“My mum always told me never to be ‘a carry down artist’. When I write I try to elevate people, and to always bear in mind that almost everyone is a candidate for compassion.”
Colin Grant is Director of WritersMosaic and the author of six non-fiction books.
Marcus Garvey’s redemption song
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’.
Biography
Colin Grant’s books include Bageye at the Wheel, short-listed for the Pen Ackerley Prize, and Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His latest book is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. His oral history of migration to Britain, What We Leave We Carry, will be published in June 2026.
Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and director of WritersMosaic, an online magazine and division of the Royal Literary Fund. He also writes for a number of newspapers including the TLS, The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Review of Books.
