Speaking out

Dancing with words.

‘I held my breath, half terrified at the stench. These were my father’s books – filled to the brim with tales of twisting, heightened lives, stained with the manias of some other age.’

In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey, the most famous black man on the planet, terrified the authorities who schemed to imprison him in 1925. Recently, Joe Biden pardoned Garvey. In Negro with a Hat, Colin Grant recalls the premature death of the 'Black Moses'.

Writers for our first UK retreat - Sharon Duggal, Arji Manuelpillai, Marjorie Lotfi, Yvvette Edwards, Jasbinder Bilan, Khaldoon Ahmed and Sea Sharp - begin work in April. A series introducing them continues with Sharon Duggal in conversation with Colin Grant

Generations of women seeing the world in vivid hues

The perils of getting lost in the system

‘the phantasmagorical journey of an alcoholic man in his hunt for his dead palm-wine tapster’

‘In ballroom, I feel legible in ways I am not, or feel I am not, elsewhere.’

‘Mum, who was partially sighted, would spend time with me working partly as her eyes, identifying plants in gardens and on the side of the road: ragwort, yarrow, thistles, pennyroyal for period pains, rue brought on menstruation.’

You end up tribeless and in the water, wherever that might be

Unabashed feminism

‘The first poem I wrote was in my mind'