Founded | 1978 |
---|---|
Country of origin | England |
Headquarters location | Brixton, London |
Publication types | Books |
Black Ink Collective was a British publishing company founded in 1978 to publish the work of young Black writers in the UK.
The Collective started as a publisher, their first book Black Ink, published in 1978, was an anthology of work by local school pupils. The Collective also established The Black Writers' Workshop, who met weekly at their premises at 258 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, south London. The writers' workshop incorpated readings, performances and aimed to "incorporate African and Caribbean orality into a Black British poetic voice". [1] The Workshop was attended by writers including Benjamin Zephaniah, S. I. Martin, Desmond Johnson, Fred D'Aguiar and Michael McMillan. [2] [3] Their second book was a play by 16-year-old Michael McMillan, originally performed at the Royal Court Theatre Young Writer's Festival, [4] about the plight of an unemployed school-leaver.
Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.
Jean "Binta" Breeze MBE was a Jamaican dub poet and storyteller, acknowledged as the first woman to write and perform dub poetry. She worked also as a theatre director, choreographer, actor, and teacher. She performed her work around the world, in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South-East Asia, and Africa, and has been called "one of the most important, influential performance poets of recent years".
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher, founder in 1966 of New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publishing company in Britain, and subsequently Chairman of the George Padmore Institute. He was originally from Trinidad and Tobago but was involved in the struggle for political independence and cultural and social change in the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s and later in Britain, the rest of Europe and the Third World.
Brett Ewins was a British comic book artist best known for his work on Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper in the weekly anthology comic 2000 AD.
Marlene Nourbese Philip, usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.
Mustapha Matura was a Trinidadian playwright living in London. Characterised by critic Michael Billington as "a pioneering black playwright who opened the doors for his successors", Matura was the first British-based dramatist of colour to have a play in London's West End, with Play Mas in 1974. He was described by the New Statesman as "the most perceptive and humane of Black dramatists writing in Britain."
Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Victor Stafford Reid, OJ, was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote to influence younger generations to embrace local history. He was awarded the silver (1950) and gold (1976) Musgrave Medals, the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children; one play production; and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - "the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form" - and The Leopard.
James Berry, OBE, Hon. FRSL, was a 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.
Paul Geoffrey Edwards was a wide-ranging literary scholar at the University of Edinburgh, appreciated for his "adventurous and unorthodox teaching".
Marion Patrick Jones was a Trinidadian novelist, whose training was in the fields of library science and social anthropology. She is also known by the names Marion Glean and Marion O'Callaghan. Living in Britain during the 1960s, she was also an activist within the black community. She was the author of two notable novels – Pan Beat, first published in 1973, and J'Ouvert Morning (1976) – and also wrote non-fiction.
Ferdinand Dennis 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, 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)."
Michael McMillan is a British playwright, artist, curator and educator, born in England to parents who were migrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). As an academic, he focuses his research on "the creative process, ethnography, oral histories, material culture and performativity". He is the author of several plays, and as an artist his first installation, The West Indian Front Room, was exhibited at the Geffrye Museum in 2005, going on to inspire a 2007 BBC Four documentary Tales from the Front Room, a website, a 2009 book, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, and various international commissions, such as Van Huis Uit: The Living Room of Migrants in the Netherlands and A Living Room Surrounded by Salt. A more recent installation of the Walter Rodney Bookshop featured as part of the 2015 exhibition No Colour Bar at the Guildhall Art Gallery.
Malika Booker is a British writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist, who is considered "a pioneer of the present spoken word movement" in the UK. Her writing spans different genres of storytelling, including poetry, theatre, monologue, installation and education, and her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Organizations for which she has worked include Arts Council England, the BBC, British Council, Wellcome Trust, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Arvon, and Hampton Court Palace.
Rashidah Ismaili, also known as Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and playwright who was born in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa, and in the 1950s migrated to the US, where she still lives in Harlem, New York City. She was part of the Black Arts Movement in New York in the 1960s. She is also an arts and culture critic and taught literature by French- and English-speaking African writers in higher education institutes for more than 30 years.
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman's Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited. Her pioneering school anthology, The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), drew on her use of local literary material while teaching in Jamaica. A participant in and chronicler of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Walmsley is also the author of The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966–1971 (1992) and Art in the Caribbean (2010). She lives in London.
Adam Lowe is a British writer, performer and publisher from Leeds, though he currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012. He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs as Beyonce Holes.
The Asian Women Writers' Collective (AWWC), formerly known as the Asian Women Writers Workshop, was an organization of British Asian women writers. Founded by the writer and activist Ravinder Randhawa in 1984, the AAWC provided a platform for several British Asian women to enter writing, including Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Leena Dhingra, Tanika Gupta and Rukhsana Ahmad.