“Toni Morrison meant little to me when I was tasked to read her at school, but when hip-hop artists Mos Def and Talib Kweli, as Black Star, encoded the themes of her novel The Bluest Eye in the track Thieves in the Night, I began to think of myself as a writer and, perhaps more importantly, a reader.”
An Afropean writer, photographer and BBC broadcaster
Biography
Johny Pitts is the author of Afropean. He has presented on MTV, BBC, and ITV1, and his broadcasting includes a BBC Radio 4 documentary exploring Black identity through the music of his father who was a member of the Northern Soul group The Fantastics Society.
Pitts currently presents Open Book for BBC Radio 4 and a forthcoming Afropean podcast funded by a grant from the National Geographic. He won the Jhalak Prize for Afropean. The book was also a winner of the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing.
