Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer.
Malorie Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues, for example, her Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional alternative Britain to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work, including the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades since its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".
Jeanette Boahemaa Kwakye is a British broadcaster and retired sprinter.
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.
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, writer, publisher and educator.
A'Lelia Perry Bundles is an American journalist, news producer and author, known for her 2001 biography of her great-great-grandmother Madam C. J. Walker.
Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., known professionally as Stormzy, is a British rapper, singer and songwriter. In 2014, he gained attention on the UK underground music scene through his Wicked Skengman series of freestyles over classic grime beats. Stormzy's song "Shut Up", which was initially released as a freestyle on YouTube, became popular and peaked at number eight on the UK Singles Chart after he launched a campaign to reach Christmas number one.
Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin, known professionally as Kit de Waal, is a British/Irish writer. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was published by Penguin Books in June 2016. After securing the publishing deal with Penguin, De Waal used some of her advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship to help improve working-class representation in the arts. The audiobook version of My Name is Leon is voiced by Sir Lenny Henry. De Waal has also published short stories, including the collection Supporting Cast (2020). She is Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) is a nonprofit organization created to promote diversity of multiple forms in American children's literature and publishing, which grew out of the Twitter hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks in 2014. The organization's programming includes funding grants and internships for diverse authors and people interested in publishing, a mentorship program, providing lists of book recommendations for librarians, teachers, and parents on finding books with characters from marginalized backgrounds, and publishing an anthology of short stories featuring multiple authors from diverse backgrounds.
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.
Derek Owusu is a British writer and podcaster. He edited and contributed to the book Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (2019), and released his debut novel, That Reminds Me, in November 2019. That Reminds Me was awarded the 2020 Desmond Elliott Prize. Owusu was named on Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists" list 2023.
Lola Olufemi is a British writer. She is an organiser with the London Feminist Library, and her writing has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, and the co-editor of A FLY Girl's Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism.
David Shelley is a British publisher who is Chief Executive Officer of Hachette UK, the second-largest trade publisher, with divisions including Hodder & Stoughton, Orion, Headline, John Murray, and Little, Brown. Shelley is also Vice-President of the executive board of the Publishers' Association. He began his publishing career at the age of 23 working as an editorial assistant at the independent company Allison and Busby, founded in 1967 by Clive Allison and Margaret Busby, and after five years running the company he moved on to become editorial director of Little, Brown in 2005, publisher at Sphere in 2007, then in 2009 Deputy Publisher at Little, Brown, and Publisher there in 2011. Shelley oversees Hachette's inclusion initiative, "Changing the Story", which he founded in 2016.
The history of black people in Cambridge, UK cannot easily be separated from the history of Cambridge University. The university has attracted students from Africa and the African diaspora to the town of Cambridge for more than two centuries. Several notable black people had a Cambridge association in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the end of the eighteenth century Cambridge became a centre of abolitionist sentiment. From the end of the nineteenth century the university started to admit black students in larger numbers. In recent decades, however, the relatively low number of black students admitted to the university has become a topic of media comment and public concern.
Grace Francesca Victory is a British Youtuber, writer, body positive activist and television presenter from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
The Black Heart Foundation is a UK and US registered charity, founded in 2000 and chaired by businessman and philanthropist Ric Lewis. Trustees include former England Rugby Captain Matt Dawson and former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan.
That Reminds Me is the debut novel of British author and podcaster Derek Owusu, published in 2019 by Merky books, a Penguin imprint launched by Stormzy and Penguin Random House UK. A Bildungroman, the novel takes place in the British countryside and in London and traces the childhood, adolescence and young adulthood of its first-person narrator, "K", and deals with the themes of identity, family, trauma, mental health, masculinity and racism. Owusu started writing the novel while he was in a mental health facility and because he wanted to understand the build-up of a mental breakdown. While there are superficial similarities between Owusu’s life and that of his protagonist, the novel is not autobiographical. Owusu himself described the character of K as something like an “alter ego”.
Keisha the Sket is an erotic coming-of-age novel, written by a 13-year-old Black London schoolgirl in text-speak, using London slang. It was originally published online in installments in the 2000s and went viral via smartphones. It was published in print for the first time in 2021, with the formerly anonymous author, now an academic, using the name Jade LB, and won the British Book Awards 2022 in the Discover Book of the Year category.
