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 Lenworth George Henry is an English comedian, actor and writer. He gained success as a stand-up comedian and impressionist in the late 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in The Lenny Henry Show in 1984. He was the most prominent black British comedian of the time and much of his material served to celebrate and parody his African-Caribbean roots.
Tracy Chapman is an American singer-songwriter, widely known for her hit singles "Fast Car" (1988) and "Give Me One Reason" (1995).
Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
Bonisile John Kani,, is a South African actor, author, director and playwright. He is known for portraying T'Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Black Panther (2018), Rafiki in The Lion King (2019) and Colonel Ulenga in the Netflix films Murder Mystery (2019) and Murder Mystery 2 (2023).
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish journalist, literary editor, 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 Advising Editor and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator.
Black British people or Black Britons are a multi-ethnic group of British people of Sub-Saharan African or Afro-Caribbean descent. The term Black British developed during the 1960s, referring to Black British people from the former British West Indies, and from Africa.
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 an English rapper, writer and activist 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.
Sir Mohammed Fathi Ahmed Ibrahim is a Sudanese-British billionaire businessman. He worked for several telecommunications companies, before founding Celtel, which, when sold, had over 24 million mobile phone subscribers in 14 African countries. After selling Celtel in 2005 for $3.4 billion, he set up the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to encourage better governance in Africa, as well as creating the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, to evaluate nations' performance. He is also a member of the Africa regional advisory board of London Business School.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is an English 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 Godfrey Henry Oliver Palmer, commonly known as Geoff Palmer, is a Jamaican-British academic and human rights activist who is professor emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Augustine John, known as Gus John, is a Grenadian-born writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has worked 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 was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.
Chinyere Adah "Chi-Chi" Nwanoku is a British double bassist and professor of Historical Double Bass Studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Nwanoku was a founder member and principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a position she held for 30 years until she didn’t.
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer and broadcaster. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Olusoga 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.
Margaret Henrietta Augusta Casely-Hayford CBE is a British lawyer, businesswoman and public figure who is active in the voluntary sector. She is at the forefront of working to create diversity on boards and is joint-manager of a rap artist and digital media entrepreneur. Casely-Hayford was a candidate in the 2024 University of Oxford Chancellor election, described by The Times as an outside bet for the role, with William Hague eventually being elected.
Vanessa Kingori is a multi-award-winning businesswoman with over 20 years of experience in the media and creative industries. She now serves as Google's Managing Director of Technology, Media, and Telecoms, bringing a fresh perspective to the company's business and cultural shifts for the AI era.
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.
