writing primarily focuses on feminism and exposing structural racism. She has written for a range of publications, including "The New York Times", "The Guardian", "The Independent", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Voice", "BuzzFeed", "Vice", "i-D" and "Dazed & Confused", and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology "New Daughters of Africa", edited by Margaret Busby. In June 2020, Eddo-Lodge's debut book, "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race" (published in 2017), rose 155 places to top the UK non-fiction paperback chart, at the same time as Bernardine Evaristo's novel "Girl, Woman, Other" topped the paperback fiction chart, the first time books by black British women headed both charts. On 16 June 2020 she became the first black British woman to be No. 1 overall in the British book charts. Early life and education. Eddo-Lodge was born and raised in London by a Nigerian mother. She attended St Anne's Catholic High School in Enfield. She studied English literature at University of Central Lancashire, graduating in 2011. While at university, she became involved in feminist activism and the 2010 student protest movement. She was president of the University of Central Lancashire students' union until 2012, and was an elected member of the National Executive Council of the National Union of Students from 2012 to 2013. Career. As a freelance journalist, Eddo-Lodge has written for a number of publications, including "The New York Times", "The Guardian", "The Independent", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Voice", "BuzzFeed", "Vice", "i-D" and "Dazed & Confused". In December 2013, Eddo-Lodge appeared on BBC Radio 4's "Woman's Hour" to discuss the year in feminism alongside activist Caroline Criado Perez. During a discussion on intersectionality, Criado Perez seemed to imply that Eddo-Lodge was involved in online abuse of other feminists. Although Criado Perez apologised for the way her comments could have been interpreted, former Conservative MP Louise Mensch accused Eddo-Lodge of "bullying". Eddo-Lodge has also appeared on BBC Radio 3’s "Night Waves", discussing feminist issues. In April 2014, she was a judge in the BBC "Woman's Hour" Power List 2014. In July 2020, Lodge partnered with Emma Watson and the WOW Foundation to spearhead a project reimagining the London Underground Map, renaming the 270 stops to spotlight women and non-binary people who have shaped the city's history. The initiative will consult writers, museums, and librarians and is set to be published by Haymarket Books on International Women's Day 2021. "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race". In 2017, Eddo-Lodge completed her debut book, "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race"; released by Bloomsbury Publishing, the polemic was made available in bookshops and online in June 2017. Initial reviews were positive, with 2015 Booker Prize-winner Marlon James writing that it was "essential" and "begging to be written". Others such as Trevor Phillips in "The Sunday Times" took issue with the book, with Phillips claiming that it probed "delicately knotted issues with all the subtlety of a blunderbuss". The book won the Jhalak Prize in March 2018. Eddo-Lodge teamed up with podcast producer Renay Richardson to create "About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge", which premiered in March 2018 and has been named one of the best podcasts of 2018 by "British GQ" and "Wired". Seen as a complement to the book, the podcast examined Britain's modern relationship with race. In January 2018, Eddo-Lodge was chosen as one of seven prominent British women to be photographed for British "Vogue", to mark the centenary of British women winning the right to vote. In the 2020 and 2021 editions of the "Powerlist", Eddo-Lodge was listed in the Top 100 of the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent. Impact during the Black Lives Matter protests. In June 2020, Eddo-Lodge's book "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race" rose 155 places in the official "Bookseller" chart. The upsurge in sales took place in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent global Black Lives Matter protests. This meant that she became the first black British woman to top the non-fiction book-selling charts at number 1; the fiction chart was simultaneously topped by the novelist Bernardine Evaristo. Eddo-Lodge stated that she was "dismayed by ... the tragic circumstances in which this achievement came about". On 16 June 2020, Eddo-Lodge became the first black British woman to be No. 1 overall in the British book charts. Criticism. In an interview published by "The Spectator" in October 2020 entitled "Kemi Badenoch: The problem with critical race theory", Badenoch, the Equalities Minister, accused authors such as Eddo-Lodge and Robin DiAngelo, whose book sales surged in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, of using critical race theory to segregate society. More than 100 leading black writers, including Bernardine Evaristo, Malorie Blackman and Benjamin Zephaniah have condemned the comments of Badenoch, not just for the content of her remarks, but also accusing Badenoch of endangering the personal safety of anti-racist writers by singling them out. Eddo-Lodge demanded a correction and apology from "The Spectator", who refused but offered her a column to reply; her complaint is currently lodged with IPSO. "The Independent" also ran the same story and have since printed a correction at the request of Eddo-Lodge. Neither had been in touch with Eddo-Lodge before printing the articles.

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Ben Okri Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Biography. Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo. He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father, Silver, moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old so that he could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. His exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a culture in which his peers at the time claimed to have seen visions of spirits, later provided inspiration for Okri's fiction. At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a short university program in physics because of his youth and lack of qualifications, Okri experienced a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers. Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country. In 1978, Okri moved back to England and went to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. When funding for his scholarship fell through, however, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He describes this period as "very, very important" to his work: "I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified." Okri's success as a writer began when he published his debut novel "Flowers and Shadows" in 1980, at the age of 21. He then served "West Africa" magazine as poetry editor from 1983 to 1986, and was a regular contributor to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period. For three years from 1988, he lived in a Notting Hill flat (rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby): "I brought the first draft of "The Famished Road" with me and that flat was where I began rewriting it... Something about my writing changed round about that time. I acquired a kind of tranquillity. I had been striving for something in my tone of voice as a writer — it was there that it finally came together... That flat is also where I wrote the short stories that became Stars of the New Curfew." His reputation as an author was secured when his novel "The Famished Road" won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the youngest ever winner of the prize at the age of 32. Literary career. Since he published his first novel, "Flowers and Shadows" (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he often is described as one of Africa's leading writers. His best known work, "The Famished Road", which was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize, along with "Songs of Enchantment" and "Infinite Riches" make up a trilogy that follows the life of Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria. Okri's work is particularly difficult to categorise. Although it has been widely categorised as post-modern, some scholars have noted that the seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this categorisation. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is claimed, then his "allegiances are not postmodern [because] he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on some, and not other, truth-claims." Alternative characterisations of Okri's work suggest an allegiance to Yoruba folklore, New Ageism, spiritual realism, magical realism, visionary materialism, and existentialism. Against these analyses, Okri has always rejected the categorisation of his work as magical realism, claiming that this categorisation is the result of laziness on the part of critics and likening this categorisation to the observation that "a horse ... has four legs and a tail. That doesn't describe it." He has instead described his fiction as obeying a kind of "dream logic," and stated that his fiction often is preoccupied with the "philosophical conundrum ... what is reality?" insisting that: He notes the effect of personal choices, "Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." Okri's short fiction has been described as more realistic and less fantastic than his novels, but these stories also depict Africans in communion with spirits, while his poetry and nonfiction have a more overt political tone, focusing on the potential of Africa and the world to overcome the problems of modernity. Okri was made an honorary vice-president of the English Centre for the International PEN and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. On 26 April 2012 Okri was appointed the new vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years prior. Influences. Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts in his father's book shelves, as it was by literature, and Okri cites the influence of both Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his "A Time for New Dreams". His literary influences include "Aesop's Fables", "Arabian Nights", Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Okri's 1999 epic poem, "Mental Fight", also is named after a quotation from the poet William Blake's "And did those feet ...", and critics have noted the close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry. Okri also was influenced by the oral tradition of his people, and particularly, his mother's storytelling: "If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn't correct me, she'd tell me a story." His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works.

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Merle Collins Merle Collins (born 29 September 1950 in Aruba) is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Life. Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government. Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada for England in 1983. Academic work. From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland, where she was selected as 2018–2019 Distinguished Scholar Teacher. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in "From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World" (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in "Slavery and Abolition" (Vol. 15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103). Creative writing. Her first collection of poetry, "Because the Dawn Breaks", was published by Karia Press in London in 1985, at which time Collins was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In England, she began her first novel, "Angel", which was published in 1987. "Angel" follows the lives of Grenadians as they struggled for independence, and is specifically about a young woman going through the political turbulence in Grenada at the time. Her collection of short stories, "Rain Darling", was produced in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, "Rotten Pomerack", in 1992. Her second novel, "The Colour of Forgetting", was published in 1995. A review of her 2003 poetry collection, "Lady in a Boat", states: "Ranging from poems reveling in the nation language of her island to poems that capture the beauty of its flora, Collins presents her island and people going about the business of living. They attempt to come to terms with the past and construct a future emerging out of the crucible of violence. "Lady in a Boat" is a poignant retelling of a period in history when, for a brief moment, Caribbean ascendancy seemed possible. Merle Collins shows how the death of this moment continues to haunt the Caribbean imagination." Her most recent collection of stories, "The Ladies Are Upstairs", was published in 2011.

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Paul Gilroy Paul Gilroy FBA (born 16 February 1956) is a British historian, writer and academic, who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London. Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies". Biography. Gilroy was born in the East End of London to a Guyanese mother, novelist Beryl Gilroy, and an English father, Patrick, who was a scientist. He has a sister, Darla. He was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Sussex in 1978. He moved to Birmingham University, where he completed his PhD in 1986. Gilroy is a scholar of Cultural Studies and Black Atlantic diasporic culture with interests in the "myriad manifestations of black British culture". He is the author of "There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack" (1987), "Small Acts" (1993), "The Black Atlantic" (1993), "Between Camps" (2000; also published as "Against Race" in the United States), and "After Empire" (2004; published as "Postcolonial Melancholia" in the United States), among other works. Gilroy was also co-author of "The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain" (1982), a path-breaking, collectively produced volume published under the imprint of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, where he was a doctoral student working with the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall. Other members of the group that produced "The Empire Strikes Back" include Valerie Amos, Hazel Carby and Pratibha Parmar. Gilroy taught at South Bank University, Essex University, and then for many years at Goldsmiths, University of London, before taking up a tenured post in the US at Yale University, where he was the chair of the Department of African American Studies and Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of Sociology and African American Studies. He was the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics before he joined King's College, London in September 2012. Gilroy worked for the Greater London Council for several years in the 1980s before becoming an academic. During that period, he was associated with the weekly listings magazine "City Limits" (where he was a contributing editor between 1982 and 1984) and "The Wire" (where he had a regular column from 1988 to 1991). Other publications he wrote for during this period include "New Musical Express", "The New Internationalist" and "New Statesman and Society". Gilroy is known as a path-breaking scholar and historian of the music of the Black Atlantic diaspora, as a commentator on the politics of race, nation and racism in the UK, and as an archaeologist of the literary and cultural lives of blacks in the western hemisphere. According to the US "Journal of Blacks in Higher Education" he has been consistently among the most frequently cited black scholars in the humanities and social sciences. He held the top position in the humanities rankings in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008. Gilroy holds honorary doctorates from the Goldsmiths University of London, the University of Liège 2016, The University of Sussex, and the University of Copenhagen. In Autumn 2009 he served as Treaty of Utrecht Visiting Professor at the Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University. Gilroy was awarded a 50th Anniversary Fellowship of Sussex University in 2012. In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In the same year, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was elected an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in April 2018. Gilroy is married to the writer, photographer and academic Vron Ware. The couple live in North London, and have two children, Marcus and Cora. "The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness". Summary. Gilroy's 1993 book "The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness" marks a turning point in the study of diasporas. Applying a cultural studies approach, he provides a study of African intellectual history and its cultural construction. Moving away from all cultural forms that could be deemed ethnic absolutism, Gilroy offers the concept of the Black Atlantic as a space of transnational cultural construction. In his book, Gilroy makes the peoples who suffered from the Atlantic slave trade the emblem of his new concept of diasporic peoples. This new concept breaks with the traditional diasporic model based on the idea that diasporic people are separated by a communal source or origin, offering a second model that privileges hybridity. Gilroy's theme of Double Consciousness involves Black Atlantic striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency being absolutely transformed. Rather than encapsulating the African-American tradition within national borders, Gilroy recognizes the actual significance of European and African travels of many African-American writers. To prove his point, he re-reads the works of African-American intellectuals against the background of a trans-Atlantic context. Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic fundamentally disrupts contemporary forms of cultural nationalism and reopens the field of African-American studies by enlarging the field's interpretive framework. Gilroy offers a corrective to traditional notions of culture as rooted in a particular nation or history, suggesting instead an analytic that foregrounds movement and exchange. In an effort to disabuse scholars of cultural studies and cultural historians in the UK and the U.S. from assuming a "pure" racial, ethnic, and class-based politics/political history, Gilroy traces two legacies of political and cultural thought that emerge through cross-pollination. Gilroy critiques New Leftists for assuming a purely nationalist identity that in fact was influenced by various Black histories and modes of exchange. Gilroy's initial claim seeks to trouble the assumptive logics of a "pure" western history (canon), offering instead a way to think these histories as mutually constituted and always already entangled. Gilroy uses the transatlantic slave trade to highlight the influence of "routes" on black identity. He uses the image of a ship to represent how authentic black culture is composed of cultural exchanges since the slave trade stifled blacks' ability to connect to a homeland. He claims that there was a cultural exchange as well as a commodity exchange that defines the transatlantic slave trade and thus black culture. In addition, he discusses how Black people and Black cultures were written out of European countries and cultures via the effort to equate white people with institutions and cultures, which causes whiteness to be conflated with Europe as a country and Black people being ignored and excluded. This causes Blackness and "Europeanness" to be viewed as separate entities lacking symbiosis. Whiteness and Europeanness even went so far as to create a culture such that Blackness becomes a threat to the sanctity of these European cultures. To further an understanding of this, one can think of how race is a taboo subject in Germany, which allows Blackness to never be introduced as a dimension of what it means to be German, allowing Black people and their struggles with racism to be unnamed, unmarked, and ignored. An example of how Gilroy and his concepts in "The Black Atlantic" directly affected a specific field of African-American studies is its role in defining and influencing the shift between the political black British movement of the 1960/70s to the 1980/90s. Gilroy came to reject outright the working-class movements of the 1970s and '80s on the basis that the system and logic behind the movements were fundamentally flawed as a result of their roots in the way of thinking that not only ignored race but also the trans-Atlantic experience as an integral part of the black experience and history. This argument is expanded upon in one of his previous co-authored books, "The Empire Strikes Back" (1983), which was supported by the (now closed) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham in the UK. "The Black Atlantic" received an American Book Award in 1994. The book has subsequently been translated into Italian, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. The influence of the study is generally accepted to be profound, though academics continue to debate in exactly what form its greatest significance may lie. The theoretical use of the ocean as a liminal space alternative to the authority of nation-states has been highly generative in diasporic studies, in spite of Gilroy's own desire to avoid such conflations. The image of water and migration has been taken up as well by later scholars of the Black diaspora, including Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Stephanie E. Smallwood, who expand Gilroy's theorizations by engaging questions of queerness, transnationality, and the middle passage. Academic responses and criticisms. Among the academic responses to Gilroy's Black Atlantic thesis are: "Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke" (2012), edited by Joseph Pivato, and George Elliott Clarke's "Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope Time,' or Nationalizing Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic"" (1996, "Canadian Ethnic Studies" 28.3). Additionally, scholar Tsiti Ella Jaji discusses Gilroy and his conceptualization of the Black Atlantic as the "inspiration and provocation" for her 2014 book "Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity". While finding Gilroy’s discussion of music in the Black diaspora compelling and inspiring, Jaji has two main points of contention that provoked her to critique and to dissect his theories, the first being his failure to include continental Africa in this space of music production, creating an understanding of black diaspora that is exclusive of Africa. Jaji's second point is that Gilroy fails to examine the role that gender plays in Black music production. Jaji discusses how Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic", while enriching our collective understanding of trans-Atlantic Black cultural exchange, devalues the incorporation of gender into his analysis, as can be seen in chapter one of "The Black Atlantic", where Gilroy says: "Black survival depends upon forging a new means to build alliances above and beyond petty issues like language, religion, skin colour, and to a lesser extent gender." Further, Gilroy did not include female voices in his discussion of music and trans-Atlantic Black cultural exchange, which Jaji argues contributes to a gendered understanding of pan-Africanism that is largely male-dominated. An additional academic response to Gilroy's work is by scholar Julian Henriques. Gilroy concludes the first chapter of his book "The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness" with the quote: "social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes...Artistic expression...therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation" (Gilroy, 40). This quote about the liberatory potential of art as a transatlantic cultural product. Gilroy argues that for Black people forms of culture take on a heightened meaning in light of Black persons being excluded from representation in the traditional political apparatus. As such, Gilroy argues that culture is the mode through which Black persons should aspire to liberation. In working to understand Black culture, Gilroy implores us as readers to focus on routes of movement of Black persons and Black cultural production as opposed to focusing on roots of origin. However, scholar Julian Henriques argues Gilroy's focus on routes in itself is limiting to our understanding of the Black diaspora. Henriques introduces the idea of propagation of vibration, described as the diffusion of a spectrum of frequencies through a variety of media, in his paper Sonic diaspora, vibrations, and rhythm: thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session (Henriques, 221). This theory of the propagation of vibrations provides language to understand the diffusion of vibrations beyond the material (accessible) sonic and musical fields or the physical circulation of objects that can be tracked through Gilroy's routes. Henriques described vibrations as having corporeal (kinetic) and ethereal (meaning based) qualities that can be diffused similarly to the accessible fields, and argues that Gilroy's routes language does not encapsulate these frequencies of vibrations (224–226). When considered together, Henriques and Gilroy's writing suggests that these plethora of vibrational frequencies propagate through the Black diaspora as part of Black musical production, with the potential to be used as a mode of liberatory practice.

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Raymond Antrobus Raymond Antrobus (born 1986) is a British poet, educator and writer, who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019 he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019 Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection "The Perseverance", praised by chair of the judges Kate Clanchy as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. Biography. Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, east London, to an English mother and a Jamaican father who in the 1960s had emigrated to England to work. As a young child Antrobus was thought to have learning difficulties until his deafness was discovered when he was six years old. He became a teacher and was one of the first recipients of an MA degree in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has had fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works 3 and Jerwood Compton. In 2015 he was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate of London. Interviewed in 2016, he said: "I've had many jobs working in removals, gyms, swimming pools, security, etc, but now I make my living off teaching and touring my poetry... and I've never felt more useful working in education as a Jamaican British poet." Of his beginnings as a poet, he says: "When I realised that I wanted to pursue poetry as a career I started looking for a community. At first I came across the London Slam and Open Mic scene, which to me is more of a community than it is a genre. ... and once I found that community I felt very nurtured by it. So for me, certainly there were people like Karen McCarthy Woolfe, Jacob Sam-La Rose, and Roger Robinson who were doing a lot of mentoring at the time, but really my first poetry mentor was Malika Booker, which must have been when I was about 21." A founding member of Chill Pill at The Albany in Deptford and the Keats House Poets Forum, Antrobus co-curated shows featuring such people as Kate Tempest, Sabrina Mahfouz, Inua Ellams, Kayo Chingyoni, Warsan Shire, Anthony Anaxagorou and Hannah Lowe. Antrobus has read and performed at major festivals and internationally, including in South Africa, Kenya, North America, Sweden, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and has held multiple residencies in schools, as well as at Pupil Referral Units. His work has been widely published in many literary magazines, journals and other outlets, among them BBC 2, BBC Radio 4, "Poetry Review", "New Statesman", "POETRY magazine", "The Rialto", "Magma Poetry", "Shooter Literary Journal", "The Missing Slate", "Media Diversified", "The Deaf Poets Society", "The Big Issue", "The Jamaica Gleaner" and "The Guardian". In 2019 he headlined the London Book Fair as "Poet of the Fair". Writing. In 2012, Burning Eye Books published "Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus", about which one reviewer wrote: "Exploring themes of outsider introspection, family connections, love and tangential inspiration, bestriding the continents in search of the answers to the keys questions, it's a chapbook that summons a chest-swelling furore of emotions." His second pamphlet, "To Sweeten Bitter" — "a very personal exploration of the father/son relationship" — came out in 2017, the same year as his poem "Sound Machine", first published in "The Poetry Review", won the Geoffrey Dearmer Award, judged by Ocean Vuong. Antrobus's debut book, "The Perseverance", was published by Penned in the Margins in 2018, going on to many accolades and critical acclaim. Among those who gave positive reviews of "The Perseverance", Kaveh Akbar said: "It’s magic, the way this poet is able to bring together so much — deafness, race, masculinity, a mother’s dementia, a father’s demise — with such dexterity. Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you’re likely to find writing today.’" Describing the book as "an insightful, frank and intimate rumination on language, identity, heritage, loss and the art of communication", Malika Booker writes: "These colloquial, historical and conversational poems plunder the space of missing, and absence in speech/ our conversations — between what we hear and what we do not say. ... Thought-provoking and eloquent monologues explore the poet’s Jamaican/ British heritage with such compassion, where the spirit and rhythm of each speaker dominates. These are courageous autobiographical poems of praise, difficulties, testimony and love.’" The collection was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and won the Ted Hughes Award (judged by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw) in March 2019, followed in May 2019 by the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the first time to a poet. "The Perseverance" was also shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was chosen as Poetry Book of the Year by both "The Guardian" and "The Sunday Times", and Book of the Year by the Poetry School. Also in May 2019 Antrobus was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry. In December 2019 "The Perseverance" was awarded the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. Antrobus was appointed an MBE in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to literature.

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Ferdinand Dennis Ferdinand Dennis (born 18 March 1956) is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background (a region probably marked more than any other by movements and migration), Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, "Duppy Conqueror" (1998), a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis' non-fiction centres on journeying rather than arrival, from "Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain" (1988) to "Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa" (2000)." Biography. Ferdinand Dennis was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in north Paddington, London, where he and his siblings – two brothers and a sister – relocated in 1964 to join their parents. Dennis read sociology at Leicester University (1975–78), after which he was employed as an educational researcher in Handsworth, Birmingham. He studied for a master's degree at Birkbeck College, London University (1978–79). In 1991 he was made Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck. He received a Wingate Scholarship in 1995. He has lectured in Nigeria, and from 2003 to 2011 taught Creative and Media Writing courses at Middlesex University. As a broadcaster, he has written and presented numerous talks and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 – such as the series "After Dread and Anger" (1989), "Journey Round My People", for which he travelled in West Africa, "Back To Africa" (1990) and "Work Talk" (1991–92, produced by Marina Salandy-Brown) – as well as a television programme about Africa for Channel 4. Dennis has also worked as a journalist for publications including "Frontline" and "City Limits" magazines. His writing has been published in a range of magazines, newspapers and anthologies, among them "The Guardian", "Granta", "Critical Quarterly", "Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader" (ed. Kwesi Owusu, 2000), "Hurricane Hits England: An Anthology of Writing About Black Britain" (ed. Onyekachi Wambu, 2000), and "IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain" (2000). He is the author of three novels – "The Sleepless Summer" (1989), "The Last Blues Dance" (1996); and "Duppy Conqueror" (1998) – and two travelogues: "Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain" (1988) – his first book, which won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize – and "Back to Africa: A Journey" (1992), in which he visited Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal. With Naseem Khan, he co-edited "Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa" (2000). He also was a co-researcher (with Kole Omotoso and Alfred Zack-Williams) of the 1992 compilation "West Africa Over 75 Years: selections from the raw material of history", edited by Kaye Whiteman. Dennis was elected to the management committee of the Society of Authors in October 2017, to serve for a three-year term. Critical reception. Dennis's first novel, "The Sleepless Summer" (1989), is said to enjoy "cult status in Britain's African-Caribbean community", while his second, "The Last Blues Dance" (1996), is described as "Warm, humorous, poignant... a wonderfully engaging novel that weaves together the lives of a rich cast of characters, creating a sense of both community and individuality, tenderness and suspense." In praise of 1998's "Duppy Conqueror", "World Literature Today" said: "Ferdinand Dennis is faultless in his depiction of artifacts, customs, speech, and behavior in the three continents of Marshall's adventures; his descriptions of the externals and his analyses of the internal motivations of his characters–both minor and principal–are quite arresting, whether he is writing about 'the unintended arrogance of the shy person' or commenting on 'love that came without duty and expired without money, leaving a rancid odour of guilt.' "Duppy Conqueror" is neither a bildungsroman nor a political treatise, though it shares some of the elements of both subgenres; it is almost a fictional biography of a sixty-year-old thinking proletarian searching for racial and ideological roots. Some readers will read Dennis's novel as a roman a clef, others as a contemporary version of Claude McKay's "Banana Bottom" and "Home to Harlem" extended to Africa; but few will read it without admiration and considerable satisfaction." Other favourable coverage came from "The Times Higher Education": "This very ambitious novel is nothing less than a history of the twentieth century, seen though Afro-Caribbean spectacles... Framed as a postcolonial picaresque, it has a hurtling energy which raises it above Dennis's previous work. Finally, and most importantly, Duppy Conqueror brims with humour and low comedy. It is a pleasing change from the wilfully ponderous treatment of historical memory and diasporic identity in much contemporary postcolonial fiction." According to "The Independent"′s Rachel Halliburton: ""Duppy Conqueror" presents a giant's eye view of the exiled African psyche. An ambitious and compelling novel... This is a novel packed to the brim with layers of symbolism, individual and cultural memories, and fascinating historical stories. Reading it once just won't be enough." Calling "Voices of the Crossing" (2000) "a fine anthology of 14 memoirs by writers from Africa, the Caribbean, India and Pakistan" (E. A. Markham, Attia Hosain, Beryl Gilroy, John Figueroa, David Dabydeen, Mulk Raj Anand, Dom Moraes, Buchi Emecheta, Rukhsana Ahmad, G. V. Desani, Homi Bhabha, James Berry, Farrukh Dhondy and Nirad Chaudhuri), the "New Statesman" reviewer Robert Winder wrote: "...the memoirs in this book, while not the major works of any of the writers concerned, might be as significant as their more ambitious work... They are more direct, eye-opening tributes to the spirited resolve that underpins all literature, not just 'colonial' literature."

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Adewale Maja-Pearce Adewale Maja-Pearce (born 1953) is an Anglo-Nigerian writer, journalist and literary critic, who is best known for his documentary essays. He is the author of several books, including the memoirs "In My Father's Country" (1987) and "The House My Father Built" (2014), several other non-fiction titles and a collection of short stories entitled "Loyalties and Other Stories" (1986). Early years and education. Adewale Maja-Pearce was born in London, England, to British and Yoruba parents. He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, attending St. Gregory's College, Obalende (1965–69), and returned to Britain for further education at the University College of Wales, Swansea (BA, 1972–75), and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University (1984–86), where he gained a Master of Arts degree in African studies. Literary career. He was employed a researcher at "Index on Censorship" and became the journal's Africa Editor (1986–97), as well as being Series Editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series (1986–94). Having returned to Nigeria, he lives in Surulere, Lagos, in a house inherited by his father, which he has written about in his 2014 memoir "The House My Father Built". Maja-Pearce runs an editorial services agency called Yemaja, as well as a small publishing company, The New Gong. Writing. Maja-Pearce has written in various genres, his early published work featuring short stories drawing on his Nigerian background, with his collection "Loyalties and Other Stories" appearing in 1986. Most notable, however, as an essayist, he has written several non-fiction books, including the 2005 "Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays", which in the opinion of critic Uzor Uzoatu "affords us the opportunity of dipping into the immense world of Maja-Pearce as he, in twenty-three heartfelt essays and reviews, illuminates the benighted mores of modern Nigeria, the identity question in South Africa … and engages with seminal minds across the world. ...This book is a treasure, a profound testament." Maja-Pearce was the editor of Christopher Okigbo's "Collected Poems" (1986), as well as of anthologies such as "The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English" (1990) and "Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?: Essays on Censorship" (1991), and also wrote the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human rights violations in Nigeria. His memoirs include 1987's "In My Father's Country: A Nigerian Journey" and, most recently, "The House My Father Built" (2014), which the reviewer for the online magazine "Bakwa" described in the following terms: "a harrowing tale of Nigeria as it then was (1993–1999); a memoir of Adewale Maja-Pearce’s quest to possess his birth right, his country and personal dignity. ...Mr Maja-Pearce presents the greatest cast of characters in the history of Nigerian literature. And nothing comes close, no cliché, except you consider "Basi and Company" by Ken Saro-Wiwa." Maja-Pearce has written journalism, essays and reviews for a range of international publications, among them "The New York Times", "Granta", "The London Review of Books", "The Times Literary Supplement", "The London Magazine", and "Prospect". He became a contributing opinion writer for "The International New York Times" in 2013. Personal life. Maja-Pearce is married to the artist/activist Juliet Ezenwa.

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Ignatius Sancho Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 – 14 December 1780) was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. Born on a slave ship in the Atlantic, Sancho was sold into slavery in the Spanish colony of New Grenada. After his parents died, Sancho's owner took the two-year-old orphan to England and gifted him to three Greenwich sisters, where he remained their slave for eighteen years. Unable to bear being a servant to them, Sancho ran away to the Montagu House, whose owner had taught him how to read and encouraged Sancho's budding interest in literature. After spending some time as a servant in the household, Sancho left and started his own business as a shopkeeper, while also starting to write and publish various essays, plays and books. Sancho quickly became involved in the nascent British abolitionist movement, which sought to outlaw both the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself, and he quickly became one of the most devoted supporters of the movement. Sancho's status as a male property-owner meant he was legally qualified to vote in a general-election, a right he exercised in 1774 and 1780, becoming the first known Black Briton to have voted in Britain. Gaining fame in Britain as "the extraordinary Negro", to British abolitionists, Sancho became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and the immorality of the slave trade and slavery. Sancho died in 1780, with his "The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African", edited and published two years after his death, being one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English from a first-hand experience. Early life. Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in what was known as the Middle Passage. His mother died not long after arriving in the Spanish colony of New Granada, which formed parts of modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. His father reportedly took his own life rather than live as a slave. Sancho's owner took the young orphan, barely two years old, to England and gave him to three unmarried sisters living together in Greenwich, where he lived from 1731 to 1749. The Duke of Montagu, a frequent visitor to the sisters, became impressed by Sancho's intellect, frankness, and amiability. The Duke not only encouraged Sancho to read, but also lent him books from his personal library at Blackheath. Life in Britain. Sancho's informal education made his lack of freedom at Greenwich unbearable, and he ran away to the Montagu House in 1749. For two years until her death in 1751, Sancho worked as a butler for the Duchess of Montagu at her residence, where he immersed himself in music, poetry, reading, and writing. Upon her death in 1751, Sancho received an annuity of £30 (about £7000 in 2020 according to the Bank of England inflation calculator) and a year's salary. On 17 December 1758 he married a West Indian woman, Anne Osborne, becoming a devoted husband and father. They had seven children: Frances Joanna, Ann Alice, Elizabeth Bruce, Jonathan William, Lydia, Katherine Margaret, and William Leach Osborne. Around the time of the birth of their third child, Sancho became a valet to George Montagu, the son-in-law of his previous patron. Sancho remained a valet until 1773. In 1768, British artist Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of Sancho at the same time as the Duchess of Montagu sat for her portrait by Gainsborough as well. By the late 1760s, Sancho had already become well accomplished and was considered by many to be a man of refinement. In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Sancho wrote to Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne encouraging the famous writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters, Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in "Tristram Shandy", wherein Tom described the mistreatment of an African servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon that he had visited. Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature. Following the publication of the Sancho-Sterne letters, Sancho became widely known as a man of letters. Sancho, a British subject and voter in Westminster, noted that despite being in the country since the age of two he felt he was "only a lodger, and hardly that." In other writings he describes his life: "Went by water – had a coach home – were gazed at – followed, etc. etc. – but not much abused." On another occasion, he writes: "They stopped us in the town and most generously insulted us." Shopkeeper. In 1774 with help from Montagu, Sancho, suffering from ill health with gout, opened a grocery shop, offering merchandise such as tobacco, sugar and tea, at 19 Charles Street in London's Mayfair, Westminster. These were goods then mostly produced by slaves in the West Indies. As a shopkeeper Sancho enjoyed more time to socialise, correspond with his many friends, share his enjoyment of literature, and his shop had many visitors. He wrote and published a "Theory of Music" and two plays. As a financially independent male householder living in London, he qualified to vote in the parliamentary elections of 1774 and 1780; he was the first person of African origin known to have voted in Britain. At this time he also wrote letters and in newspapers, under his own name and under the pseudonym "Africanus". Among his acquaintances were figures such as Thomas Gainsborough, the Shakespearean actor David Garrick, violin virtuoso Felice Giardini, the preacher William Dodd, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, and the novelist Laurence Sterne. Nollekens gave Sancho a plaster cast of his 1766 marble bust of Sterne. Sancho received many prominent visitors at his shop, including statesman and abolitionist Charles James Fox, who successfully steered a resolution through Parliament pledging it to abolish the slave trade. He oversaw a Foreign Slave Trade Bill in spring 1806 that prohibited British subjects from participating in the trading of slaves with the colonies of Britain's wartime enemies, thus eliminating two-thirds of the slave trade passing through British ports. Death. Ignatius Sancho died from the effects of gout on 14 December 1780 and was buried in the churchyard of St Margaret's, Westminster. There is no memorial at the church, as the grave stones (which lie flat) in the churchyard were covered over with grass in 1880 and no inscription was found for him when a record was made of the existing epitaphs. He was the first person of African descent known to be given an obituary in the British press. "Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho". While his correspondence often included domestic issues, it also commented on the political and literary life in 18th-century Britain. One of his more famous series of letters includes his eye-witness accounts of the Gordon Riots in June 1780. The angry mob passed outside his shop on Charles Street. The protest that began when Protestants protested against parliamentary extension of Roman Catholic enfranchisement grew into a violent mob of 100,000 looting and burning parts of London. In 1782 Frances Crewe, a correspondent of Sancho, arranged for 160 of his letters to be published in the form of two volumes entitled "The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African". The book sold very well, with more than 2,000 subscribing to it. His widow received in royalties more than £500, . Joseph Jekyll provided a memoir of Sancho for the first edition, and four more editions had been issued by 1803. Sancho's son, William Leach Osborne Sancho, inherited the shop on Charles Street, Mayfair, and transformed it into a printing and book-selling business. In 1803 at this shop he printed a fifth edition of "Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho with Memoirs of His Life by Joseph Jekyll", with a frontispiece engraving by Bartolozzi. "I am Sir an Affrican – with two ffs – if you please – & proud am I to be of a country that knows no politicians – nor lawyers – nor [word deleted] ... nor thieves of any denomination save Natural..." Sancho was unusually blunt in his response to a letter from Jack Wingrave, John Wingrave's son. Jack wrote about his negative reaction to people of colour based on his own experience in India during the 1770s. Sancho's response was as such: I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom – and for the many blessings I enjoy in it – shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers and blessings); I say it is with reluctance, that I must observe your country's conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West-Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators – indeed of all Christian navigators – is money – money – money – for which I do not pretend to blame them – Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part – to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love – society – and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace – with the commodities of his respective land – Commerce attended with strict honesty – and with Religion for its companion – would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. In Africa, the poor wretched natives blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil – are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing: the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings encouraged by their Christian customers who carry them strong liquors to enflame their national madness – and powder – and bad fire-arms – to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping. Further reading. Facs. Set for the harpsichord. (London: Thompson, 2014). Interpreted by V. Webster, illus. D. Durant, research S Petchy and P Cooper. Pbk 97 pp. By Ignatius Sancho, 191 pp; ed. & intro. by S. Petchey (64 pp). 22 dances & facs. of their music and two more pieces. A recording of these dances is available from Green Ginger at https://greengingerband.co.uk. .

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Helen (charles) Helen (charles) is a Black British lesbian feminist writer and activist, who has written on womanism and the concept of whiteness. (charles) writes the shape of her name to recall the history of imposition of "family" names on black slaves.

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Anthony Joseph Anthony Joseph (born 12 November 1966 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. Biography. Joseph was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he was raised by his grandparents. He began writing as a young child and cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the spiritual Baptist church that his grandparents attended, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech. Joseph has lived in the United Kingdom since 1989. In September 2004 he was chosen by Renaissance One and Arts Council England as one of 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature, appearing in the "A Great Day in London" photograph and performing at the event at the British Library. In April 2005, he served as the British Council's first poet-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles. Joseph holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has taught at London Metropolitan University, University of Surrey Roehampton, South Thames College, and Birkbeck College. Joseph is the author of the poetry collections "Desafinado" (1994), "Teragaton" (1997), "Bird Head Son" (2009) and "Rubber Orchestras" (2011). His debut novel, "The African Origins of UFOs", was published by Salt Publishing in November 2006. Described as an "afro-psychedelic-noir, a poetic work of metafiction, mythology and afro-futurism", the book was endorsed by Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Lauri Ramey, who hailed it in her introduction as "a future fiction classic". Reviewing the book, Ali Alizadeh called Joseph "both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa's past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future. Contemporary literature doesn't come a lot more sophisticated and intriguing than this." Joseph received an Arts Council award to conduct a reading tour of the UK in support of the book. In 2007, the tour continued to Europe with a 10-city tour of Germany and readings in the US. Joseph also performs and records as a spoken-word vocalist. His debut album with The Spasm Band band Leggo de Lion was released in April 2007 by Kindred Spirits. His collection of poetry, "Bird Head Son", was published by Salt Publishing in February 2009, coinciding with the release of his album "Bird Head Son". The album was recorded over two days in Meudon, France, with guests Keziah Jones, Joseph Bowie, and vibraphonist David Neerman. Joseph's album "Rubber Orchestras" was released in August 2011. His poetry collection, also entitled "Rubber Orchestras", was published by Salt Publishing in November 2011. "Time", his first solo album, was released on 3 February 2013. It was produced by American bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello. He has also guested on albums by Mop Mop and Adam Pierończyk. In 2012, Joseph represented Trinidad and Tobago at the Poetry Parnassus Festival on London's South Bank Centre. "Caribbean Roots" was released in June 2016 by Strut Records and Heavenly Sweetness. In 2018 Peepal Tree Press published his novel "Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon". "Kitch" was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award, and long listed for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2019, his third novel, "The Frequency of Magic" was published, also by Peepal Tree Press.

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Bolu Babalola Boluwatito Temilola Babalola (born 24 February 1991) is a British author, television writer, and journalist. Her debut novel "Love in Colour" was published in 2020 and became a "Sunday Times" Bestseller. She has written for publications such as "Dazed", "Vice", "Vulture", "GQ", "Cosmopolitan", and "Stylist". In 2021, she was included in the Forbes "30 under 30" for Media and Marketing, Europe. Early life. Babalola was born in Guy's Hospital in Southwark to Nigerian Yoruba parents and grew up in East London. She attended Valentines High School in Ilford for sixth form. She went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Reading in 2012 and later a Master of Arts in American Politics and History from University College London in 2018. Career. Babalola began her career working as an assistant writer and producer for BBC Comedy, contributing to "The Javone Prince Show" and "Tracey Ullman's Show". She pitched the web series "Ackee & Saltfish", assistant producing the pilot episode. As of August 2020, she was working on a television programme with Tiger Aspect. She was shortlisted in 2016 for "The Guardian" and 4th Estate B4ME prize for her debut story, "Netflix and Chill". A television and film columnist for "Dazed", Babalola is a self-professed "Romcomoisseur". She named "Insecure" by Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore, "Brown Sugar", "When" "Harry Met Sally", "My Best Friend's Wedding", "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist", "Lovesick", and "New Girl" as her favourite romcoms. She praised Michaela Coel's "I May Destroy You". She called the characters Ashley Banks from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and the titular character of the series "Moesha", played by Brandy Norwood, important examples of "just dark skin black girls living". In 2018, Babalola sent a tweet with a photoshopped image of her and Michael B. Jordan, asking Twitter to help find her "holiday romance" as a joke. The tweet went viral, and was featured on "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Steve Harvey Show". Jordan and Babalola later met when he was promoting a film in London. Babalola explained: "At the Q&A at the end, I stood up and said: "Hi, it's me, the love of your life." It was mortifying, but he was so lovely." She said that her Twitter activity has helped her career, and that Twitter is an important space for building community, especially among Black women. "Love in Colour". Babalola's debut novel, "Love in Colour", was published in 2020 by Headline Publishing Group. The collection of short stories "remixes ancient love stories from Asia, Greece, and around Africa for a new audience", including pre-colonial Yoruba stories, Orisha traditions, and Ancient Soninke tales. She stated that she hopes the book is a "step towards decolonizing tropes of love". Babalola changed many of the stories to make the female characters more empowered, and to demonstrate consent and love without suffering. She has said that its important to her to write about and for Black women, stating: "you're used to seeing white women play [romantic archetypes]. They're fun girls, independent, they have their own minds and they have access to their own iteration of romance. Why don't we have that?" "Love in Colour" was featured on 13 November 2020 as "book of the week" of BBC2's book club programme "Between the Covers", hosted by Sara Cox. Fellow writers Candice Carty-Williams, David Nicholls, and Meg Cabot have praised "Love in Colour", with Babalola saying "That's when it felt real... Meg Cabot who I adored growing up, who I still adore, loves the book… That's the moment when it sunk in." Upcoming work. In August 2020, Babalola began teasing her next novel, "a collegiate rom-com set in an Afro-Caribbean Society in a UK university, where enemies become friends and eventually lovers". In January 2021, it was announced she had signed a deal with Headline Review for "Honey & Spice", as well as another untitled project. William Morrow and Company acquired the North America rights. "Honey & Spice" is set for a summer 2022 release date.

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Trevor Phillips Mark Trevor Phillips (born 31 December 1953) is a British writer, broadcaster and former politician. In March 2015, Phillips was appointed as the President of the Partnership Council of the John Lewis Partnership for a three-year term, being the first external appointment since 1928. Phillips became head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003 and was the chairman of its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission of the U.K. (EHRC). During his career, he was a television presenter and executive. After retirement, he continued to chair numerous corporate and social boards. Early life and education. Mark Trevor Phillips was born in Islington, London, the youngest of ten children. His parents emigrated from then British Guiana in 1950. He spent his childhood partly in British Guiana, and partly in Wood Green, north London; he attended Wood Green County Grammar School (became Wood Green Comprehensive in 1967) on White Hart Lane, but took his A-levels at Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana. He returned to London to study for a BSc in Chemistry at Imperial College London. Broadcasting and writing career. Phillips worked initially as a researcher for London Weekend Television (LWT), before being promoted to head of current affairs in 1992, remaining in the post until 1994. He produced and presented "The London Programme" for LWT and has worked on projects for the BBC and Channel 4. With his brother, the crime writer Mike Phillips, he wrote "Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain" (1998, HarperCollins, ). He has won three Royal Television Society Awards, including Documentary Series of the Year for "Windrush" in 1999. He is a Vice President of the RTS. In March 2015, Channel 4 aired "Things We Won't Say About Race (That Are True)", a feature-length documentary written and presented by Phillips and co-produced by Pepper Productions and Outline Productions. Philips was invited to analyse and interpret the survey for the documentary "What British Muslims Really Think" aired April 2016, which followed similar themes to "Things We Won't Say About Race (That Are True)" relating to exploring racial truths through statistics. Political activity. As a student at Imperial he became president of its students' union. In 1978 he was elected president of the National Union of Students as a candidate for the Broad Left. Phillips was active in the voluntary sector, serving as chairman of the Runnymede Trust, a think-tank promoting ethnic equality, from 1993 to 1998, and as a commissioner for a number of other charities. He also served as chairman of the London Arts Board. His long-standing friendship with Peter Mandelson (who worked with Phillips at LWT and was best man at his first wedding) brought him close to the New Labour project and he became friendly with Tony Blair. Phillips joined the Labour Party in London in 1996. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1999 New Year Honours list for services to broadcast journalism. Later in 1999, Phillips ran to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London. Phillips was initially reported to be Blair's preferred choice for the role, and when Blair called for the party to swiftly unite behind one candidate, Ken Livingstone, a left-winger and favourite to win the nomination, offered to form a joint ticket with Phillips as his running mate. Phillips described Livingstone's offer as "patronising" in a response that was seen as an accusation of racism, though Phillips later denied this. Following this and other controversies, including his decision to send his children to a private school, Phillips withdrew from the race a few months later and was not on the final shortlist of candidates. Instead, he accepted an offer to be running mate to [[Frank Dobson]]. Although Dobson won the nomination, his candidature was harmed by the perception that the contest was "fixed" by the use of an electoral college. Livingstone ran as an independent and won. The Labour Party designated Phillips as a member of the [[London Assembly]] on 4 May 2000 as one of its 'top-up' candidates. Phillips served as chairman of the Assembly until February 2003, before resigning his seat to take up his appointment at the [[Commission for Racial Equality]]. In March 2020, Phillips was suspended from Labour following allegations of [[Islamophobia]]. Following the announcement, Phillips defended his comments about [[British Muslims]] on [[BBC Radio 4]]'s [[Today (BBC Radio 4)|"Today" programme]]. The interview was mentioned in the analysis by former Tory party chair, [[Sayeeda Warsi]]. Critics of the move include a former MP familiar with similar accusations, Stephanie Phillips (no relation), published in her current newspaper, as well as an opinion piece at "[[The New Arab]]". Multiculturalism: disagreements with Ken Livingstone. Phillips and Livingstone had a frosty relationship throughout Phillips' time on the London Assembly, and Phillips' opposition to [[multiculturalism]] saw them clash time and again during his tenure at the CRE. In a "Times" interview in April 2004, Phillips called for the government to reject its support for multiculturalism, claiming it was out of date and legitimised "separateness" between communities, and instead should "assert a core of Britishness". In 2006, Livingstone accused Phillips of "pandering to the right" so much that he "would soon join the [[British National Party|BNP]]". Phillips himself replied that his views had been "well documented" and "well supported". Phillips has made speeches stating that "it was right to ask hard questions about multicultural Britain". Although he apologised for his presentation of research by the Australian academic Michael Poulsen of statistics on levels of segregation, which had led to some controversy, he welcomed the focus on integration of different communities after the launch of A Commission for Integration and Cohesion. Phillips has subsequently cited recent work by, amongst others, Professor [[Eric Kaufmann]] of Birkbeck College, London showing that white and non-white segregation in London and Birmingham has increased during the census period to 2011. After the 2005 riots in France, Phillips warned that "inequality, race and powerlessness" can be "incendiary". He was invited to advise the French government and in September 2007 was awarded the [[Legion of Honour|Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur]]. Phillips wrote in May 2016: "Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion" by ignoring the effects of mass immigration to the United Kingdom, explicitly comparing his warning to [[Enoch Powell]]'s 1968 [[Rivers of Blood speech]]. Views on free speech. Phillips has spoken on the need for free speech to "allow people to offend each other." These comments came after the protests against the Danish cartoons satirising the Islamic prophet, Muhammad which sparked protests in the Muslim world. He stated in an ITV interview: "One point of Britishness is that people can say what they like about the way we should live, however absurd, however unpopular it is." While supporting free speech, Phillips has spoken out against providing the far right with a platform. Discussing the [[Oxford Union]]'s invitation to [[British National Party|BNP]] leader [[Nick Griffin]] and Holocaust denier [[David Irving]], he told the BBC's "Andrew Marr Show": "As a former president of the National Union of Students, I'm ashamed that this has happened. This is not a question of freedom of speech, this is a juvenile provocation. What I would say to students at Oxford is: You're supposed to be brilliant. Put your brains back in your head. People fought and died for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. They didn't fight and die for it so it could be used as a sort of silly parlour game. This is just a piece of silly pranksterism and the issues are too serious to be left to that." Griffin has since hit back at Phillips by declaring him a "black racist" in an interview given to Channel 4. Opposition to 42-day detention. In early June 2008 Phillips as EHRC head voiced that he "remain[ed] unpersuaded that the government has yet provided compelling evidence for what our legal advice shows would be an effective suspension of some human rights". Phillips was responding to the growing uproar surrounding proposals to amend counter-terrorism legislation to permit 42 days' detention without charge. He raised the possibility of the EHRC legally testing the legislation by judicial review. In the event, the Brown government maintained the limit on detention without charge at 28 days (although in practice a 14-day limit was observed). Following the installation of a [[Cameron–Clegg coalition|Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government]], the limit was in January 2011 allowed to revert to 14 days. Boards and appointments. Phillips is deputy chairman of the board of the [[National Equality Standard]], and other business appointments include chairman of Green Park Diversity Analytics, director of WebberPhillips, a data analytics provider; and director of Pepper Productions, an independent television production company. He is a member of the board of the [[Barbican Arts Centre]] and the Council of [[Aldeburgh Music]]; and a trustee of the Social Mobility Foundation, among other charities. Equality and Human Rights Commission. Phillips became head of the [[Commission for Racial Equality]] in 2003, and on its abolition in 2006 was appointed full-time chairman of its successor, the EHRC (initially called the Commission for Equality and Human Rights), which had a broader remit of combating discrimination and promoting equality across other grounds (age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment). The EHRC also had the role of promoting and defending human rights, and secured recognition as the [[National human rights institutions|national human rights institution]] for England and Wales (alongside separate commissions in Northern Ireland and Scotland). Phillips' tenure as EHRC chairman (which at his request became a part-time position in 2009) was at times controversial. Phillips' tenure as [[Equality and Human Rights Commission|EHRC]] chairman was dogged by controversies and internal dissent. Under his leadership it was reported that six of the body's commissioners departed after expressing concerns about his leadership and probity and others were reported to be considering their position. In 2010 Phillips was investigated regarding alleged attempts to influence a Parliamentary committee (the Joint Committee on Human Rights) writing a report on him. He would have been the first non-politician in over half a century to be convicted of [[contempt of Parliament]], but the Lords Committee found that the allegations were "subjective, and that no firm factual evidence is presented in their support; nor are they borne out by the submissions by individual members of the JCHR." He was cleared of contempt of Parliament and the House of Lords recommended that new and clearer guidance about the conduct of witnesses to Select Committees be issued. However, he was told his behaviour was "inappropriate and ill-advised". Phillips completed his second term of office in September 2012, which, together with his term at the CRE made him the longest serving leader of any UK equality commission. In 2006 Phillips has warned that Britain's current approach to multiculturalism could cause Britain to "sleepwalk towards segregation". He expanded on these views in 2016 a publication by Civitas entitled "Race and Faith: the Deafening Silence", in which he said that "squeamishness about addressing diversity and its discontents risks allowing our country to sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so well for so long." Comparisons between Britain and the United States. In an article published in 2003, Phillips stated "from Rome, through Constantinople to Venice and London, our (European) nations have a history of peacefully absorbing huge, diverse movements of people, driven by war, famine and persecution; and there is no history of long-term ethnic segregation of the kind one can see in any US city". In a March 2008 article for Prospect magazine, Phillips was cool on [[Barack Obama]] as a potential Presidential candidate, and speculated that if he did become President it might "postpone the arrival of a [[post-racial America]]". Following Obama's election, in an interview for "[[The Times]]" on 8 November 2008, Trevor Phillips said that he believed it would be impossible for a black candidate in the United Kingdom to rise to the top in politics because of [[institutional racism]] within the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]], saying: If Barack Obama had lived here I would be very surprised if even somebody as brilliant as him would have been able to break through the institutional stranglehold that there is on power within the Labour party. The comments gained support and criticism from members of ethnic communities in the UK. Personal life. Phillips married Asha Bhownagary, a [[Parsi]] child psychotherapist, in 1981 and they have two daughters. Further reading. [[Category:1953 births]] [[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Alumni of Imperial College London]] [[Category:Associates of the Royal College of Science]] [[Category:Black British politicians]] [[Category:Black British writers]] [[Category:British broadcasters]] [[Category:Commissioners for Racial Equality]] [[Category:English people of Guyanese descent]] [[Category:English television producers]] [[Category:John Lewis Partnership people]] [[Category:Labour Members of the London Assembly]] [[Category:Officers of the Order of the British Empire]] [[Category:People from Wood Green]] [[Category:Presidents of the National Union of Students (United Kingdom)]]

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Aminatta Forna Aminatta Forna, OBE (born 1964) is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, "", and four novels: "Ancestor Stones" (2006), "The Memory of Love" (2010), "The Hired Man" (2013) and "Happiness" (2018). Her novel "The Memory of Love" was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. On 7 March 2014, Forna was announced as the recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction). In 2015 Forna was part of the judging panel which awarded the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award to Yiyun Li. The finalists for the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature were announced in May 2015. The list included Forna and writers, poets and playwrights from around the world. The majority of the finalists were women writers. Forna was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature. Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, sits on the advisory committee for the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, has been a judge on several high-profile prize panels, including the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and continues to champion the work of up-and-coming diverse authors. In 2019, the Scotiabank Giller Prize announced that Forna was one of the judges for the 2019 prize, an award of Cdn $140,000 for a Canadian writer. In March 2019, Forna's "Happiness" was shortlisted for the European Literature Prize, and in April 2019 was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Ondaatje Prize and for the Jhalak Prize Commenting on her work in a wide-ranging interview with Keija Parssinen in "World Literature Today", Forna said: "I think what novelists do is bring into relief something that’s been hiding in plain sight ... describing what it might look like from elsewhere, the view from elsewhere." In a conversation with Maaza Mengiste published to LitHub in December 2020, it was announced that Forna's essay collection "The Window Seat" would be published in May 2021. Background. Aminatta Forna was born in Bellshill, Scotland, in 1964 to a Sierra Leonean father, Mohamed Forna, and a Scottish mother, Maureen Christison. When Forna was six months old the family travelled to Sierra Leone, where Mohamed Forna worked as a physician. He later became involved in politics and entered government, only to resign citing a growth in political violence and corruption. Between 1970 and 1973 he was imprisoned and declared an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience. Mohamed Forna was hanged on charges of treason in 1975. The events of Forna's childhood and her investigation into the conspiracy surrounding her father's death are the subject of the memoir "The Devil That Danced on the Water". The trauma of her father's death is a contributing factor to the common theme of psychological trauma throughout many of her novels. Forna studied law at University College London and was a Harkness Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2013 she assumed a post as Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Between 1989 and 1999 Forna worked for the BBC, both in radio and television, as a reporter and documentary maker in the spheres of arts and politics. She is also known for her Africa documentaries: "Through African Eyes" (1995), "Africa Unmasked" (2002) and "The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu" (2009). Forna is also a board member of the Royal National Theatre and a judge for The Man Booker International Prize 2013. Forna is the founder of The Rogbonko Village Project, a charity begun as an initiative to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. Aminatta Forna is married to the furniture designer Simon Westcott and lives in south-east London. Writing. Forna's work, both fiction and non-fiction, is typically concerned with the prelude and aftermath to war, memory, the conflict between private narratives and official histories, and examines how the gradual accretion of small, seemingly insignificant acts of betrayal find expression in full-scale horror. In her fiction she employs multiple voices and shifting timelines. "The Devil that Danced on the Water". "" (2002), Forna's first book, received wide critical acclaim across the UK and the US. It was broadcast on BBC Radio and went on to become runner-up for the UK's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. This memoir discusses the murder of her father, Mohamed Forna, as he was taken by the state secret police and was executed a year later. The anger and sadness of this traumatic event permeates through the writing in Forna's memoir. "Ancestor Stones". "Ancestor Stones", Forna's second book and first novel, won the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction in the US and the Liberaturpreis in Germany and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. "The Washington Post" named "Ancestor Stones" one of the most important books of 2006. In 2007, Forna was named by "Vanity Fair" magazine as one of Africa's best new writers. "The Memory of Love". "The Memory of Love", winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award 2011, was described by the judges as "a bold, deeply moving and accomplished novel" and Forna as "among the most talented writers in literature today"; "The Memory of Love" was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2012, the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 and the Warwick Prize for Writing. The book was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 programme "Bookclub", in discussion between Forna and James Naughtie. "Girl Rising". Forna was one of 10 writers contributing to "10x10 Girl Rising". The film tells the stories of 10 girls in 10 developing countries. The girls' stories are written by 10 acclaimed writers and narrated by 10 world-class actresses, including Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Freida Pinto and Cate Blanchett. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 2013. Forna wrote through the lens of Mariama, an intelligent woman who studies engineering in university and strives to extend the opportunity of education to young girls. Her role models are also advocates of education, including Sia Koroma, who is the First Lady of Sierra Leone. "The Hired Man". "The Hired Man", Forna's third novel, was published in the UK in March 2013. Critics praised Forna's forensic research and ability to evoke atmosphere, place, pacing, precision, powerful emotions, characterisations and atmosphere. In the United States "The Boston Globe" stated that "not since "Remains of the Day" has an author so skilfully revealed the way history's layers are often invisible to all but its participants, who do what they must to survive". "Happiness". "Happiness", Forna's fourth novel, published in the US in March 2018, and in the UK in April 2018, explores themes of love, trauma, migration and belonging, the conflict between nature and civilisation, and how multi-layered experiences can grow resilience. Psychiatrist Dr. Attila Asara of Ghana and Jean Turane of America meet by chance and grow from their newfound relationship. One of Attila's main arguments of the novel is that people try to live out a "wrinkle-free" life, although Attila argues that one must live in discomfort to live a full life. Attila compares trauma survivors and Turane's foxes: the foxes try to outsmart humans while trauma survivors outsmart the damage they went through to try to maintain a normal life. "Happiness" has featured on several recommended reading lists, including BBC Culture, "The Root", "The Guardian", "Irish Times", and "i News". The "Star Tribune" described "Happiness" as "a tightly focused two-hander". The "Financial Times" review of "Happiness" said: "Forna is a risk-taker, a writer who doesn’t hold back from tackling big themes..." "The Washington Post" described Forna as a "subtle and knowing" writer able to fold "weighty matter into her buoyant creation with a sublimely delicate touch", while "The Seattle Times" wrote: "Forna’s prose is precise ... stunning in its clarity". "Kirkus Reviews", featuring the author on its cover, wrote: "Low-key yet piercingly empathetic, Forna's latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective." The "Sunday Times" review notes: "Forna circles... Her path is never straight, she doubles back, crisscrosses ... she approaches the thought from elliptical angles, bringing moments of startling clarity. This walk is never dull." "The Observer"′s Alex Preston wrote of "Happiness": "It is as if the author has privileged access into multiple spheres of existence, learning the secret languages of each". Reviewing "Happiness" in "The Guardian", Diana Evans wrote that it "builds in resonance beyond the final page". In "The Spectator", Kate Webb wrote of "Happiness": "Forna’s piercingly intelligent and interrogative novel ... registers tectonic shifts taking place in the world and provokes us to think anew about war, and what we take for peace and happiness." "Happiness" was featured on numerous international end-of-2018 round-ups as one of the best books of the year, including "Kirkus Reviews", the UK's "Guardian", and South Africa's "Sunday Times". "Happiness" was longlisted for the European Literature Prize in March 2019, and shortlisted for both the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Ondaatje Prize, and the Jhalak Prize in April 2019. "The Window Seat". In December 2020, in a conversation with Maaza Mengiste published to LitHub, Forna revealed the cover of, and announced, that an essay collection named "The Window Seat" would be published in May 2021. In January 20201, LitHub listed "The Window Seat" as one of the most anticipated books of 2021, Harper's Magazine's reviewer wrote: "With this collection, she proves a compelling essayist too, her voice direct, lucid, and fearless. All the pieces are enjoyable and often surprising, even when rather slight. But the most substantial ones are memorable—even unforgettable. They deftly straddle the personal and the political." The Boston Globe singled out Forna's "fine command over both language and life", also noting "her vivid, keenly observed anecdotes [which] make her tendency toward hope all the more reassuring." Time Magazine selected "The Window Seat" as one of twelve 'must read' books in May 2021. The Washington Independent Review of Books described "The Window Seat" as "a collection that defies convention. It may just be the perfect post-pandemic read, and Forna the ideal post-pandemic writer." The LA Times singled out Forna's ability to weave in "experiences that are so individual another essayist would make them the center of a piece, like the time she flew a plane on a loop-de-loop or when she had an audience with the Queen. Here they are part of the texture of her understanding of the world" and singled out "The Window Seat" as "intelligent, curious and broad." The New York Times review commented that "Forna’s ruminations are deeply felt yet unsentimental...whose wide-ranging subjects chart a path toward a kind of freedom, to be at home, always elsewhere."

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Rageh Omaar Rageh Omaar (; ; ; born 19 July 1967) is a Somali-born British journalist and writer. He was a BBC world affairs correspondent, where he made his name reporting from Iraq. In September 2006, he moved to a new post at Al Jazeera English, where he presented the nightly weekday documentary series "Witness" until January 2010. "The Rageh Omaar Report", first aired February 2010, is a one-hour, monthly investigative documentary in which he reports on international current affairs stories. From January 2013, he became a special correspondent and presenter for ITV News, reporting on a broad range of news stories, as well as producing special in-depth reports from all around the UK and further afield. A year after his appointment, Omaar was promoted to International Affairs Editor for ITV News. Since October 2015, alongside his duties as International Affairs Editor, he has been a Deputy Newscaster of ITV News at Ten. Since September 2017 Omaar has occasionally presented the ITV Lunchtime News including the "ITV News London Lunchtime Bulletin" and the ITV Evening News. Early life. Omaar was born in 1967 in Mogadishu to Abdullahi and Sahra Omaar. Omar belongs to a prominent family that hails from the Sa'ad Musa sub-division of the Habr Awal Isaaq clan. His father was an accountant who became a businessman, a representative of Massey Ferguson tractors, founder of the country's first independent newspaper, and was responsible for introducing Coca Cola to Somalia. A Muslim, his family is originally from Hargeisa. Omaar moved to the United Kingdom at the age of two. He has several siblings: his elder brother, Mohamed Abdullahi Omaar, was a former Foreign Minister of Somalia. Education. Omaar was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire. He then studied Modern History at New College, Oxford. Journalism. General. Omaar began his journalistic career as a trainee for "The Voice" newspaper. In 1991, he moved to Ethiopia where he freelanced as a foreign correspondent, working mainly for the BBC World Service. A year later, Omaar returned to London to work as a producer and broadcast journalist for the BBC. He moved to South Africa after having been appointed the BBC's Africa correspondent. Omaar's wife and children were based there through 2004, and his regular commuting made domestic life a challenge. His career highlights include reporting live on the conflicts in Somalia and Iraq. BBC. Omaar covered the Iraq invasion for the weekday BBC news bulletins and BBC News. Many of his broadcasts were syndicated across the United States, where he became known as the "Scud Stud". Omaar has written a book about his time as the BBC's Iraq correspondent called "Revolution Day". The book deals with the effects of the Saddam Hussein regime, UN sanctions, and of the war on Iraqi civilians. Explaining why he eventually left the BBC, Omaar suggested that he wanted to operate independently and to take on assignments for people he wished to collaborate with. He also suggested that the BBC working environment was somewhat exclusivist on a class basis, and that he was guilty of this as well to some degree as a consequence of his public school upbringing. Additionally, Omaar has expressed regret about the way in which he covered the invasion of Iraq during his time as a BBC correspondent. He suggested that he and his colleagues did pieces on Saddam Hussein, his regime and weapons inspectors, giving little coverage to the Iraqi people. Interviewed in John Pilger's documentary "The War You Don't See" (2010), Omaar also lamented that "one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough" and called the coverage "a giant echo chamber". Al Jazeera. In September 2006, Omaar joined Al Jazeera English. He served as a Middle Eastern correspondent for its London Division. During his time with the news organization, Omaar presented the nightly weekday documentary series "Witness". He also hosted the monthly "The Rageh Omaar Report", his own investigative documentaries. ITV News. In January 2013, it was announced that Omaar would be joining ITV News as a special correspondent. He was promoted the following year to ITV News' International Affairs Editor. Since October 2015, alongside his duties as International Affairs Editor, Rageh has been a Deputy Newscaster of ITV News at Ten. Since September 2017 Omaar has occasionally presented the ITV Lunchtime News, including the ITV News London Lunchtime Bulletin, and the ITV Evening News. Awards and nominations. In 2003, Omaar was the recipient of an Ethnic Multicultural Media Academy award for the best TV journalist. In 2008, he was also presented the Arab Media Watch Award for excellence in journalism. In January 2014 and 2015, Omaar was nominated for the Services to Media award at the British Muslim Awards. Personal life. Omaar is married to Georgiana Rose "Nina" Montgomery-Cuninghame, the daughter of Sir John Montgomery-Cuninghame of Corsehill. The couple live in Chiswick, West London, with their three children. He maintains close contact with his family in Somalia, is an activist for the Somali community, and regularly attends its lectures and events.

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Lenny Henry Sir Lenworth George Henry (born 29 August 1958) is a British actor, comedian, singer, television presenter and writer. He is known for co-founding the charity Comic Relief, and appearing in TV programmes including children's entertainment show "Tiswas", sitcom "Chef!" and "The Magicians" for BBC One. He was formerly married to Dawn French. He is currently the Chancellor of Birmingham City University and is acting in the production of the Amazon Prime Lord of the Rings. Early life. Lenworth George Henry was born at Burton Road Hospital in Dudley, on 29 August 1958, to Winston Jervis Henry (1910–1978) and Winifred Louise Henry (1922–1998), who emigrated to Britain from Jamaica before he was born. The fifth of seven children, Henry was the first child of the family to be born in the United Kingdom. When Henry was ten years old, he began spending time with the man who was later revealed to be his biological father, Albert Augustus "Bertie" Green (1927–2004), another Jamaican immigrant with whom his mother had a brief relationship when she first arrived in England from their native Jamaica. He was named after the doctor who delivered him, Dr Lenworth. Henry attended St John's Primary School and later The Blue Coat School in Dudley before completing his schooling at W.R. Tuson College in Preston, Lancashire. Career. Early career. Henry's formative years in comedy were spent in working men's clubs, where he impersonated mainly white characters, such as the "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em" character Frank Spencer. His earliest television appearance was on the "New Faces" talent show in 1975, aged 16, which he won with impersonations of Frank Spencer, Stevie Wonder and others. His first manager was Robert Luff, who signed him in 1975 and gave him the opportunity, from the ages 16 to 21, to perform as a comedian as part of the Luff-produced touring stage version of "The Black and White Minstrel Show". In July 2009, Lenny Henry stated he was contractually obligated to perform and regretted his part in the show, telling "The Times" in 2015 that his appearance on the show led to a profound "wormhole of depression", and he regretted his family not intervening. In 1976, he appeared with Norman Beaton in LWT's sitcom "The Fosters", Britain's first comedy series with predominantly black performers. He also made guest appearances on television programmes including "Celebrity Squares", "Seaside Special" and "The Ronnie Corbett Show". 1980s. In 1980, Henry performed in Summer Season in Blackpool with Cannon and Ball. He has since said that "the summer season was the first time [he] felt that [his] act had received a proper response from an audience". Around the same time, he co-hosted the children's programme "Tiswas" from 1978 until 1981 playing such characters as Rastafarian Algernon Razzmatazz, David Bellamy and Trevor McDoughnut (a parody of Trevor McDonald), and subsequently performed and wrote for the show "Three of a Kind". Also in 1980, he teamed up with alternative-comedy collective The Comic Strip. While involved with the group, he met his wife, comedian Dawn French. She encouraged him to move over to the fledgling alternative comedy scene, where he established a career as a stand-up comedy performer and character comedian. He introduced characters who both mocked and celebrated Black British culture, such as Theophilus P. Wildebeeste (a homage to Teddy Pendergrass using the 'TP' initials) and Brixton pirate radio disc jockey DJ Delbert Wilkins. His stand-up material, which sold well on LP, owed much to the writing abilities of Kim Fuller. During this time, he also spent three years as a DJ on BBC Radio 1, playing soul and electro tracks and introducing some of the characters that he would later popularise on television. He made a guest appearance in the final episode of "The Young Ones" as The Postman, in 1984. The first series of "The Lenny Henry Show" appeared on the BBC in 1984. The show featured stand up, spoofs like his send-up of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, and many of the characters he had developed during Summer Season, including Theophilus P. Wildebeeste and Delbert Wilkins. A principal scriptwriter for his television and stage shows during the 1990s was Jon Canter. "The Lenny Henry Show" ran periodically for a further 19 years in various incarnations. He performed impressions such as Tina Turner, Prince, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Run DMC, among others. It was in 1985 that Henry co-founded the British Comic Relief charity organisation, and 1988 when the first ever Red Nose Day was celebrated. Over 150 celebrities and comedians, including Lenny Henry, took part in an evening long BBC broadcast, which was watched by 30 million viewers and raised over £15 million. Prior to the 1987 general election, Henry lent his support to Red Wedge by participating in a comedy tour organised by the campaign. In 1987, he appeared in a TV film, "Coast to Coast". It was a comedy thriller with John Shea about two DJs with a shared passion for Motown music being chased across Britain. The film has a strong following, but contractual problems have prevented it from being distributed on video or DVD. 1990s. In the early 1990s, Henry starred in the Hollywood film "True Identity", in which his character pretended to be a white person (using make-up, prostheses, and a wig) to avoid the mob. The film was not commercially successful. In 1991, he starred in a BBC drama alongside Robbie Coltrane called "Alive and Kicking", in which he played a heroin addict, which was based on a true story. Also in 1991, he starred in the Christmas comedy Bernard and the Genie alongside Alan Cumming and Rowan Atkinson. Henry is known as the choleric chef Gareth Blackstock from the 1990s television comedy series "Chef!", or from his 1999 straight-acting lead role in the BBC drama "Hope And Glory". He was co-creator with Neil Gaiman and producer of the 1996 BBC drama serial "Neverwhere". Henry appeared as a backing singer on Kate Bush's album "The Red Shoes" (1993) for the song "Why Should I Love You?," on which Prince played guitar. He also performed, backed by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, at Amnesty International's Big 3-0 fund raising concert. Henry returned to the BBC to do "Lenny Henry in Pieces", a character-based comedy sketch show which was followed by "The Lenny Henry Show", in which he combined stand-up, character sketches and song parodies. 2000s. In 2003, Henry was listed in "The Observer" as one of the fifty funniest acts in British comedy. He was the voice of the British speaking clock for two weeks in March 2003 in aid of Comic Relief. Henry voiced Dre Head, the "shrunken head" on the Knight Bus in the 2004 Alfonso Cuarón movie "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", and read the audiobook version of Neil Gaiman's "Anansi Boys". He also voiced Sporty on the children's show "Little Robots". Henry appeared in advertisements for butter products in New Zealand, commissioned by the company now known as Fonterra, as well as portraying Saint Peter in the Virgin Mobile advertising campaign in South Africa. In the UK, he used his character of Theophilus P. Wildebeeste to advertise Alpen muesli, and promoted the non-alcoholic lager, Kaliber. In June 2000, for a BBC documentary, he sailed a trimaran from Plymouth to Antigua with yachtsman Tony Bullimore. In 2005, he appeared in Birmingham, as an act for "Jasper Carrott's Rock with Laughter". He appeared alongside performers such as Bill Bailey, Jasper Carrott, Bonnie Tyler, Bobby Davro and the Lord of the Dance troupe. In 2006, Henry starred in the BBC programme "Berry's Way". He did the voice of Dark Nebula in "". On 16 March 2007, Henry made a cameo appearance as himself in a sketch with Catherine Tate, who appeared in the guise of her character Geordie Georgie from "The Catherine Tate Show". The sketch was made for the BBC Red Nose Day fundraising programme of 2007. On 16 June 2007 Lenny appeared with Chris Tarrant and Sally James to present a 25th Anniversary episode of "Tiswas". The show lasted 90 minutes and featured celebrities discussing their enjoyment of "Tiswas" as children, as well as appearances from kids and people who had appeared on the original show. In the summer of 2007, he presented "Lenny's Britain", a comedy documentary tour made with the Open University on BBC One on Tuesday nights. In late 2007, he hosted a stand-up comedy tour of the UK. In early 2008, Henry's series "lennyhenry.tv" was broadcast on BBC One. The programme has an accompanying website of the same name and broadcasts strange, weird and generally amusing online videos and CCTV clips. He starred in the Radio 4 show "Rudy's Rare Records". On 31 December 2008 and 1 January 2009, he appeared on Jools Holland's "Hootenanny" on BBC Two, singing part of the song "Mercy" along with singer Duffy. In January 2009, he appeared on the BBC's comedy show, "Live at The Apollo", in which he played host for the night, introducing Andy Parsons and Ed Byrne, where he referred to Wikipedia as "Wrongopedia" for containing incorrect information about his life. In October 2009, Henry reprised his role of Deakus to feature in comedy shorts about story writing alongside Nina Wadia, Tara Palmer Tomkinson and Stephen K. Amos. He also offers his own writing tips and amusing anecdotes in the writing tips video clip on BBC raw words – story writing. He supplies the voices of both Big and Small in the BBC CBeebies Children's programs "Big & Small". 2010s. In 2010, Henry produced and starred in a five-part web series for the BBC Comedy website, "Conversations with my Wife", about a fictional couple conversing over Skype while the wife is away on business leaving the husband (played by Henry) to hold the fort at home. In 2008, he became the face of budget hotel operator Premier Inn. One of the 2010 adverts caused controversy and was banned from children's programming hours as it parodied a well-known scene from the film "The Shining", with Lenny Henry spoofing the scene originally starring Jack Nicholson, smashing a door with an axe and then thrusting his head through the door saying: "Here's Lenny." In 2011, Henry presented a Saturday night magic series called "The Magicians" on BBC One. The show returned in 2012, however, Henry was replaced by Darren McMullen. In March 2011, he appeared with Angela Rippon, Samantha Womack and Reggie Yates in the BBC fundraising documentary for Comic Relief called "Famous, Rich and in the Slums", where the four celebrities were sent to Kibera in Kenya, the African continent's largest slum. Henry was criticised for his opening sketch for the 2011 Comic Relief, during which he spoofed the film "The King's Speech" and grew impatient with Colin Firth's portrayal of King George VI as he stammered over his speech. "The Sun" reported that the British Stammering Association had branded the sketch as "a gross and disgusting gleefulness at pointing out someone else's misfortune". In 2014, Henry appeared in and produced a play based on his radio show "Rudy's Rare Records", which played at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre before moving on to a run in London. Henry wrote "Danny and the Human Zoo", a ninety-minute television film shown on BBC One in 2015. Directed by Destiny Ekaragha, it was a fictionalised account of Henry's life as a teenager in 1970s Dudley. Henry played Samson Fearon, a character based on Henry's own father Winston. In November 2019, it was announced that Henry would guest star in "Spyfall", the two-part opening episode of "Doctor Who"'s twelfth revived series, which began broadcast on New Year's Day 2020. Henry played technology billionaire Daniel Barton. 2020s. In December 2020, Henry was announced as a cast member of Amazon Prime's Lord of the Rings spin-off series. In 2021, Henry appeared as a contestant on the second series of "The Masked Singer", masked as the Blob. He finished in 6th place. COVID-19 vaccination. In March 2021 Henry wrote an open letter urging everyone to get COVID-19 vaccination. Henry stated people ought to, "trust the facts" and distrust misinformation. Henry also wrote, “Because we love you – we want you to be safe and we don’t want you to be left out or left behind. While other communities are rushing to get the vaccine and millions have already been vaccinated, some Black people in our community are being more cautious,” The letter encourages black UK adults to take an informed decision over the vaccine and get vaccinated so as to protect themselves and those they care for. Shakespeare. Henry was introduced to Shakespeare when he made the 2006 Radio 4 series "Lenny and Will", which saw him going "in search of the magic of Shakespeare in performance". In February 2009, he appeared in the title role in the Northern Broadsides production of "Othello" at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. Before the production opened the director Barrie Rutter said of the decision to cast him: "knives might be out at me or at Lenny. I don't care. This has come about from a completely genuine desire to do a piece of theatrical work. Bloody hell, how long has the Donmar had Hollywood stars going there for £200? He's six-foot five. He's beautifully black. And he's Othello." Henry received widespread critical acclaim in the role. Charles Spencer in "The Daily Telegraph" said "This is one of the most astonishing debuts in Shakespeare I have ever seen. It is impossible to praise too highly Henry's courage in taking on so demanding and exposed a role, and then performing it with such authority and feeling." Michael Billington in "The Guardian" noted "Henry's voice may not always measure up to the rhetorical music of the verse, but there is a simple dignity to his performance that touches one". Lynne Walker of "The Independent" said of Henry that his "emotional dynamism is in no doubt. The frenzy within his imagination explodes into rage and, finally, wretchedness. It's not a subtle reading but it works powerfully in this context." Henry has said that he saw parallels between himself and Othello. "I'm used to being the only black person wherever I go...There was never a black or Asian director when I went to the BBC. Eventually I thought 'where are they all?' I spent a lot of time on my own. Things have changed a bit, but rarely at the BBC do I meet anyone of colour in a position of power." The production was scheduled to transfer to the West End of London from 11 September to 12 December 2009, to be performed at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall. In November 2011, Henry made his debut at the Royal National Theatre in London in Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors", directed by Dominic Cooke, in which he played the character of Antipholus of Syracuse. The production was selected to be broadcast live to selected cinemas worldwide in March 2012 as part of the National Theatre Live programme. Henry's performance gained positive reviews. Paul Taylor in "The Independent" wrote that "Henry beautifully conveys the tragicomic plight of an innocent abroad." Music career. In 2015, Henry was asked by Sky Arts to produce a show for them, "Lenny Henry's Got The Blues". He worked with a group of musicians including Jakko Jakszyk, lead singer of King Crimson, to produce the album "New Millennium Blues". The album consists of both covers of blues classics, as well as original tracks co-written by Lenny. Henry later released "hard-hitting animated blues video" directed by Iranian filmmaker, Sam Chegini titled "The Cops Don't Know" which was premiered by "Classic Rock" magazine on 20 April 2016. Personal life. Henry met Dawn French on the alternative comedy circuit. They married in 1984 in Covent Garden, London and have one child, a daughter named Billie. On 6 April 2010, French and Henry announced they were 'amicably' separating after 25 years of marriage. Their divorce was finalised in 2010. Since 2012, Henry has been in a relationship with theatre producer and casting director Lisa Makin. Henry obtained a BA Hons degree in English Literature from the Open University in 2007 and an MA in Screenwriting for TV and Film from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2010. He subsequently studied at the latter institution for a doctorate on the role of black people in the media. In July 2018, Henry was awarded a PhD degree in Media Arts for the thesis titled "Does the Coach Have to be Black? The Sports Film, Screenwriting and Diversity: A Practice-Based Enquiry". Henry has been an open critic of British television's lack of ethnic diversity in its programmes. During a speech at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in March 2014, he called the lack of minorities "appalling" and he has continued to raise the issue publicly. Henry is a lifelong supporter of West Bromwich Albion Football Club. Honours. Henry was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1999 New Year Honours. He was knighted in the Queen's 2015 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity. In July 2016, Henry became the chancellor of Birmingham City University citing his passion to give life changing opportunities to young people from a wide range of backgrounds. Henry has also been listed in the "Powerlist" of the 100 most influential Black Britons, including ranking fourth in 2016. In 2016, Henry was made a fellow of the Royal Television Society. Henry was awarded the BAFTA Television: Special Award in 2016. Also in 2016, Henry was awarded an honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University in recognition of his significant contribution to British comedy and drama, along with his achievements in international charity work. External links. Articles

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Valerie Mason-John Valerie Mason-John (born 22 November 1962) is the co-founder of "Eight Step Recovery - Using The Buddha's Teaching to Overcome Addiction", an alternative to the 12-step programs for addiction. Thesis. Since the publication of the book by Windhorse Publications in 2013, it has been the recipient of a Best USA Book Award 2014 and Best International Book Award 2015 in the self-motivational and self-help category. Eight Step Meetings now take place in the UK, USA, Canada, India and Finland. Mason-John also is the co-creator of Mindfulness Based Addiction Recovery (MBAR), which was inspired by "Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression" book by John D. Teasdale, Mark Williams, and Zindal Seagal. She is the author of eight books and works as a public speaker in Mindfulness for Addiction and Emotional Well Being and is a trainer in anti-bullying and conflict resolution. She is also the chairperson of Triratna Vancouver Buddhist Centre. Her Buddhist name is Vimalasara, which means "she whose essence is stainless and pure". She used to be a freelance feature writer for "The Voice" newspaper and was also a performer and spoken-word poet using the stage name "Queenie". Black British by birth, she has now become a Canadian. Biography. Born in Cambridge, England, Mason-John spent her childhood "in care" — in foster homes and childcare facilities, including the Barnardo's Orphanages in Britain with the exception of a short time spent living with her mother in her early teens. She dropped out before receiving her undergraduate degree in the 1980s, but has continued to pursue post-graduate education and training into the present. Since the early 1990s, she has worked as a writer, performing artist and lecturer. She received a teaching certificate from South Bank University, and currently conducts seminars in anger management and conflict resolution. After 18 months of studying philosophy and politics at Leeds University during the 1980s, Mason-John studied post-graduate journalism, earned an MFA in creative writing and diploma in theatrical performance at Sussex University and The Desmond Jones School. By 2003, her interest in counseling and her ordination into the Western Buddhist Order led her into writing and performing, and on training herself and others in anger management and conflict resolution. In December 2007, Mason-John was named Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of East London. Mason John continues to write, work as a self-awareness trainer; she performs and lectures internationally. Publication, broadcasting, and academic work. Mason-John's work has appeared in UK and international journalistic and scholarly publications such as "The Guardian", "The Voice", "Curve Magazine", "The Morning Star", "Pink Paper", "Girl Friend Magazine" and "Wasafiri". She has also contributed to "Half the Earth: Women's Experience of Travel Worldwide" (second edition, Pandora Rough Guide, 1990), "Frauen Zimmerim Haus Europa" (Papyrosa, 1991), "Assaults on Convention" (Cassell, 1995), "Words from Word Up Café" (Centerprise Publications, 1993), and "Tell Tales" (Tell Tales/Flipped Eye Publications, 2005). Mason-John was the editor of "Feminist Arts News" from 1992 to 1997. Additionally, she was the artistic director of the London Mardi Gras from 1997 to 2000, and spent four years as the director of the Pride Arts Festival. Her television credits include freelance work for the BBC, Channel 4 and Vis International TV; she has also been featured on British radio broadcasts for the BBC World Service and the regional programmes "Midweek", "Woman's Hour" and "The Shelagh Rogers Show Next Chapter" on CBC Radio. In addition to her work in broadcasting and journalism, Mason-John embarked on a career in theatre, having studied at the Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theatre, she began performing and writing for the stage by 1998. Focusing on one-woman plays, she developed a body of work including "Sin Dykes, Brown Girl in the Ring", "The Adventures of Snow Black and Rose Red" and "You Got Me" among other plays. Her first novel "Borrowed Body" (2005), which was later relaunched as "The Banana Kid" (2007), received the Mind Book of the Year Award. Since, Mason-John has authored six books including her spiritual non-fiction "Detox Your Heart" (2006), which is slated for revision in 2017. "The Great Black North". In 2012, Mason-John alongside spoken-word artist Kevan Anthony Cameron co-edited the anthology "The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry", published by Frontenac House, featuring more than 90 poets. "The Great Black North" was one of the first complete poetry collections of contemporary Black Canadian poets. Notable poets in the anthology include George Elliot Clarke, M. Nourbese Philip, Wayde Compton, Sylvia Hamilton, Olive Senior, Fredrick Ward and d'bi Young. The anthology is unique in the way it categorizes "page" and "stage" poetry, as a means to honour both the written and oral traditions of poets from the African Diaspora.

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Nuzo Onoh Nuzo Onoh (born 22 September 1962) is a British-Nigerian writer. She grew up the third of the eight children of the late Chief Mrs Caroline Onoh, a former headteacher. She experienced the Biafran war with Nigeria (1967–70) as a child refugee and at the age of 13, she was the victim of an attempted "exorcism" by a local pastor. Due to this experience, she currently advocates for greater awareness of ritual child abuse in African communities. Education. Nuzo Onoh attended Queen's School, in Enugu Nigeria, as well as The Mount School, York, a Quaker boarding school in York, and later, St Andrew's Tutorial College, Cambridge, England. Onoh holds a law degree and a master's degree in writing from Warwick University. Writing. She is a pioneer of the African horror subgenre. Onoh's books "The Reluctant Dead" (2014) and "Unhallowed Graves" (2015) are both collections of ghost stories depicting core Igbo culture, traditions, beliefs and superstitions within a horror context. She is also author of "The Sleepless" (2016) and "Dead Corpse" (2017).Onoh's works have featured in numerous magazines and, to date, she is the only African horror fiction writer to have featured on "Starburst", the world's longest-running magazine of cult entertainment. She is listed in the reference book "80 Black women in Horror" (Sumiko Saulson, 2017) and her stories have been included in several anthologies, including "Black Magic Women Anthology", which features stories by some writers listed in "80 Black Women in Horror". Her contest-winning story, Guardians, featured in the Nosetouch Asterisk Anthology, Vol 2, (2018) is arguably the first African Cosmic Horror story published. Her works have also featured in academic studies, including the "Routledge Handbook of African Literature". She has also featured on multiple media platforms, discussing her unique writing and African Horror as a genre. She has written several blogs for "Female First Magazine". Onoh has been mentioned as one of the new British horror writers bringing a positive change to how black and minority races are portrayed in mainstream horror fiction. Onoh has also given talks and lectures, including at the prestigious Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Onoh writes about ghosts, vengeful African ghosts with unfinished business, and has been hailed as the "Queen of African Horror". Her writings have been described as works of "magical realism and horror", exploring the "philosophical positions that define the reality of Africa and Africans in a world that is bent towards Western globalization and the annihilation of African roots in culture." Her writing showcases both the beautiful and horrific in the African, mainly, Igbo culture and doesn't shy away from tackling issues of religious hypocrisy, child abuse, ritual killings, dangerous superstitions, corrupt politicians, evil witchdoctors and the plight of widows in the broader African culture, all within a fictitious horror context. Her book "The Sleepless", a ghost story tackling both the ritual abuse of children and the horrors of the Biafran War, has been described as "a genuine powerhouse of horror storytelling" and as a work that "Goes beyond magical realism": "What distinguishes her genre as 'African Horror' is the detailed exploration of African beliefs on the mysterious and the spiritual, which reveals a lot about the 'African Self'". Family. Onoh has two children, Candice Onyeama (writer and film director) and Jija Orka-Gyoh (student).

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Shane Ryan (social activist) Shane Ryan (born 13 May 1969) is a British social reformer/activist, writer and formerly, the Chief Executive of Future Men, a charity supporting men and boys in the United Kingdom and also secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) On Fatherhood. He was previously Deputy Director at the National Lottery Community Fund , and currently Global Executive Director of The Avast Foundation , a worldwide social impact organization. Ryan is best known for his work in highlighting the plight of less affluent boys in the British education system and teenaged fathers in the UK, as well as speaking nationally about support for unemployed young men and his work related to fathers and families. In 2018 in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, Ryan helped to set up and is currently the Chair of The Grenfell Children and Young Peoples Fund, along with the Queens Park Rangers Trust and the Evening Standard newspaper.

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Colour Me English Colour Me English is a 2011 collection of essays by Caryl Phillips. Written over a period of 20 years, the essays deal with themes of identity, home and belonging. Reviewed in "The Independent", the book was called "a polymorphous delight that always retains at its core the notion of identity: how it is constructed, how it is thrust upon us, how we can change it. It is about our sense of self, how we fit within society – and how both society and individuals must adapt to each other in order for both to thrive." In the words of Courttia Newland in "Wasafiri" magazine, the collection "revisits the author’s chosen territories of ‘displacement, home/homelessness, race and identity’, as defined by Renée Schatteman, editor of "Conversations with Caryl Phillips" (2009). It is a volume heaving with insights, musings and ideology, some thirty-eight essays in all, each dissecting the notion of tribal belonging and its polar opposite, exclusion. Much of the collection details the travels Phillips has undertaken since he was first published by Faber and Faber in 1985, spanning countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belgium and France. The writings also map temporal journeys; essays such as 'Water' go back to 1993, while others like 'Ground Zero' and another on the Chinese-American novelist, Ha Jin, are clearly written more recently." According to Samira Shackle in the "New Statesman", "This book is as much about writing as it is about race. Phillips explores his own development as a writer and the struggle of negotiating identities. Seen through this prism, travel is both part of a 'long tradition' of British writers and an attempt to work out where his identity should be placed. He feels he cannot do this in England, a country that 'seemed to revel in its ability to reduce identity to clichés'. Phillips had it tough growing up in Leeds in the 1960s and 1970s and undeniably life was hard for the first wave of immigrants to the UK, yet I can't help but feel that he is sometimes too harsh on Britain. Too often, he writes as if little has changed - perhaps because he has lived abroad for many years. (...) Nonetheless, this is a thought-provoking collection by an accomplished author whose subtle, unobtrusive style allows him to explore familiar subjects in an original way."

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The Lonely Londoners The Lonely Londoners is a 1956 novel by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon. Its publication was one of the first to focus on poor, working-class black people following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948 alongside George Lamming's "The Emigrants" (1954). Overview. The book details the life of West Indians in post-World War II London, a city the immigrants consider the "centre of the world." Covering a period of roughly three years, "The Lonely Londoners" has no plot in the usual sense of the term. The novel follows a limited number of characters of the "Windrush generation", all of them "coloureds", through their daily lives in the capital. The various threads of action form a whole through the unifying central character of Trinidadian Moses Aloetta, a veteran émigré who, after more than ten years in London, has still not achieved anything of note and whose homesickness increases as he gets older. Every Sunday morning "the boys", many of them recent arrivals, come together in his rented room to trade stories and inquire after those whom they have not seen for a while. Their lives mainly consist of work (or looking for work) and various petty pleasures. Social commentary. A recurring theme in Selvon's character development addresses upward social mobility. This mobility is clouded by the character's designation as the "other". Selvon's characters are offered the worst jobs, they are exploited by housing landlords, and their romantic ventures oftentimes only includes sex. Their accents and race mark them as outsiders and force them to form a group identity based on the principle of congregation via segregation. Though they have various coping mechanisms: sex, lavish spending, drinking, hard work, appeasing white women, etc., the novel ultimately conveys unity in their experiences and the self-hatred, disappointment, and struggle that haunt them. The protagonist, Moses, describes London as a lonely city that "divide[s] up in little worlds, and you stay in the world where you belong to and you don't know anything about what is happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers." Against a backdrop of invisibility, many of the characters struggle with a sense of failed promise. Regardless of their actions, a certain sense of stagnancy prevails. Moses says: "...I just lay there on the bed thinking about my life, how after all these years I ain't get no place at all, I still the same way, neither forward nor backward." Helon Habila has noted: "One imagines immediately the loneliness that must have gnawed at these immigrants whose memory of their sunny, convivial island communities was their only refuge at such moments. But although this is a book about exile and alienation, it is not a sad book. Even when his characters are under-going the direst of tribulations, Selvon has a way of capturing the humour in the situation... The message of The Lonely Londoners is even more vital today than in 50s Britain: that, although we live in societies increasingly divided along racial, ideological and religious lines, we must remember what we still have in common - our humanity." Narrative technique, language and style. The most striking feature of "The Lonely Londoners" is its narrative voice. Selvon started writing the novel in standard English but soon found out that such language would not aptly convey the experiences and the unarticulated thoughts and desires of his characters. In creating a third person narrator who uses the same creolized form of English as the characters of the novel, Selvon added a new, multiculturalist dimension to the traditional London novel and enhanced the awareness in both readers and writers of a changing London society which could no longer be ignored. Thus, in style and context, "The Lonely Londoners" "represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization." The language used by Selvon's characters and by the narrator contains a multitude of slang expressions. For example, when "the boys" talk about "the Water" or "the Gate", they are referring to Bayswater and Notting Hill respectively. (Unlike today, the Notting Hill area evoked a down-at-heel area of cheap lodgings where Caribbean immigrants could more easily find accommodation than elsewhere in London, but be victims of practices like Rachmanism.) Sometimes referring to themselves and each other as "spades", in their spare time they can be found "liming"—the Caribbean pastime of hanging around with friends eating, talking and drinking—and some of their talk will be "oldtalk", reminiscences of their previous lives in the West Indies and the exchange of news from home. Finally, a white English girl can be a "skin" ("a sharp piece of skin"), a "frauline" [sic], a "cat", a "number", or of course a "chick" or "white pussy". A remarkable passage within the novel about a typical London summer is written in the stream-of-consciousness mode, linking up Selvon with the modernist movement. See also. Other novels with the theme of the immigrant experience among Caribbeans in London: References. All page references are to the 2006 Penguin "Modern Classics" edition.

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The Second Life of Samuel Tyne The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) is the debut novel of Canadian author Esi Edugyan. It was set in Amber Valley, Alberta, an historic settlement of African-American homesteaders from the United States in the early 20th century. The novel was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Plot. In 1968, Samuel Tyne, an unhappy Ghanaian civil servant residing in Calgary, Alberta, learns that he has inherited his late uncle Jacob's estate in the rural community of Amber Valley, Alberta. He persuades his wife Maud and twin daughters Yvette and Chloe to move to the town, which was a settlement of African- American immigrant homesteaders from Oklahoma and the Deep South in the early 20th century. Reception. "Kirkus Reviews" described the novel as "unrelenting" in its portrayal of life as "somber and bleak", with a "suitably ominous atmosphere" and a conclusion that is "astonishingly moving". It said that the plot developed "haltingly and predictably". Bronwyn Drainie, editor-in-chief of the "Literary Review of Canada", characterized Edugyan's portrayal of rural Alberta as "vicious and hilarious and pitch-perfect", but said that the mental illness of Tyne's daughters was "not a very compelling fictional device". She also said that the novel had "illogicalities" and "too much telling and not enough showing". Similarly, Malcolm Azania said that, although Edugyan's writing showed "a poet’s attention to wordcraft" and "extremely refined skills", both the novel and its characters were "frustrating". The overall negative portrayal of humanity "makes for joyless and ultimately rather flat reading". The novel was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

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The Illegal (novel) The Illegal is a novel by Canadian wrter Lawrence Hill. It was published in 2015 by Harper-Colilins. Synopsis. The novel's central character is Keita Ali, a marathon runner from the fictional Indian Ocean nation of Zantoroland. The story follows Ali as he desperately tries to save his only sibling, who has been kidnapped. Critical response. The novel won the 2016 edition of "Canada Reads", making Hill the first writer to win the competition twice. Prior to its publication, the novel was optioned for film treatment by Conquering Lion Pictures, the producers of the miniseries adaptation of Hill's prior novel "The Book of Negroes". The French translation "Le Sans-papiers", by Carole Noël and Marianne Noël-Allen, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English to French translation at the 2017 Governor General's Awards.

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The Book of Negroes (novel) The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name. Title. The author has written about the title: "I used "The Book of Negroes" as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in "The Book of Negroes", you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are speaking in a deeply offensive manner if you were to use such words. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title." Synopsis. Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, Niger in West Africa and forced to walk for three months to the sea in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village. Even before she is placed on the ship, she vows that one day, she will return. A boy her age, Chekura, has been forced to assist the slave traders, but is later sent abroad just like the rest. He becomes Aminata's unlikely friend. After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, including a slave revolt, she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave. Her name is anglicized to Meena Dee. She is taken under the wing of a fellow slave named Georgia, who helps her learn English. Seeing her intelligence and potential, a fellow Muslim slave named Mamed secretly teaches her to read and write. As a teenager Aminata manages to reunite with Chekura, and they sneak off to meet once a month. The plantation owner, Appleby, learns of the meetings and punishes Aminata by brutally raping her. Despite her owner's jealousy, the two slaves marry and conceive a baby boy, whom she named Mamadu after her father. Appleby arranges for Aminata and her child to be sold to separately and so her son Mamadu is stolen from her. Aminata is handed over to a Jewish man named Solomon Lindo who moves her to Charles Town, unaware of where her child may be. Aminata grows close to Lindo and his wife, who allow her to read and write openly. However Solomon also requires her to pay him a part of any money that she earns through midwifery. After a few years, a smallpox outbreak kills Lindo's wife and son. Shortly after, Aminata is once again reunited with Chekura, who has found out that Lindo helped arrange the selling of their son Mamadu who he has been told died. This ruins the relationship Aminata has had with Lindo. Attempting to win her over, Lindo takes Aminata to New York. During the rioting at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Aminata is able to escape from Lindo. During this time Aminata works as a midwife and teacher, helping other black people to learn how to read. Proving that she served the British during the war, her name is entered in the "Book of Negroes", a real document created to list the freed African American slaves who requested permission to leave the newly created United States of America. Because of her ability to read and write as well as her fluency in two African languages, Aminata is also hired to help record names in the book. While doing this work she is reunited for a few months with Chekura, who also served the British; they plan to resettle in Nova Scotia together and she becomes pregnant with their second child. However, just as they are boarding the ship, the two are separated and Aminata is arrested, as Appleby has put out a warrant for her as a run-away slave. The matter is resolved when Lindo appears in court, explaining the situation and simultaneously setting Aminata free. Aminata, once again trying to find her husband, finds another ship to Nova Scotia. Aminata arrives in Shelburne and begins to work in the black community of Birchtown, where she meets Jason, a young fellow whom she listed in the "Book of Negroes", and Daddy Moses (the "Preacher"). Soon after arriving, she gives birth to a second child, her daughter May. Aminata finds work for white people in town, but after a few years relations between the black community and white community break down. During these difficult times, her daughter is stolen from her by a white couple. She tries to locate her husband many times and learns that the ship carrying him to Nova Scotia had swept away to Bermuda and sank, and her husband Chekura is presumed dead. A young British naval officer named Captain John Clarkson comes to the black Birchtown communities, promising a better land reserved for them in Sierra Leone. Aminata helps Clarkson to gather people from the community, and eventually they all leave for a better future. On her way to Africa, Aminata observes ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America. In Sierra Leone, the black communities attempt to establish Freetown despite the strict rules of the British. History is repeating itself - despite Clarkson's efforts, Freetown is not the safe haven it was meant to be. It is located just a few miles from a slave trading centre, the very same one from which Aminata was sent for America. Clarkson offers to take her to London, where a group of abolitionists need a spokesperson against slavery. However, longing to return to her village in the interior of Africa, Aminata negotiates with a slave trader to take her there. It takes many years before he agrees. It is a difficult journey, especially since Aminata is no longer young. She is slowing the group down, and overhears the traders talking about how they will sell her back into slavery to get rid of her. After escaping to a nearby village and telling them her story, Aminata finally realizes what is more important than returning to her home village of Bayo is helping to free other enslaved people. She takes Clarkson up on his offer. As an old woman, she finds herself taking a voyage one more time to England to present the account of her life, so it may help abolish the slave trade. She publishes her life story, speaks at schools and churches, and even meets the King and Queen. She is eventually reunited with her daughter May, and May cares for Aminata until her dying day. Awards and recognition. "The Book of Negroes" won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was the winning selection for CBC Radio's "Canada Reads" 2009, in which journalist Avi Lewis championed the novel. Its French translation, titled "Aminata", was championed by Thomas Hellman in the 2013 edition of "Le Combat des livres", and won that competition as well, becoming the only title to date to have won both the English and French editions of the competition. Miniseries adaptation. In 2007, Canadian production company Conquering Lion Pictures announced it had acquired the film rights to the novel. In mid-2013 it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a miniseries of the same name, rather than the feature film originally planned. Clement Virgo and Hill collaborated on writing the miniseries, with Virgo also directing. It premiered on CBC Television in Canada in January 2015 and aired on BET in the United States in February 2015. The mini-series stars Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata, Lyriq Bent as Chekura, Cuba Gooding Jr, Louis Gossett Jr., Ben Chaplin, Allan Hawco, and Jane Alexander. The international co-production began shooting in February 2014 in Cape Town, South Africa. Filming also took place in various locations around Nova Scotia.

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Frances-Anne Solomon Frances-Anne Solomon (born 28 June 1966) is a Caribbean British-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She lives between Toronto, Canada, and Barbados. Biography. Born in England of Trinidadian parents, Frances-Anne Solomon began her professional life at the BBC in England, where she built a successful career as a producer, first with BBC Radio then with BBC television drama. She also produced and directed independent films through her company Leda Serene Films. In 1999, she moved her company to Canada, where she continued to write, direct, and produce films, television programs, theatre plays, and new media projects. In 2001, she founded CaribbeanTales, a charitable organisation producing, exhibiting and distributing educational multi-media projects based on Caribbean-heritage stories. The CaribbeanTales International Film Festival, founded in 2006 and based in Toronto, includes an annual festival, community screening series, and youth-focused film challenges. The CaribbeanTales Incubator Program develops original content for the regional and international market, CTFF also holds workshops and festivals in other territories, including to date Barbados, Belize, and Cuba. In 2010, Solomon founded CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution Inc, the first film distribution company in the English-speaking Caribbean dedicated to the marketing and sales of Caribbean-themed films. In 2014 she launched CaribbeanTales-TV, a video-on-demand platform. Solomon is a Director member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Early life. Solomon is the granddaughter of Trinidad and Tobago independence politician Dr. Patrick Solomon. When her grandfather left politics and took a role as a diplomat, the family lived in different countries including Canada, the United States, Europe and Venezuela. She moved back to Trinidad at nine years old, and attended the girls' "prestige" school, Bishop Anstey High School. At 18 she moved to Canada to live with her mother, and discovered a love of the arts, studying theatre at the University of Toronto's U.C. Playhouse, and poetry with Jay Macpherson. In 1986, she moved to England, to work for the BBC. Career. She trained in television production through the two-year BBC Production Training Program and worked with "Ebony", the Corporation's first Black magazine programme, before being hired as a Radio Drama producer in London. While there she was responsible for helping to introduce a number of initiatives aimed at diversifying the talent pool in BBC Radio Drama. Many great talents got their first entry to Radio Drama in this way, including actors Adjoa Andoh and Clarence Smith to the BBC Drama Repertory Company, producers Pam Fraser Solomon and Nandita Ghose, composer Dominique Le Gendre and writers Parv Bancil, Maya Chowdhry, Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta and Jackie Kay among others. Solomon returned to television as a Script Editor for ScreenPlay, a strand of mostly studio-based TV dramas. Between 1992 and 1998 she worked as a script editor and then as a producer and executive producer for BBC Single Drama and Films under George S. J. Faber. For the BBC she produced and executive-produced feature films, including "Speak Like a Child", director John Akomfrah's narrative debut, and "Love Is The Devil", John Maybury's award-winning first feature. She credits her time at the BBC as providing her with a grounding, and vision of the importance and creative power of public service broadcasting. In 1993, Solomon won a place on the prestigious BBC Drama Directors Course. While working as a Drama Producer for the BBC, she continued to run her own company Leda Serene Films, where she developed, produced and directed films including "What My Mother Told Me", a Trinidad-based autobiographical story of generational violence in the context of a middle-class family; and "Peggy Su!", produced by BBC Films. Set in a Chinese laundry in Liverpool in the 1960s, it remains one of the only British films to depict the lives of the Chinese in Britain. Ultimately she found the racism of the British film and television industry constraining, and like many of her peers, chose to emigrate. Returning to Canada in 2000, she founded the CaribbeanTales Media Group and continued to develop and produce television, feature films and new media projects. "Lord Have Mercy!", produced with Claire Prieto and Vanz Chapman, was Canada's first multicultural sitcom, and starred Russell Peters alongside Caribbean stars Leonie Forbes and Dennis "Sprangalang" Hall. "A Winter Tale", CityTV, 2007, depicts a Caribbean-Canadian community plagued by gun violence in Toronto. Solomon is the director of "HERO", a hybrid feature, inspired by elements of the life of Trinidad and Tobago war hero, judge and jurist Ulric Cross. Solomon was the recipient of the 2018 Visionary Award from the ReelWorld Film Festival. On 1 July 2019 Solomon was one of 842 new members invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. The 2019 class is 50% women, 29% people of color, and represents 59 countries. CaribbeanTales. CaribbeanTales Inc. CaribbeanTales Inc a not-for-profit company was formed in 2001, originally as an internet platform for Caribbean-themed film and arts. Early projects include CaribbeanTales.ca, a multimedia e-newsletter, and "Literature Alive", a multi-faceted project including an educational website, audio books, and a documentary series, profiling Caribbean authors, many of whom are based in Canada. The non-profit company became a registered Canadian charity in 2014. In 2006, Solomon founded the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival in Toronto as a platform for Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora films and filmmakers from the region. The CaribbeanTales Youth Film Festival, during Black History Month in Toronto, screens Africentric films in schools and communities. The Film Festival Group has also produced festivals and events in Barbados and New York. CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution. While teaching film at the University of the West Indies in 2009, she consolidated her connections in the region. This led to the creation of CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, a Barbados-based company, and the first film distribution company dedicated to international distribution of Caribbean-themed audio visual content. The company was co-founded with cultural industries specialist Dr. Keith Nurse, businessman Terrence Farrell, and filmmakers Lisa Wickham and Mary Wells, with the goal to tackle head-on problems of the monetisation of Caribbean-themed content and the development of the Caribbean Film Industry. Creators of Colour Incubator. The Creators of Colour Incubator (formerly CaribbeanTales Incubator Program), also founded in 2010, an annual program that takes place during the Toronto International Film Festival, aims to train filmmakers in the creation and marketing of sustainable content, and has been committed to helping to develop an infrastructure and international profile for Caribbean films, in the region and the diaspora. The Program has evolved into a development and production hub for regional content. In 2015, CaribbeanTales won a five-year sponsorship and production deal with Flow, the brand name for Cable and Wireless Ltd, the largest telecommunications conglomerate in the Caribbean. The deal, brokered with Flow C.E.O John Reid, supports the production of at least three television series pilots a year from the CaribbeanTales Incubator Program. In 2016, the first of these projects were selected: "Caribbean Girl NYC" by Mariette Monpierre, "Battledream Chronicle" by Alain Bidard, and "Heat" by Menelik Shabazz. Production is underway in New York, Martinique and Barbados respectively. In 2017 Flow and CaribbeanTales expanded their relationship to give Flow subscribers around the Caribbean access to CaribbeanTales vast catalogue of films through Television on demand. CaribbeanTales-TV. CaribbeanTales established an online VOD platform CaribbeanTales-TV.

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Chris Spence (educator) Christopher M. Spence is a former Canadian educator, author, and former Canadian football player. He is the former Director of Education of the Toronto District School Board and former Director of Education of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board. Biography. Born in England to Jamaican parents, Spence has lived in Canada since he was three years old and received his early education in Windsor, Ontario. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in criminology from Simon Fraser University in 1985. A running back, he was drafted by the BC Lions in the third round of the 1985 CFL Draft, but his CFL career was ended in 1988 by an Achilles tendon injury. Spence received a Bachelor of Education degree from York University, a Master of Education degree from the University of Toronto in 1993 and a Doctor of Education degree from the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1996, which was later revoked due to plagiarism. He became Director of Education for the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board on September 1, 2004, and served until July 2009, when he became the Director of Education for the Toronto District School Board. Plagiarism, resignation and revoking of teaching license. On January 9, 2013, Spence apologized for plagiarizing several passages in an op-ed piece he wrote for the "Toronto Star" on extracurricular activities. The plagiarism was verified by the "Star"'s public editor. Among the plagiarized material was this paragraph lifted from a 1989 opinion piece in the "New York Times": "We are challenged through sport to use our minds in guiding our bodies through the dimensions of time and space on the field of play. Learning the skills of sport provides opportunity to experience success." On January 10, 2013, Spence tendered his resignation as director effective immediately after additional incidents of plagiarism in earlier articles and blog entries were uncovered. Passages of his 1996 Ed.D. dissertation were also revealed to have been copied from other sources without attribution; the University of Toronto investigated the allegations and found him guilty of academic dishonesty, stripping him of his doctorate. On December 20, 2016, the Ontario College of Teachers announced that Spence's teaching license had been revoked as a result of the findings of the investigation. His Doctor of Education has been recommended to be revoked by an independent tribunal due to 67 counts of plagiarism in his dissertation. On June 20, 2017, an independent tribunal at the University of Toronto recommended that Chris Spence be stripped of his Doctor of Education degree and that he be expelled from the university based on 67 instances of plagiarism in his 1996 doctorate dissertation that show a clear intention to plagiarize such as paragraph after paragraph and page after page of plagiarism that was edited from American to Canadian spelling and edited to appear as his own opinion. In 2018, Spence lost his fight to keep his PhD. The appeals tribunal stated that the "nature and extent [of plagiarism] found in Spence's thesis is a very serious offence." The matter, however is not settled. His lawyer, Darryl Singer, wrote in an email that Spence intends to seek judicial review of the decision in Ontario divisional court. Spence successfully appealed the revocation of his teaching licence in 2018 on the grounds that his "'precarious' mental state was not adequately accounted for". A psychiatric report stated that Spence's ability to function had been affected by "depression and suicidal ideation, related to the evaporation of his marriage and career".

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Nalo Hopkinson Nalo Hopkinson (born 20 December 1960) is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. As of 2013, she lived and taught in Riverside, California. Her novels ("Brown Girl in the Ring", "Midnight Robber", "The Salt Roads", "The New Moon's Arms") and short stories such as those in her collection "Skin Folk" often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling. Hopkinson has edited two fiction anthologies ("Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction" and ""). She was the co-editor with Uppinder Mehan for the anthology "So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future", and with Geoff Ryman for "Tesseracts 9". Hopkinson defended George Elliott Clarke's novel "Whylah Falls" on the CBC's "Canada Reads 2002". She was the curator of "Six Impossible Things", an audio series of Canadian fantastical fiction on CBC Radio One. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master. Early life and education. Nalo Hopkinson was born 20 December 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to Freda and Muhammed Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson. She grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. She was raised in a literary environment; her mother was a library technician and her father a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who also taught English and Latin. By virtue of this upbringing, Hopkinson had access to writers like Derek Walcott during her formative years, and could read Kurt Vonnegut's works by the age of six. Hopkinson's writing is influenced by the fairy and folk tales she read at a young age, which included Afro-Caribbean stories like Anansi, as well as Western works like "Gulliver's Travels", the "Iliad", the "Odyssey"; she was also known to have read the works of Shakespeare around the time she was reading Homer. Though she lived in Connecticut briefly during her father's tenure at Yale University, Hopkinson has said that the culture shock from her move to Toronto from Guyana at the age of 16 was something "to which [she's] still not fully reconciled". She lived in Toronto from 1977 to 2011 before moving to Riverside, California where she accepted a position as Professor of Creative Writing at University of California Riverside. Hopkinson has a Masters of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, where she studied with her mentor and instructor, science fiction writer James Morrow. She has learning disabilities. Career. Hopkinson held jobs in libraries, worked as a government culture research officer, and held the position of grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council. She has taught writing at various programs around the world, including stints as writer-in-residence at Clarion East, Clarion West and Clarion South. Publishing and writing was stopped for six years due to a serious illness that prevented her from working. Severe anemia, caused by fibroids as well as a vitamin D deficiency, led to financial difficulties and ultimately homelessness for two years prior to being hired by UC Riverside. In 2011, Hopkinson was hired as an associate professor in creative writing with an emphasis on science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism at University of California, Riverside. She became a full professor in 2014. As an author, Hopkinson often uses themes of Caribbean folklore, Afro-Caribbean culture, and feminism. She is historically conscious and uses knowledge from growing up in Caribbean communities in her writing, including the use of Creole and character backgrounds from Caribbean countries including Trinidad and Jamaica. In addition, Hopkinson consistently writes about subjects including race, class, and sexuality. Through her work, particularly in "Midnight Robber", Hopkinson addresses differences in cultures as well as social issues such as child and sexual abuse. Hopkinson has been a key speaker and guest of honor at multiple science fiction conventions. She is one of the founding members of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the board. Hopkinson's favorite writers include Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Buckell, and Charles Saunders. In addition, inspiration for her novels often comes from songs or poems with Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" serving as the inspiration for "Sister Mine". Personal hobbies include sewing, cooking, gardening, and fabric design. Hopkinson designs fabrics based on historical photos and illustrations. Awards. Hopkinson was the recipient of the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. "Brown Girl in the Ring" was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998, and received the Locus Award for Best First Novel. In 2008 it was a finalist in Canada Reads, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "Midnight Robber" was shortlisted for the James R. Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2000 and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001. "Skin Folk" received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in 2003. "The Salt Roads" received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction for 2004, presented at the 2005 Gaylaxicon. It was also nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award. In 2008, "The New Moon's Arms" received the Prix Aurora Award (Canada's reader-voted award for science fiction and fantasy) and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, making her the first author to receive the Sunburst Award twice. This book was also nominated for the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master.

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Lorena Gale Lorena Gale (May 9, 1958 – June 21, 2009) was a Canadian actress, playwright and theatre director. She was active onstage and in films and television since the 1980s. She also authored two award-winning plays, "Angélique" and "Je me souviens". Life and career. Gale was born in Montreal, Quebec. She studied at Concordia University and the National Theatre School and completed a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in 2005. Her performances on stage for Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun" and Joseph A. Walker's "River Niger" won her the Montreal Gazette Theatre Critics Award for Outstanding Performance in 1981. In 1985 she became the artistic director of Montréal's Black Theatre Workshop. She then studied playwriting at the Playwrights' Workshop Montréal. After moving to Vancouver in 1988, Lorena won a 1991 Jessie Richardson Award for best supporting actress as Normal Jean in "The Colored Museum" (1990) . Her play, "Angélique", the story of executed slave Marie-Joseph Angelique, was the winner of the 1995 duMaurier National Playwriting Competition in Canada. Her writing explores the nature of being black and mixed race and belonging in Canada. She appeared in such movies as "The Hotel New Hampshire", "Another Cinderella Story", "Ernest Goes to School", "Fantastic Four", "Traitor", "The Chronicles of Riddick", "The Mermaid Chair", and "The Exorcism of Emily Rose". She has guest starred on programs such as "The X-Files", "Stargate SG-1", "Smallville" and "Kingdom Hospital". Until August 2005, she starred as Priestess Elosha on the SciFi Channel television program "Battlestar Galactica". Gale also lent her voice to several animated works such as "", "The Bitsy Bears", "Camp Candy", "The Adventures of Corduroy" and "Hurricanes". Gale's final film role was as a librarian in "Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins", which was dedicated to her. Death. Gale died following a battle with throat cancer on June 21, 2009 at age 51. Her body was cremated.

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Jillian Christmas Jillian Christmas is a Canadian poet from Vancouver, British Columbia. She is most noted as the 2021 winner of the League of Canadian Poets' Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for spoken word poetry. Her published debut collection, "The Gospel of Breaking", was also a shortlisted finalist for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the Pat Lowther Award in the same year. She is a former artistic director of Vancouver's Verses Festival of Words. She identifies as queer.