Afua Hirsch
Afua Hirsch is a British writer and broadcaster. She has worked as a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She is the author of the 2018 book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, receiving a Jerwood Award while writing it.
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Travis Alabanza
Travis Alabanza is a performance artist, theatre maker, poet and writer that works and survives in London, via Bristol. Their multidisciplinary practice uses a combination of poetry, theatre, sounscapes, projection and body-focussed performance art to scream about their survival as a Black, trans, gender-non-conforming person in the UK. Growing up on a council estate in the outskirts of a city, Alabanza prides themselves on a practice that is messy, abrupt, confrontation, atypical and self-taught, often using performance to provoke a strong emotion [and action] from their audiences. In the last two years Alabanza has cemented themselves as one of the most prominent emerging queer artists in the UK (As noted by Dazed, Prancing Through Life a
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Akala
Kingslee James McLean Daley, better known by the stage name Akala, is an English rapper, author, poet, and political activist.
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Originally from Kentish Town, London he is the younger brother of rapper/vocalist Ms. Dynamite. In 2006, he was voted the Best Hip Hop Act at the MOBO Awards. He was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of Brighton in 2018.
In May 2018, Akala published Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. The book is part memoir, part polemic, on the subject of race in modern Britain.
Akala has given guest lectures at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, Manchester Metropolitan University, Sydney University, Sheffield Hallam University, Cardiff University, and the International Slavery Museum, as well as -
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983–2015, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990), which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman.
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Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, after which Pratchett wrote an average of two books a year. The final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in August 2015, five months after his death.
With more than 100 million books sold worldwide in 43 languages, Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Emp -
Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."
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Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at To -
Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is the author of Sunstroke and Other Stories, and the novels The Past, Late in the Day and Clever Girl. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.
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Diane Abbott
Diane Julie Abbott is an English politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She was the first black woman elected to the UK Parliament, and in 2024 became its longest-serving female MP, earning the title Mother of the House. A former Shadow Home Secretary and Privy Counsellor, Abbott has been a prominent figure on the Labour left and a vocal campaigner on issues of race and inequality. She was suspended from the Labour Party in 2023 over comments about racism, later apologised, and had the whip restored ahead of the 2024 general election. In July 2025, she was suspended again after reiterating those remarks in a BBC interview, and currently sits as an independent MP.
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Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. She’s the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her collected essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.
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Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Laing’s writing about art & culture appears in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and -
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Laura Bates
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 100,000 testimonies of gender inequality, with branches in 25 countries worldwide. She works closely with politicians, businesses, schools, police forces and organisations from the Council of Europe to the United Nations to tackle gender inequality. She was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 2015 and has been named a woman of the year by Cosmopolitan, Red Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine.
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Laura is the author of Everyday Sexism, the Sunday Times bestseller Girl Up, and Misogynation. Her first novel, The Burning, was published in 2019. She co-wrote Letters to the Future with Ow -
Claire North
Claire North is actually Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal-nominated young-adult novel author whose first book, Mirror Dreams, was written when she was just 14 years old. She went on to write seven more successful YA novels.
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Claire North is a pseudonym for adult fantasy books written by Catherine Webb, who also writes under the pseudonym Kate Griffin. -
Sayaka Murata
Sayaka Murata (in Japanese, 村田 沙耶香) is one of the most exciting up-and-coming writers in Japan today.
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She herself still works part time in a convenience store, which gave her the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen). She debuted in 2003 with Junyu (Breastfeeding), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), and in 2013 the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-oro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City). Convenience Store Woman won the 2016 Akutagawa Award. Murata has two short stories published in English (both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): "Lover on the Breeze" (Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthqu -
Travis Alabanza
Travis Alabanza is a performance artist, theatre maker, poet and writer that works and survives in London, via Bristol. Their multidisciplinary practice uses a combination of poetry, theatre, sounscapes, projection and body-focussed performance art to scream about their survival as a Black, trans, gender-non-conforming person in the UK. Growing up on a council estate in the outskirts of a city, Alabanza prides themselves on a practice that is messy, abrupt, confrontation, atypical and self-taught, often using performance to provoke a strong emotion [and action] from their audiences. In the last two years Alabanza has cemented themselves as one of the most prominent emerging queer artists in the UK (As noted by Dazed, Prancing Through Life a
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The Secret Barrister
The author, writing under the pseudonym of The Secret Barrister, is a junior barrister practising criminal law before the courts of England and Wales. The Secret Barrister is also a blogger who in 2016 and 2017 was named Independent Blogger of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards. As of the book's publication date in March 2018 the author had a substantial following on Twitter of nearly 88,000.
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Chetna Maroo
Chetna Maroo lives in London, UK. Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Western Lane is her first novel.
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Emma Dabiri
Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian author, academic, and broadcaster. Her debut book, Don't Touch My Hair, was first published in 2019.
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Dabiri is a frequent contributor to print and online media, including The Guardian, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Vice, and in academic journals. She is known for her outspokenness on issues of race and racism.
She now lives in London, where she is completing her PhD while also teaching and continuing her broadcast work. -
Derek Owusu
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London.
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He has written for the BBC, ITV, Granta, Esquire, GQ and Tate Britain.
In 2019, Owusu collated, edited and contributed to SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, an anthology exploring the experiences of Black men in Britain.
His first novel, That Reminds Me, and the first work of fiction to be published by Stormzy’s Merky Books imprint, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK and Ireland.
His second novel, Losing the Plot, was published in 2022 and was Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize.
In 2023 he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
His third novel, Borderline Fiction, will be published by Can -
J.B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley was an English writer. He was the son of a schoolmaster, and after schooling he worked for a time in the local wool trade. Following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Priestley joined the British Army, and was sent to France - in 1915 taking part in the Battle of Loos. After being wounded in 1917 Priestley returned to England for six months; then, after going back to the Western Front he suffered the consequences of a German gas attack, and, treated at Rouen, he was declared unfit for active service and was transferred to the Entertainers Section of the British Army.
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When Priestley left the army he studied at Cambridge University, where he completed a degree in Modern History and Political Science. Subsequently h -
Alice Procter
Alice A. Procter is an art historian and museum enthusiast. When she graduated in 2016 she couldn’t get a job, so she started an irreverent and low-tech podcast called The Exhibitionist, reviewing galleries and museums with friends and terrible background noise.
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That turned into Uncomfortable Art Tours, unofficial guided tours exploring how major institutions came into being against a backdrop of imperialism. She runs these regularly at six sites, exploring the role colonialism played in shaping and funding national collections, looking beyond the surface of paintings to unravel the ideological aesthetics at work.
Alice’s academic work concentrates on the intersections of postcolonial art practice and colonial material culture, the curation o -
Natasha Brown
Natasha Brown is a writer who lives in London. Assembly is her first novel.
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Saou Ichikawa
Saou Ichikawa graduated from the School of Human Sciences, Waseda University. Her bestselling debut novel, Hunchback, won the Bungakukai Prize for New Writers, and she is the first author with a physical disability to receive the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s top literary awards. She has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair. Ichikawa lives outside Tokyo.
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David Harewood
David Harewood was born on December 8, 1965 in Birmingham, England. His parents are originally from Barbados in the Caribbean and they moved to England in the 50s and 60s. He grew up in Small Heath and is an avid Birmingham City FC fan. David is married and has two daughters.
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At 18 years old he began training as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He was the first black actor to play the title role in Othello – making history at the National Theatre in 1997. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed David a ‘Member of The Most Excellent Order’ of the British Empire for his services to acting in 2012, giving him the title David Harewood MBE. -
Emma Dabiri
Emma Dabiri is an Irish-Nigerian author, academic, and broadcaster. Her debut book, Don't Touch My Hair, was first published in 2019.
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Dabiri is a frequent contributor to print and online media, including The Guardian, Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, Vice, and in academic journals. She is known for her outspokenness on issues of race and racism.
She now lives in London, where she is completing her PhD while also teaching and continuing her broadcast work. -
Hannah Azieb Pool
Hannah Azieb Pool is a British–Eritrean writer and journalist. She was born near the town of Keren in Eritrea during the war for independence from Ethiopia. She is a former staff writer for The Guardian newspaper, and writes regularly for national and international media. She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK.
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Mariam Khan
Mariam Khan is an intersectional feminist, diversity-in-books pusher and freelance writer. She is the editor of It’s Not About the Burqa, an anthology of essays by Muslim women.
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Darren McGarvey
Darren McGarvey (born 1984), aka Loki, grew up in Pollok, Glasgow. He is a writer, performer, columnist and former rapper-in-residence at Police Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit. He has presented eight programmes for BBC Scotland exploring the root causes of anti-social behaviour and social deprivation.
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Amelia Gentleman
Amelia Gentleman (born 1972) is a British journalist. She is a reporter for The Guardian.
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Gentleman studied Russian and History at Wadham College, Oxford, before becoming a journalist.
For six months, Gentleman worked for The Guardian on the story of the Windrush scandal, the deportation of people originally from British colonies in the Caribbean, or elsewhere in the Commonwealth, who legally had a right of residence in the UK. The scandal broke in April 2018 and within weeks led to resignation of the Conservative Home Secretary, Amber Rudd.
Gentleman won the 2018 Paul Foot Award for her work on the Windrush story. She was also named as the Political Studies Association's journalist of the year for 2018, with Carole Cadwalladr, and as journali -
Derek Owusu
Derek Owusu is an award-winning writer and poet from North London.
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He has written for the BBC, ITV, Granta, Esquire, GQ and Tate Britain.
In 2019, Owusu collated, edited and contributed to SAFE: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, an anthology exploring the experiences of Black men in Britain.
His first novel, That Reminds Me, and the first work of fiction to be published by Stormzy’s Merky Books imprint, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel published in the UK and Ireland.
His second novel, Losing the Plot, was published in 2022 and was Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize.
In 2023 he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.
His third novel, Borderline Fiction, will be published by Can -
Reni Eddo-Lodge
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a British journalist with a focus on feminism and exposing structural racism.
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