Jade E. Bradford’s cultural highlights

Jade E. Bradford is an author and communications and engagement professional based in South Wales. Jade holds an MA in Creative Writing. Her short fiction has been published in Wasafiri, Breadfruit magazine, and Rowayat. Her short story ‘Drifting’, won first place in the 2024 Breadfruit magazine Prize, while her YA short story, ‘An Embarrassment of Janets’ was highly commended in the 2023 Faber FAB Prize for Children’s Literature. Jade was selected for the 2023/24 Literature Wales Representing Wales cohort, the 2024 Black British Book Festival Writers on the Rise and Hay Festival’s Writers at Work in 2025.

Album: Miles Davis – Kind of Blue

I’ve recently celebrated my birthday with friends and family and it has sent me into a fit of nostalgia for the music and people I have loved throughout my life. Kind of Blue was the soundtrack of my dad’s kitchen last week. He told me it was his favourite Miles Davis record, but of course, I already knew. It made me consider what it must be like to be a parent, to be known and unknown in equal measure. Now, I think about ageing. The record is the same age as my father. I am older than Miles Davis was when it was released. Time dances on.

https://www.milesdavis.com/albums/kind-of-blue/

Audiobook: Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold

Recently I’ve been re-engaging with the audiobook of Anansi’s Gold: The man who swindled the world, to remind me how good perfectly paced writing feels when it is spoken aloud. As a fiction author, I feel there’s a lot we can all learn from the ways high-quality narrative non-fiction blends storytelling and meticulous research. Also, there’s something about being steeped in Black history whilst being thoroughly entertained that feels precious. And, if you turn to the acknowledgements, you’ll find a message to me and my two cats.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/anansis-gold-9781526667083/

Concert: Cowboy Carter Tour

On the theme of Black history, I have seen Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter (she is only mononymic to people that aren’t close enough to consider her part of their parasocial family) twice this week. As a self-proclaimed scholar of pop culture (in the way that many of us raised by MTV are), I can confidently say she remains a peerless, incomparable talent. She’s not just a singer and dancer but a creative visionary with the good business sense to hire the people who can enhance her thoroughly modern ideas of what ‘performance’ can be. Standing in that stadium I realised that with the right people at the helm, I could be convinced to join a cult.

www.beyonce.com

Movie: Sinners

In 2015, Ryan Coogler released Creed, making Rocky, my favourite movie franchise, Black, with the introduction of Michael B. Jordan as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, son of Apollo. I hope he would be honoured to learn I named my cats after the film’s main adversaries. In 2018 Coogler inducted me into the Marvel universe through Black Panther (we miss you, Chadwick Boseman). It’s reductive to call his latest hit, Sinners, a vampire movie, or even a horror film. By blending history, folklore, music, and good old fashioned movie magic he’s created an absurdly watchable cultural epic. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31193180/

Event: Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye

I once worked a summer at the Cannes Lions festival. Before we left for Cannes one of the organisers said, ‘It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but also the best’. I remember naïvely wondering ‘how can anything be both?’ This year, I and nine others had the uncommon privilege of attending Hay Festival from beginning to end, as part of Writers at Work; a writers-in-residence programme for emerging authors made possible by Hay Festival, Arts Council Wales and Literature Wales. We spent busy, dreamy days meeting authors, being taught by authors, and most importantly being authors. Hyperbole is the language of my generation, but it was truly a perfect experience. In many ways, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but also the best. 

https://www.hayfestival.com/hay-on-wye/home

Place: Portmeirion, North Wales

My brain is most stimulated by bright colours, coastal paths and inconceivable architecture, which is why visiting Portmeirion was a bucket list experience for me. Best known to those outside Wales as the filming location for the television show The Prisoner, Portmeirion is a Disneyfied Italianate village built between 1925 and 1973 from the imagination of Clough Williams-Ellis. It’s set sympathetically in Welsh nature, working with, not against it. No matter what your art is, Portmeirion teaches us an important lesson. Sometimes you’ll have this huge, singular idea which makes no sense. But do it anyway, create the thing. People will love it. And even if they don’t, you will. 

https://portmeirion.wales/

Favourite WritersMosaic Author

At Hay Festival, I attended the thought-provoking events curated by WritersMosaic – making this choice all the harder. I’ve chosen Lanre Bakare because of the work his book, We Were There, does to fly the flag for those of us Black Britons not born in London.