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Colin Grant by Missohio

“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 the author of five 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 is an author, historian, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016.

Grant also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the GuardianObserver, New StatesmanTLSLondon Review of BooksProspectSpectator, New York Review of Books and Granta.  Grant’s latest book, Homecoming: Voices of Caribbean Migration to Britain was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year.

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