In search of lasting change
Whilst acknowledging the vast array of initiatives for so-called BAME writers, what will be the enduring impact? The six writers here, commissioned in the summer of 2019 before the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, have wrestled with this question throughout their careers.
Edited by: Kerry Young
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In search of lasting change
Kerry Young
“There have been many initiatives for so-called BAME writers over the last decade but what will be their enduring impact? In the summer of 2019, I commissioned six writers to reflect on this with me. It's a question that we’ve wrestled with throughout our careers.”
Kerry Young asks how black writers and writers of colour can overcome the people and circumstances that bar our path with ignorance and discouragement.
The Jhalak Prize
Sunny Singh
“The Jhalak Prize is disruption, defiance, challenge, subversion. It is an initiative to decolonise our literatures, imaginations, cultures, and even ourselves.”
Sunny Singh on the Jhalak Prize, an initiative to decolonise our literatures, imaginations, cultures, and even ourselves.
Advice to my younger self
Malika Booker
“That nerdy little brown skin girl freezing in the playground, that girl is going to be a writer. A poet.”
Malika Booker gives her younger self advice and solace about her lifelong vocation as a poet.
Mainstreaming and greater choice of books
Margaret Busby
“Being black seems to be considered my expertise; the couple of times I’ve been asked to review a white writer is when their subject- matter is ‘black’.”
Margaret Busby OBE looks back at 50 years in the British publishing industry, still saying that tokenism is not enough.
And the rest of you are normal
Mahsuda Snaith
“On the night of the awards, I sat in the audience with my heart pounding. Then my name was announced.”
Mahsuda Snaith on inclusive action, awards, and redressing the imbalance in the publishing industry.
The writing culture I would like to see
Katy Massey
“Such is the weight of the cultural baggage attached to books that there is a fervour of protective jealousy over who gets to put their name on one.”
Katy Massey asks for the publishing industry to look at why the inequalities in many previous reports have not been addressed.
Being my own person as a writer
Irenosen Okojie
“I am still that young girl with a keen hunger to know the world, having adventures on the page.”
Irenosen Okojie, British-Nigerian author of Curundera, on getting to know herself as a writer and investigating the multiplicities of otherness.