Jacqueline Rudet (born 12.02.1962) is a British dramatist. [1] [2] [3]
Born in London, England, Jacqueline Rudet (also known as Magdalene St Luce), spent her early years in the Caribbean island of Dominica, before returning to Britain, and studying drama at Barking College. [4]
Rudet's play Basin opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 29 October 1985. [5] Set in a London flat after a party the night before, the story centring on the friendship between three Dominican women living in London, [6] Basin was published in Black Plays, edited by Yvonne Brewster (Methuen, 1987), [7] and extracts were included in the anthology Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992). [8]
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.
Road is the first play written by Jim Cartwright, and was first produced in 1986 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, directed by Simon Curtis.
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).
Thomas Edward Bond was an English playwright, theatre director, poet, dramatic theorist and screenwriter. He was the author of some 50 plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. His other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), and the War trilogy (1985). Bond was broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.
Pauline Melville FRSL is an English-Guyanese writer and former actress of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said of Melville: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
Mona Hammond was a Jamaican-British actress and co-founder of the Talawa Theatre Company. Born in Tweedside, Jamaica, Hammond immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1959, where she lived for the rest of her life. Hammond had a long and distinguished stage career. She was best known for her work on British television and played Blossom Jackson in the BBC soap opera EastEnders.
Yvonne Jones Brewster is a Jamaican actress, theatre director and businesswoman, known for her role as Ruth Harding in the BBC television soap opera Doctors. She co-founded the theatre companies Talawa in the UK and The Barn in Jamaica.
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."
Michael John Abbensetts 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.
Talawa Theatre Company is a Black British theatre company founded in 1986.
Winsome Pinnock FRSL is a British playwright of Jamaican heritage, who is "probably Britain's most well known black female playwright". She was described in The Guardian as "the godmother of black British playwrights".
Barrington John Reckord, known as Barry Reckord, was a Jamaican playwright, one of the earliest Caribbean writers to make a contribution to theatre in Britain. His brother was the actor and director Lloyd Reckord, with whom he sometimes worked.
The Keskidee Centre, or Keskidee Arts Centre, was Britain's first arts centre for the black community, founded in 1971. Located at Gifford Street in Islington, near King's Cross in London, it was a project initiated by Guyanese architect and cultural activist Oscar Abrams (1937–1996) to provide under one roof self-help and cultural activities for the local West Indian community. Its purpose-built facilities included a library, gallery, studios, theatre and restaurant. The Keskidee became a hub for African and Afro-Caribbean politics and arts, and for years was the only place in London that produced black theatre, developing its own vibrant drama company and attracting both a black and white audience.
Pearl Connor-Mogotsi, née Nunez, was a Trinidadian-born theatrical and literary agent, actress and cultural activist, who was a pioneering campaigner for the recognition and promotion of African Caribbean arts. In the UK, in the 1950s, she was the first agent to represent black and other minority ethnic actors, writers and film-makers, and during the early 1960s was instrumental in setting up one of Britain's first black theatre companies, the Negro Theatre Workshop. In the words of John La Rose, who delivered a eulogy at her funeral on 26 February 2005: "Pearl Connor-Mogotsi was pivotal in the effort to remake the landscape for innovation and for the inclusion of African, Caribbean and Asian artists in shaping a new vision of consciousness for art and society."
Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. 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.
Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".
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.
Deirdre OsborneHon. FRSL is an Australian-born academic who is Professor of Literature and Drama in English. She teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and is Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Co-ordinator for the School of Arts and Humanities. She co-founded the MA degree in Black British Writing. In 2022, Osborne was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature for her "her contribution to the advancement of literature in the UK".
Paul Boakye is a British writer, editor, campaigner, and marketing executive. He is best known for his provocative drama, Boy with Beer, and for his work as editor and creator of Black Britain's premiere men's lifestyle magazine, DRUM.
Maria Oshodi is a British writer and theatre director. A guide dog owner, she is Artistic director and CEO of Extant Theatre Company, Britain's only professional performing arts company of blind and partially sighted people.