“I have no problem being regarded as a black writer. It’s an adjective, not an epithet. It’s not the only adjective available, and I have no interest in being confined by it. But I’m not in flight from it either.”
A journalist, cultural historian and author
Gary Younge in conversation with Colin Grant
In front of an audience at the Cambridge Literary festival, Gary Younge, a Guardian columnist for more than two decades reflects on the extraordinary moments in history that he witnessed and reported on, from the election of President Nelson Mandela to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
Biography
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.
In 2017, Another Day in the Death of America won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation. In the US the book was shortlisted for the Helen Berenstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism from New York Public Library and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award as well as longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction from the American Library Association. Younge has also written for The New York Review of Books. Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman.
