William McGuire Bryson is an American–British journalist and author. Bryson has written a number of nonfiction books on topics including travel, the English language, and science. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 and 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship. He served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.
Sir Steven Geoffrey Redgrave is a British retired rower who won gold medals at five consecutive Olympic Games from 1984 to 2000. He has also won three Commonwealth Games gold medals and nine World Rowing Championships golds. He is the most successful male rower in Olympic history, and the only man to have won gold medals at five Olympic Games in an endurance sport.
Martin John O'Neill, Baron O'Neill of Clackmannan was a Scottish Labour politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1979 until 2005 and as a member of the House of Lords from 2005 until his death.
Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British 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. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. He received a knighthood in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988. O'Toole was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001 and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator.
Thomas Gerald Reames Davies CBE DL is a Welsh former rugby union wing who played international rugby for Wales between 1966 and 1978. He is one of a small group of Welsh players to have won three Grand Slams including Gareth Edwards, JPR Williams, Ryan Jones, Adam Jones, Gethin Jenkins and Alun Wyn Jones.
Black British people are a multi-ethnic group of British citizens of either African or Afro-Caribbean descent. The term Black British developed in the 1950s, referring to the Black British West Indian people from the former Caribbean British colonies in the West Indies sometimes referred to as the Windrush Generation and people from Africa, who are residents of the United Kingdom and are British citizens.
Dame Frances Anne Cairncross, is a British economist, journalist and academic. She is a senior fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCLA.
Kingslee James McLean Daley, known professionally as Akala, is a British rapper, journalist, author, activist and poet from Kentish Town, London. In 2006, he was voted the Best Hip Hop Act at the MOBO Awards and has been included on the annual Powerlist of the 100 most influential Black British people in the UK, most recently making the 2021 edition.
Jeremy Leggett is a British social entrepreneur and writer. He founded and was a board director of Solarcentury from 1997 to 2020, an international solar solutions company, and founded and was chair of SolarAid, a charity funded with 5% of Solarcentury's annual profits that helps solar-lighting entrepreneurs get started in Africa (2006–2020). SolarAid owns a retail brand SunnyMoney that was for a time Africa's top-seller of solar lighting, having sold well over a million solar lights, all profits recycled to the cause of eradicating the kerosene lantern from Africa.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Sir Kenneth Aphunezi Olisa is a British businessman and philanthropist. He is the first mixed heritage Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London. He founded and led the AIM-listed technology merchant bank Interregnum and now leads Restoration Partners. Ken Olisa is Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and has served and serves on several boards of philanthropic, educational and regulator organisations. Sir Kenneth with his wife endowed the Olisa Library at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Sir Godfrey Henry Oliver Palmer OBE is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a human rights activist.
Professor Peter Gerald Moore was an, academic, actuary and statistician. He was Professor of Statistics at London Business School, 1965–1993 and its principal from 1984 to 1989.
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.
Thomas Segun Ilube is a British entrepreneur and educational philanthropist and chair of the Rugby Football Union making him the first black chair of a major sport in England. He was ranked first in the Powerlist 2017, an annual listing of the UK's 100 most powerful people with African or Afro-Caribbean heritage.
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and filmmaker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.
Patrick Philip Vernon is a British social commentator and political activist of Jamaican heritage, who works in the voluntary and public sector. He is a former Labour councillor in the London Borough of Hackney. His career has been involved with developing and managing health and social care services, including mental health, public health, regeneration and employment projects. Also a film maker and amateur cultural historian, he runs his own social enterprise promoting the history of diverse communities, as founder of Every Generation and the "100 Great Black Britons" campaign. He is also an expert on African and Caribbean genealogy in the UK. He was appointed a Clore Fellow in 2007, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for "services to the Reduction of Health Inequalities for Ethnic Minorities", and in 2018 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton.
Jacaranda Books is a Black owned British independent book publishing firm launched in 2012 and known for their effort promoting diversity in United Kingdom's publishing industry.
André Pierre Picard is a Canadian journalist and author specializing in health care issues. He works as a reporter and a columnist for the national newspaper The Globe and Mail. As of 2020, he runs the news organization's office in Montreal. He currently lives in Vancouver.
