Michael Crummey is a Canadian poet and a writer of historical fiction. His writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Peepal Tree Press is a publisher based in Leeds, England which publishes Caribbean, Black British, and South Asian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and academic books. It was founded after a paper shortage in Guyana halted production of new books in the region, and was named after the sacred peepal trees transplanted to the Caribbean with Indian indentured labourers, after founder Jeremy Poynting heard a story of workers gathering under the tree to tell stories.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Fiona Ruth Sampson, is a British poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing. A former musician, Sampson has written on the links between music and poetry, and her work has been set to music by several composers. She has received several prizes for her literary biographies and poetry. Notably, Sampson received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
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.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a South African writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the biracial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. She has written: "I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side. After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification." She has also said: "Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up." As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: "Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context."
Brunel International African Poetry Prize is a literary award aimed at the "development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa." The prize is sponsored by Brunel University and Bernardine Evaristo. In the past it has been partnered by Commonwealth Writers and the African Poetry Book Fund USA. It comes with a £3,000 honorarium. It is aimed at unpublished poets with a manuscript of ten poems.
Diriye Osman is an award-winning British-Somali short story writer, novelist, visual artist, essayist, photographer, journalist, editor, critic, graphic designer and website designer.
Warsan Shire 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 ", have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates".
Reni Eddo-Lodge 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.
Mr Loverman is the seventh novel written by British-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo. Published by Penguin Books, UK, in 2013 and Akashic Books, US, in 2014, Mr Loverman explores the life of Britain's older Caribbean community, through the perspective of a 74-year-old Antiguan-Londoner and closet homosexual.
Hello Mum is a novella written by British-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo. Published by Penguin Books in 2010, this epistolary novella explores London gang culture from the viewpoint of a 14-year-old boy, Jerome, who communicates with his mother through letters. In 2010 Hello Mum was chosen as Suffolk's Big Quick Read and adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play in 2012.
Lara is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse written by Bernardine Evaristo. It was originally published in 1997 by Angela Royal Publishing and won the EMMA Best Book Award in 1999. Drawing on family life, childhood and an inter-racial marriage, Lara explores the struggles of London living in the 1960s and '70s, travelling through seven generations of predecessors, spanning over 150 years to follow their lives in England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil. In 2009 a new, revised and expanded edition was published by Bloodaxe Books, with a photograph of the author's parents on their wedding day in Camberwell, London, 1955, as the cover.
Theatre of Black Women (1982–1988) was Britain's first black women's theatre company. It was founded by Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall upon leaving the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, where they had trained as actors and theatre-makers on the Community Theatre Arts course from 1979 to 1982. The course was a progressive, innovative drama course aimed at producing individuals who would be equipped to create their own theatre and be a force for change in society. The company, based in London, was forced to disband in 1988 when Arts Council funding ceased.
The Emperor's Babe is a verse novel written by British author Bernardine Evaristo. Published by Penguin in 2001, it is Evaristo's second work of fiction. Based in London around 1800 years ago, it follows the story of black Nubian teenage girl, Zuleika, who comes of age in the Roman period. The Emperor's Babe won the Arts Council Writers Award in 2000, a NESTA Fellowship Award in 2003 and was chosen by The Times as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade in 2010. In 2013, it was also adapted into a BBC Radio 4 play.
Blonde Roots is a prose novel written by British-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo. Published by Penguin UK in 2009 and Penguin USA in 2010, this satirical novel reverts notions of transatlantic slavery, placing Africans as masters of European slaves. In 2009, it was the Orange Prize Youth Panel Choice and the Big Red Read Award.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Will Harris (1989) is a London-based poet of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage. His debut poetry book RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021. His poem SAY was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2018. In 2019, Harris received a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation.
