Nathan Hare, author of "The Black Anglo-Saxons" (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University, where the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during the 1968–69 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.


The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them") organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam. These three formations provided both style and conceptual direction for Black Arts artists, including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the Black Arts Movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major forces were located outside New York City.


As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership, particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the "Journal of Black Poetry" and "The Black Scholar", and the Chicago–Detroit axis because of "Negro Digest/Black World" and Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) "Black Theatre" magazine, published by the New Lafayette Theatre, and "Black Dialogue", which had actually started in San Francisco (1964–68) and relocated to New York (1969–72).


Although the journals and writing of the movement greatly characterized its success, the movement placed a great deal of importance on collective oral and performance art. Public collective performances drew a lot of attention to the movement, and it was often easier to get an immediate response from a collective poetry reading, short play, or street performance than it was from individual performances.


The people involved in the Black Arts Movement used the arts as a way to liberate themselves. The movement served as a catalyst for many different ideas and cultures to come alive. This was a chance for African Americans to express themselves in a way that most would not have expected.


As the movement grew, ideological conflicts arose and eventually became too great for the movement to continue to exist as a large, coherent collective.


Among these definitions, the central theme that is the underlying connection of the Black Arts, Black Aesthetic, and Black Power movements is then this: the idea of group identity, which is defined by Black artists of organizations as well as their objectives.


As there begins a change in the Black population, Trey Ellis points out other flaws in his essay "The New Black Aesthetic." Blackness in terms of cultural background can no longer be denied in order to appease or please white "or" black people. From mulattos to a "post-bourgeois movement driven by a second generation of middle class," blackness isn’t a singular identity as the phrase "The Black Aesthetic" forces it to be but rather multifaceted and vast.


In his essay, Baraka says: "The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us."


According to the Academy of American Poets, "many writers--Native Americans, Latinos/as, gays and lesbians, and younger generations of African Americans have acknowledged their debt to the Black Arts Movement." The movement lasted for about a decade, through the mid-1960s and into the 1970s. This was a period of controversy and change in the world of literature. One major change came through in the portrayal of new ethnic voices in the United States. English-language literature, prior to the Black Arts Movement, was dominated by white authors.


The Black Arts Movement, although short, is essential to the history of the United States. It spurred political activism and use of speech throughout every African-American community. It allowed African Americans the chance to express their voices in the mass media as well as become involved in communities.


It can be argued that "the Black Arts movement produced some of the most exciting poetry, drama, dance, music, visual art, and fiction of the post-World War II United States" and that many important "post-Black artists" such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and August Wilson were shaped by the movement.


The Black Arts Movement also provided incentives for public funding of the arts and increased public support of various arts initiatives.


The movement has been seen as one of the most important times in African-American literature. It inspired black people to establish their own publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. It led to the creation of African-American Studies programs within universities. The movement was triggered by the assassination of Malcolm X. Among the well-known writers who were involved with the movement are Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Hoyt W. Fuller, and Rosa Guy. Although not strictly part of the Movement, other notable African-American writers such as novelists Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed share some of its artistic and thematic concerns. Although Reed is neither a movement apologist nor advocate, he said:


I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.


BAM influenced the world of literature with the portrayal of different ethnic voices. Before the movement, the literary canon lacked diversity, and the ability to express ideas from the point of view of racial and ethnic minorities, which was not valued by the mainstream at the time.


"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album "Small Talk at 125th and Lenox", on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron's first single, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", from his album "Pieces of a Man" (1971). It was also included on his compilation album, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1974). All these releases were issued on the Flying Dutchman Productions record label.


The song's title was originally a popular slogan among the 1960s Black Power movements in the United States. Its lyrics either mention or allude to several television series, advertising slogans and icons of entertainment and news coverage that serve as examples of what "the revolution will not" be or do. The song is a response to the spoken-word piece "When the Revolution Comes" by The Last Poets, from their eponymous debut, which opens with the line "When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV".


It was inducted to the National Recording Registry in 2005.


Been There, Done That: Family Wisdom for Modern Times is a 2016 non-fiction book written by real life husband and wife Al Roker and Deborah Roberts.


An insight into the marriage of media personalities Al Roker and Deborah Roberts.


On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep with Men is a 2004 New York Times Bestselling non-fiction book by J. L. King. The book was released in hardback on April 14, 2004 through Broadway Books and details the sexual lives of African-American men who are on the "down low" or having sex with men while posing or identifying as heterosexual. When the book was initially released, King denied claims that he was gay in both the book and in the media, but later confirmed that he was gay in 2010.


In the book King discusses the subject of African-American men who claim to be or otherwise consider themselves to be heterosexual, but hold secret sexual encounters with other men. The men give an outward appearance of only being heterosexual and will hold long-term relationships with women without informing the women or anyone else that they are having encounters, some of which are unprotected, with other men. King also discusses his own personal experience with living on the "down low", as well as what he perceives as potential risks and dangers that some forms of the lifestyle can bring.


Critical reception for "On the Down Low" was mostly positive, with Booklist calling the book "a revealing look at an important social and health issue". Robert Burns, director of Brother to Brother, criticized the book, stating that it "perpetuates stereotypes" and that the down low culture was "more complex" and "doesn't just exist the way (King) explained it".


In 2005 King's ex-wife Brenda Stone Browder published "On the Up and Up", a non-fiction book that was described as both a "survival guide" and a biography of Browder's life before and after discovering King's activities.


John F. Callahan is literary executor for Ralph Ellison, and was the editor for his posthumously-released novel "Juneteenth". In addition to his work with Ellison, Callahan has written or edited numerous volumes related to African-American literature, with a particular emphasis on 20th century literature.


Some of Callahan's other works include "In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in 20th Century Black Fiction", "Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook", and "The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald". Callahan also edited Ellison's short story collection "Flying Home" and co-edited with Albert Murray the Modern Library edition of "Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray". As Darryl Pinckney has observed: "Thanks to Callahan, there are more Ellison titles now than existed during his lifetime."


In 2010 Callahan published a fuller version of Ellison's unfinished second novel as "Three Days Before the Shooting".


Callahan serves as the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College.


He earned his B.A. from the University of Connecticut and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.


Callahan is the author of "A Man You Could Love", a novel published in 2007 by Fulcrum Publishing.


In 2015, Callahan donated his papers to the Lewis & Clark Archives.


Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence


The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence is an annual national literary award designed to recognize rising African-American fiction writers. First awarded in 2007, the prize is underwritten by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation in honor of the literary heritage provided by author Ernest J. Gaines, with the winner receiving a cash award ($15,000 as of 2020) "to support and enable the writer to focus on writing." It has been described as "the nation's biggest prize for African-American writers".


Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown is a 1995 book by Tony Brown, published by William Morrow & Company.


Brown advocates for black self-reliance. He criticizes black politicians' ties to the Democratic Party. He stated that African-Americans make up four "tribes". Richard Kahlenberg of "The Washington Post""stated that "conspiracy theories", including those targeting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and saying that AIDS research funds are not distributed properly, make up about 33% of the content. Kahlenberg stated that the criticisms of affirmative action for wealthier minorities are "flashes of insight".


The book was dedicated to his foster guardians, Elizabeth "Mama" Sanford and Mabel Holmes, Sanford's daughter.


Kahlenberg stated that Brown's "sensationalist style that works better on television than in print" undermines his "legitimate criticisms".


"Publishers Weekly" stated that Brown "undermines his case with a broad-brush assessment of the black community", referring to the designation of tribes, "and exaggerated references to black leaders' support for (and America's drift to) ``socialism.""


The Black Renaissance in D.C. was a social, intellectual, and cultural movement in Washington, D.C. that began in 1919 and continued into the late 1920s.


Before the start of the Black Renaissance, Washington, D.C. developed an educated and prosperous Black middle class, made up of Black intellectuals and scholars who often studied at Howard University. Washington, D.C. had the country's largest Black community from 1900 to 1920, heavily influencing the development of the Black Renaissance in the area.


While the Black Renaissance movement ultimately began in Harlem, Manhattan, New York, with the Harlem Renaissance, the movement ultimately spread to cities across the United States. In Washington, D.C., the movement began on July 19, 1919, with the alleged sexual assault of a white woman by a black predator. The event was never confirmed, but it incited inflammatory responses from the four daily newspapers in the city. Several hundred whites formed a mob near Murder Bay off of Pennsylvania Avenue, a neighborhood known for prostitution and violence. The mob went on to assault a Black couple who were walking on 9th and D Streets, Southwest. Many prominent figures in the Harlem movement had strong roots in Washington, D.C. and heavily influenced the movement there.


U-Street was known as a place of entertainment and jazz music. The street was often referred to as "Black Broadway".


Afro-Brazilian literature has existed in Brazil since the mid-19th century with the publication of Maria Firmina dos Reis's novel "Ursula" in 1859. Other writers from the late 19th century and early 20th century include Machado de Assis, Cruz e Sousa and Lima Barreto. Yet, Afro-Brazilian literature as a genre that recognized the ethnic and cultural origins of the writer did not gain national prominence in Brazil until the 1970s with the revival of Black Consciousness politics known as the Movimento Negro.


Literature written by individuals or groups of African ancestry in the present-day nation of Brazil, it can trace its origins to the 19th century. However, oral traditions of histories and narratives can be traced back to the 16th century when African slaves were brought across the Atlantic to work in the Portuguese colonies. Written forms of Afro-Brazilian literature do not appear until the 19th century with publications by writers such as Maria Firmina dos Reis, Cruz e Sousa and Machado de Assis.


There also existed during the 19th century a vast wealth of literature on Afro-Brazilians written by White Brazilians. Many of these writers were abolitionists that included Castro Alves, Joaquim Nabuco, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, and Naturalist writers that included Aluísio Azevedo, Jose Veríssimo, and Raul Pompéia. The well known Bahian author of the 20th century, Jorge Amado, also included many aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture and religion in many of his novels such as "Tenda dos Milagres" ("Tent of Miracles") and "A Morte e a Morte de Quincas Berro Dágua" ("The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell").


With the largest population of African descendants outside of Africa found in Brazil, the importance of focusing on Afro-Brazilian literature has increased in recent years with the publication of multiple anthologies and literary criticisms revolving around Afro-Brazilian writers. Furthermore, Afro-Brazilian literature reflects the complex relationship between Brazil's long history of slavery, its politics of branqueamento (racial whitening) that were implemented by the Brazilian government during the late 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and the myth of racial democracy that pervaded and still exists within the Brazilian national consciousness.


Considered to be the greatest Brazilian writer and the first writer to be inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Machado de Assis was a mulatto (more specifically, a quadroon) whose grandparents were slaves.


An Afro-Brazilian literary group founded by a group of Paulistanos in 1980 by Cuti, Oswaldo de Camargo, Paulo Colina, Abelardo Rodrigues and others, its objective was to discuss and deepen the understanding of Afro-Brazilians in literature. It also desired to promote the habit of reading and to develop and to encourage studies, research and analysis concerning Black literature and culture. The group is best known for its annual publication of "Cadernos Negros" (Black Notebooks), an anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays by Afro-Brazilian writers, artists and intellectuals. In collaboration with other organizations and academic literary departments, they have created courses, seminars, and debates about Afro-Brazilian literature and questions of race in literature. Since 1999 the group is coordinated by Esmeralda Ribeiro and Márcio Barbosa.


Best known for his novel "Cidade de Deus" ("City of God"), Paulo Lins currently teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. "Cidade de Deus" was the result of eight years of ethnographic fieldwork that Lins conducted in the favela of the same name and where he grew up as a child. Lins is currently working on a book that deals with slavery in Brazil since the 15th century.


Writing Black Britain 1948–1998 is an anthology of black British writings published in 2000 and edited by James Procter. The selection of writings includes many well-known writers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. This is an interdisciplinary collection and contains a variety of writings that discuss different forms of representation, i.e. films, music, and photography. It is centred on works of the diaspora, including Caribbean, African, and South Asian experiences. This collection is the first of its kind and critically engages with both the construction and community of "black Britain" and power relations. Every writer has something to say about their own positionality and how they've come to theorize black Britain.


The book is subdivided into three main parts covering distinct time periods: 1948 to late 1960s, later 1960s to mid-1980s, and mid-1980s to late 1990s. Each main part is framed by an introduction and then divided between "literature" and "essays and documents".


While many anthologies following were filled with pieces written specifically for the anthology's publication, "Writing Black Britain" is a collection of previously published text. These pieces were initially compiled in order to prevent misinterpretation and inaccuracy about Black communities in Britain and Germany. Because of this, the anthology was aimed at speaking to mainstream white audiences in order to highlight the Black presence in European life.


When reading and discussing "Writing Black Britain", it is important to keep in mind the fact that it was designed for use in university coursework and the potential effect this may have had on what materials were and were not included for publication.


This anthology engages with blackness and the Caribbean Community in Britain, especially looking at migration and how art serves as resistance. The Caribbean Artists Movement began in Britain, giving this discussion local relevance. In the first section, Claudia Jones speaks to the cultural identity formation of Afro-Caribbeans.


Recognizing the centrality of black women struggles within the formation of a black Britain, within this anthology black women speak to power differentials and intersectionality in their essay. As Hazel Carby states, "The fact that black women are subject to the 'simultaneous' oppression of patriarchy, class, and 'race' is the prime reason for not employing parallels that render their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible."


The anthology brings conversations to light, including the conversation/debate that occurred between Stuart Hall, Darcus Howe, and Salman Rushdie. The Black Audio Film Collective released their film "Handsworth Songs" (1986), and there was much to say about it and its implications. The film looks at the "riots" of 1985 in Handsworth and South London.


The Atlantic Sound is a 2000 travel book by Caryl Phillips. It was published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in the US by Knopf. In the words of the "Publishers Weekly" review: "Journeys, as forces of spiritual and cultural transformation, bind this trio of nonfiction narratives, which explores the legacy of slavery in each of the three major points of the transatlantic slave trade."


The book was described by "Kirkus Reviews" as: "A splendidly honest and vividly detailed venture into some of history's darkest corners—by a novelist who is also a superb reporter."


Gents is a novel by Warwick Collins first published in 1997. It is set in the unlikely environment of a "Gentlemen's" toilet, somewhere in London.


The story describes the lives of three West Indian immigrants who run a public urinal in London. Collins claimed it was stimulated in part by his memories of apartheid when he lived as a child in South Africa. The New York Times reviewer wrote: "Mr. Collins is able to express, deftly, several contrasting views of homosexuality. ..., resolves to make up his own mind about "alternative" life styles and does precisely that, with a mixture of love and logic."


The Saga Prize was a literary award for new Black British novelists, which ran from 1995 to 1998.


The actress and writer Marsha Hunt established the Saga Prize in 1995 to recognise the literature emerging from indigenous black Britons' experiences. The prize – of £3,000 and a book contract – was for unpublished first novels. To be eligible, entrants needed a black African ancestor and to have been born in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland. The prize was sponsored by the travel firm Saga plc. Judges included Andrea Levy and Margaret Busby.


The "afrocentric" nature of the Saga Prize and its restrictive definition of blackness caused controversy. The Commission for Racial Equality objected to its creation, and the Society of Authors refused to support it. The prize was successful, nevertheless, and ran for four years until 1998, winners including Diran Adebayo and Joanna Traynor.


Frances-Anne Solomon (born 28 June 1966) is a Caribbean British-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She lives between Toronto, Canada, and Barbados.


Born in England of Trinidadian parents, Frances-Anne Solomon began her professional life at the BBC in England, where she built a successful career as a producer, first with BBC Radio then with BBC television drama. She also produced and directed independent films through her company Leda Serene Films.


In 1999, she moved her company to Canada, where she continued to write, direct, and produce films, television programs, theatre plays, and new media projects.


In 2001, she founded CaribbeanTales, a charitable organisation producing, exhibiting and distributing educational multi-media projects based on Caribbean-heritage stories. The CaribbeanTales International Film Festival, founded in 2006 and based in Toronto, includes an annual festival, community screening series, and youth-focused film challenges. The CaribbeanTales Incubator Program develops original content for the regional and international market, CTFF also holds workshops and festivals in other territories, including to date Barbados, Belize, and Cuba. In 2010, Solomon founded CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution Inc, the first film distribution company in the English-speaking Caribbean dedicated to the marketing and sales of Caribbean-themed films. In 2014 she launched CaribbeanTales-TV, a video-on-demand platform.


Solomon is a Director member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.


Solomon is the granddaughter of Trinidad and Tobago independence politician Dr. Patrick Solomon. When her grandfather left politics and took a role as a diplomat, the family lived in different countries including Canada, the United States, Europe and Venezuela. She moved back to Trinidad at nine years old, and attended the girls' "prestige" school, Bishop Anstey High School. At 18 she moved to Canada to live with her mother, and discovered a love of the arts, studying theatre at the University of Toronto's U.C. Playhouse, and poetry with Jay Macpherson. In 1986, she moved to England, to work for the BBC.


She trained in television production through the two-year BBC Production Training Program and worked with "Ebony", the Corporation's first Black magazine programme, before being hired as a Radio Drama producer in London. While there she was responsible for helping to introduce a number of initiatives aimed at diversifying the talent pool in BBC Radio Drama. Many great talents got their first entry to Radio Drama in this way, including actors Adjoa Andoh and Clarence Smith to the BBC Drama Repertory Company, producers Pam Fraser Solomon and Nandita Ghose, composer Dominique Le Gendre and writers Parv Bancil, Maya Chowdhry, Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta and Jackie Kay among others.


Solomon returned to television as a Script Editor for ScreenPlay, a strand of mostly studio-based TV dramas. Between 1992 and 1998 she worked as a script editor and then as a producer and executive producer for BBC Single Drama and Films under George S. J. Faber. For the BBC she produced and executive-produced feature films, including "Speak Like a Child", director John Akomfrah's narrative debut, and "Love Is The Devil", John Maybury's award-winning first feature. She credits her time at the BBC as providing her with a grounding, and vision of the importance and creative power of public service broadcasting.


In 1993, Solomon won a place on the prestigious BBC Drama Directors Course. While working as a Drama Producer for the BBC, she continued to run her own company Leda Serene Films, where she developed, produced and directed films including "What My Mother Told Me", a Trinidad-based autobiographical story of generational violence in the context of a middle-class family; and "Peggy Su!", produced by BBC Films. Set in a Chinese laundry in Liverpool in the 1960s, it remains one of the only British films to depict the lives of the Chinese in Britain.


Ultimately she found the racism of the British film and television industry constraining, and like many of her peers, chose to emigrate. Returning to Canada in 2000, she founded the CaribbeanTales Media Group and continued to develop and produce television, feature films and new media projects. "Lord Have Mercy!", produced with Claire Prieto and Vanz Chapman, was Canada's first multicultural sitcom, and starred Russell Peters alongside Caribbean stars Leonie Forbes and Dennis "Sprangalang" Hall. "A Winter Tale", CityTV, 2007, depicts a Caribbean-Canadian community plagued by gun violence in Toronto.


Solomon is the director of "HERO", a hybrid feature, inspired by elements of the life of Trinidad and Tobago war hero, judge and jurist Ulric Cross.


Solomon was the recipient of the 2018 Visionary Award from the ReelWorld Film Festival.


On 1 July 2019 Solomon was one of 842 new members invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. The 2019 class is 50% women, 29% people of color, and represents 59 countries.


CaribbeanTales Inc a not-for-profit company was formed in 2001, originally as an internet platform for Caribbean-themed film and arts. Early projects include CaribbeanTales.ca, a multimedia e-newsletter, and "Literature Alive", a multi-faceted project including an educational website, audio books, and a documentary series, profiling Caribbean authors, many of whom are based in Canada. The non-profit company became a registered Canadian charity in 2014.


In 2006, Solomon founded the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival in Toronto as a platform for Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora films and filmmakers from the region. The CaribbeanTales Youth Film Festival, during Black History Month in Toronto, screens Africentric films in schools and communities. The Film Festival Group has also produced festivals and events in Barbados and New York.


While teaching film at the University of the West Indies in 2009, she consolidated her connections in the region. This led to the creation of CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, a Barbados-based company, and the first film distribution company dedicated to international distribution of Caribbean-themed audio visual content. The company was co-founded with cultural industries specialist Dr. Keith Nurse, businessman Terrence Farrell, and filmmakers Lisa Wickham and Mary Wells, with the goal to tackle head-on problems of the monetisation of Caribbean-themed content and the development of the Caribbean Film Industry.


The Creators of Colour Incubator (formerly CaribbeanTales Incubator Program), also founded in 2010, an annual program that takes place during the Toronto International Film Festival, aims to train filmmakers in the creation and marketing of sustainable content, and has been committed to helping to develop an infrastructure and international profile for Caribbean films, in the region and the diaspora.


The Program has evolved into a development and production hub for regional content. In 2015, CaribbeanTales won a five-year sponsorship and production deal with Flow, the brand name for Cable and Wireless Ltd, the largest telecommunications conglomerate in the Caribbean. The deal, brokered with Flow C.E.O John Reid, supports the production of at least three television series pilots a year from the CaribbeanTales Incubator Program. In 2016, the first of these projects were selected: "Caribbean Girl NYC" by Mariette Monpierre, "Battledream Chronicle" by Alain Bidard, and "Heat" by Menelik Shabazz. Production is underway in New York, Martinique and Barbados respectively. In 2017 Flow and CaribbeanTales expanded their relationship to give Flow subscribers around the Caribbean access to CaribbeanTales vast catalogue of films through Television on demand.


CaribbeanTales established an online VOD platform CaribbeanTales-TV.


Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta ( born in 21 July 1944, died in 25 January 2017) was a Nigerian novelist, based in the UK from 1962. she wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She authored more than 20 books, including "Second Class Citizen" (1974), "The Bride Price" (1976), "The Slave Girl" (1977) and "The Joys of Motherhood" (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby.


Emecheta's themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education gained recognition from critics and honours. She once described her stories as "stories of the world, where women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical." Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity. She has been characterized as "the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948".


From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976, she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she worked as a community worker in Camden, North London, meanwhile continuing to produce further novels with Allison and Busby – "The Bride Price" (1976), "The Slave Girl" (1977), "The Joys of Motherhood" (1979) and "Destination Biafra" (1982) – as well as the children's books "Titch the Cat" (1979) and "Nowhere To Play" (1980).


Over the years, Emecheta worked with many cultural and literary organizations, including the Africa Centre, London, and with the Caine Prize for African Writing as a member of the Advisory Council.


Buchi Emecheta suffered a stroke in 2010, and she died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72.


Most of her fictional works are focused on sexual discrimination and racial prejudice informed by her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in the United Kingdom.


Among honours received during her literary career, Emecheta won the 1978 Jock Campbell Prize from the "New Statesman" (first won by Chinua Achebe's "Arrow of God") for her novel "The Slave Girl", and she was on "Granta" magazine's 1983 list of 20 "Best of Young British Novelists". She was a member of the British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race in 1979.


In September 2004, she appeared in the "A Great Day in London" photograph taken at the British Library, featuring 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature. In 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature.


She received an Honorary doctorate of literature from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1992.


Buchi Emecheta features at number 98 on a list of 100 women recognised in August 2018 by "BBC History Magazine" as having changed the world.


In March 2019, Camden Town Brewery launched a football kit using artwork featuring "some of the most inspiring female icons to have influenced the brewery's home borough of Camden".


On 21 July 2019, which would have been Emecheta's 75th birthday, Google commemorated her life with a Doodle.


In October 2019 a new exhibition space in the library for students at Goldsmiths, University of London, was dedicated to Buchi Emecheta.


Pam Fraser Solomon FRSA is a British producer/director of Guyanese heritage, whose work spans four decades in theatre, radio, film, television and education, winning prizes such as the Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media Award" in 1999. Her career in fringe and repertory theatre includes working for venues such as the Sheffield Crucible and the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and she is currently the Head of Creative Producing at Mountview drama school.


Speaking of how her Guyanese heritage and the experience of growing up in London as a Black woman has impacted her work, Fraser Solomon has said: "People like me with experiences that can inform characterisation and storytelling, subtly changing the emphasis, can lead drama away from comfort zones. This doesn't make me better than others, but it makes my contribution equally valid. I see the world through the eyes of a Black woman, so in that sense all my intuition eventually leads back to that fact."


From 1991, Fraser Solomon was for 16 years a senior producer with BBC Radio, where she directed more than a hundred hours of audio dramas, and she was involved in major arts events such as the Africa95 and Africa '05 festivals, as well as the 2007 Abolition commemoration season. She wrote and produced for BBC Radio 4 in January 2001 the programme "Stealing the Glory", about the Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, presented by Colin Salmon.


Her television drama work encompasses producing several episodes of "EastEnders" and "Holby City", and she was the development producer for the BBC short film "One Night In White Satin". She was an executive producer of the 2007 BBC2 television documentary "In Search of Wilberforce", presented by Moira Stuart.


Continuing her career as a freelance producer, director and script editor, Fraser Solomon was involved in projects including the production of the documentary film "Divided by Race, United in War and Peace", about Caribbean war veterans and their struggles against colour prejudice and racism. She took up the position of Head of MA Creative Producing at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in 2018. She is also Co-Chair of Theatre Deli.


Among her awards as a producer/director are a 1999 Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media Award" (RIMA) for Radio Drama as director of Margaret Busby's play based on C. L. R. James's novel "Minty Alley", first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1998, featuring Geff Francis, Vivienne Rochester and Burt Caesar.


Fraser Solomon has served as a judge for prizes including The Whickers Radio & Audio Funding Award (RAFA).


Caryl Phillips (born 13 March 1958) is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright and essayist. Best known for his novels (for which he has won multiple awards), Phillips is often described as a writer, since much of his fictional output is defined by its interest in, and searching exploration of, the experiences of peoples of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean and the United States. As well as writing, Phillips has worked as an academic at numerous institutions including Amherst College, Barnard College, and Yale University, where he has held the position of Professor of English since 2005.


At the age of 22, he visited St. Kitts for the first time since his family had left the island in 1958. The journey provided the inspiration for his first novel, "The Final Passage", which was published five years later. After publishing his second book, "A State of Independence" (1986), Phillips went on a one-month journey around Europe, which resulted in his 1987 collection of essays "The European Tribe". During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phillips divided his time between England and St. Kitts while working on his novels "Higher Ground" (1989) and "Cambridge" (1991).


In 1990, Phillips took up a Visiting Writer post at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He remained at Amherst College for a further eight years, becoming the youngest English tenured Professor in the US when he was promoted to that position in 1995. During this time, he wrote what is perhaps his best-known novel, "Crossing the River" (1993), which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. After taking up the position at Amherst, Phillips found himself doing "a sort of triangular thing" for a number of years, residing between England, St Kitts, and the U.S.


Finding this way of living both "incredibly exhausting" and "prohibitively expensive", Phillips ultimately decided to give up his residence in St. Kitts, though he says he still makes regular visits to the island. In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order. In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English. He was made an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011.


Phillips has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles, and his writing is concerned with issues of "origins, belongings and exclusion", as noted by a reviewer of his 2015 novel "The Lost Child". Phillips's work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for "Crossing the River" and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for "A Distant Shore".


Phillips received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for "Dancing in the Dark" in 2006.


Mary Jane Seacole ("née" Grant; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican nurse, healer and businesswoman who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield, and nursed many of them back to health. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole displayed "compassion, skills and bravery while nursing soldiers during the Crimean War", through the use of herbal remedies. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton.


Mary Seacole relied on her skill and experience as a healer and a doctress from Jamaica. Schools of nursing in England were only set up after the Crimean war, the first being the (Florence) Nightingale Training School, in 1860 at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Seacole was arguably the first nurse practitioner.


Hoping to assist with nursing the wounded on the outbreak of the Crimean War, Seacole applied to the War Office to be included among the nursing contingent but was refused, so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded. She became popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war.


In 1858 a four-day Fundraising Gala took place on the banks of the river Thames, to honour Mary Seacole. Crowds of about 80,000 attended, including veterans, their families and Royalty.


After her death she was largely forgotten for almost a century, but was subsequently recognised for her success as a woman. Her autobiography, "Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands" (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned by present-day supporters of Florence Nightingale. The erection of a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London, on 30 June 2016, describing her as a "pioneer", has generated controversy and opposition from Nightingale enthusiasts, such as Lynn McDonald, and others researching the period.


Mary Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, in the Colony of Jamaica, the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British Army, and a free Jamaican woman. Her mother, Mrs Grant, nicknamed "The Doctress", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Mrs Grant also ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, which was considered one of the best hotels in all of Kingston.


At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills, which included the use of hygiene, ventilation, warmth, hydration, rest, empathy, good nutrition and care for the dying. Blundell Hall also served as a convalescent home for military and naval staff recuperating from illnesses such as cholera and yellow fever. Seacole's autobiography says she began experimenting in medicine, based on what she learned from her mother, by ministering to a doll and then progressing to pets before helping her mother treat humans. Because of her family's close ties with the army, she was able to observe the practices of military doctors, and combined that knowledge with the West African remedies she acquired from her mother.


In Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, neonatal deaths were more than a quarter of total births, at a time when British-Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood wrote about European doctors employing questionable practices such as mercury pills and the bleeding of the patient. However, Seacole, using traditional West African herbal remedies and hygienic practices, boasted that she never lost a mother or her child.


Mary Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly woman, whom she called her "kind patroness", before returning to her mother. She was treated as a member of her patroness's family and received a good education. As the educated daughter of a Scottish officer and a free black woman with a respectable business, Seacole would have held a high position in Jamaican society.


In about 1821, Seacole visited London, staying for a year, and visited her relatives in the merchant Henriques family. Although London had a number of black people, she records that a companion, a West Indian with skin darker than her own "dusky" shades, was taunted by children. Seacole herself was "only a little brown"; she was nearly white according to one of her biographers, Dr. Ron Ramdin. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a "large stock of West Indian pickles and preserves for sale". Her later travels would be as an "unprotected" woman, without a chaperone or sponsor – an unusually independent practice at a time when women had limited rights.


After returning to Jamaica, Seacole cared for her "old indulgent patroness" through an illness, finally returning to the family home at Blundell Hall after the death of her patroness (a woman who gave financial support to her) a few years later. Seacole then worked alongside her mother, occasionally being called to provide nursing assistance at the British Army hospital at Up-Park Camp. She also travelled the Caribbean, visiting the British colony of New Providence in The Bahamas, the Spanish colony of Cuba, and the new Republic of Haiti. Seacole records these travels, but omits mention of significant current events, such as the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica of 1831, the abolition of slavery in 1833, and the abolition of "apprenticeship" in 1838.


During 1843 and 1844, Seacole suffered a series of personal disasters. She and her family lost much of the boarding house in a fire in Kingston on 29 August 1843. Blundell Hall burned down, and was replaced by New Blundell Hall, which was described as "better than before". Then her husband died in October 1844, followed by her mother. After a period of grief, in which Seacole says she did not stir for days, she composed herself, "turned a bold front to fortune", and assumed the management of her mother's hotel. She put her rapid recovery down to her hot Creole blood, blunting the "sharp edge of [her] grief" sooner than Europeans who she thought "nurse their woe secretly in their hearts".


Seacole absorbed herself in work, declining many offers of marriage. She later became known to the European military visitors to Jamaica who often stayed at Blundell Hall. She treated and nursed patients in the cholera epidemic of 1850, which killed some 32,000 Jamaicans.


The epidemic raged through the population. Seacole later expressed exasperation at their feeble resistance, claiming they "bowed down before the plague in slavish despair". She performed an autopsy on an orphan child for whom she had cared, which gave her "decidedly useful" new knowledge. At the end of this epidemic she herself contracted cholera, forcing her to rest for several weeks. In her autobiography, "The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands", she describes how the residents of Cruces responded: "When it became known that their "yellow doctress" had the cholera, I must do the people of Cruces the justice to say that they gave me plenty of sympathy, and would have shown their regard for me more actively, had there been any occasion."


Cholera was to return again: Ulysses S. Grant passed through Cruces in July 1852, on military duty; a hundred and twenty men, a third of his party, died of the disease there or shortly afterwards en route to Panama City.


Despite the problems of disease and climate, Panama remained the favoured route between the coasts of the United States. Seeing a business opportunity, Seacole opened the British Hotel, which was a restaurant rather than an hotel. She described it as a "tumble down hut," with two rooms, the smaller one to be her bedroom, the larger one to serve up to 50 diners. She soon added the services of a barber.


The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 until 1 April 1856 and was fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire. The majority of the conflict took place on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea and Turkey.


Many thousands of troops from all the countries involved were drafted to the area, and disease broke out almost immediately. Hundreds perished, mostly from Cholera. Hundreds more would die waiting to be shipped out, or on the voyage. Their prospects were little better when they arrived at the poorly staffed, unsanitary and overcrowded hospitals which were the only medical provision for the wounded. In Britain, a trenchant letter in "The Times" on 14 October triggered Sidney Herbert, Secretary of State for War, to approach Florence Nightingale to form a detachment of nurses to be sent to the hospital to save lives. Interviews were quickly held, suitable candidates selected, and Nightingale left for Turkey on 21 October.


Nightingale reportedly wrote, "I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs Seacole's advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!)...Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness - also much drunkenness and improper conduct".


Seacole finally resolved to travel to Crimea using her own resources and to open the British Hotel. Business cards were printed and sent ahead to announce her intention to open an establishment, to be called the "British Hotel", near Balaclava, which would be "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". Shortly afterwards, her Caribbean acquaintance, Thomas Day, arrived unexpectedly in London, and the two formed a partnership. They assembled a stock of supplies, and Seacole embarked on the Dutch screw-steamer "Hollander" on 27 January 1855 on its maiden voyage, to Constantinople. The ship called at Malta, where Seacole encountered a doctor who had recently left Scutari. He wrote her a letter of introduction to Nightingale.


Seacole visited Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, where she asked for a bed for the night. Seacole wrote, "Mrs. B. questions me very kindly, but with the same look of curiosity and surprise. What object has Mrs. Seacole in coming out? This is the purport of her questions. And I say, frankly, to be of use somewhere; for other considerations I had not, until necessity forced them upon me. Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water. I fancy Mrs. B— thought that I sought for employment at Scutari, for she said, very kindly – "Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy – "


After transferring most of her stores to the transport ship "Albatross", with the remainder following on the "Nonpareil", she set out on the four-day voyage to the British bridgehead into Crimea at Balaclava. Lacking proper building materials, Seacole gathered abandoned metal and wood in her spare moments, with a view to using the debris to build her hotel. She found a site for the hotel at a place she christened Spring Hill, near Kadikoi, some along the main British supply road from Balaclava to the British camp near Sevastopol, and within a mile of the British headquarters.


The hotel was completed in July at a total cost of £800. It included a building made of iron, containing a main room with counters and shelves and storage above, an attached kitchen, two wooden sleeping huts, outhouses, and an enclosed stable-yard. The building was stocked with provisions shipped from London and Constantinople, as well as local purchases from the British camp near Kadikoi and the French camp at nearby Kamiesch. Seacole sold anything – "from a needle to an anchor"—to army officers and visiting sightseers. Meals were served at the Hotel, cooked by two black cooks, and the kitchen also provided outside catering.


Despite constant thefts, particularly of livestock, Seacole's establishment prospered. Chapter XIV of "Wonderful Adventures" describes the meals and supplies provided to officers. They were closed at 8 pm daily and on Sundays. Seacole did some of the cooking herself: "Whenever I had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands, roll up my sleeves, and roll out pastry." When called to "dispense medications," she did so. Soyer was a frequent visitor, and praised Seacole's offerings, noting that she offered him champagne on his first visit.


To Soyer, near the time of departure, Florence Nightingale acknowledged favourable views of Seacole, consistent with their one known meeting in Scutari. Soyer's remarks—he knew both women—show pleasantness on both sides. Seacole told him of her encounter with Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital: "You must know, M Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging." When he related Seacole's inquiries to Nightingale, she replied "with a smile: 'I should like to see her before she leaves, as I hear she has done a deal of good for the poor soldiers.'" Nightingale, however, did not want her nurses associating with Seacole, as she wrote to her brother-in-law.


Seacole often went out to the troops as a sutler, selling her provisions near the British camp at Kadikoi, and nursing casualties brought out from the trenches around Sevastopol or from the Tchernaya valley. She was widely known to the British Army as "Mother Seacole".


After the fall of Sevastopol, hostilities continued in a desultory fashion. The business of Seacole and Day prospered in the interim period, with the officers taking the opportunity to enjoy themselves in the quieter days. There were theatrical performances and horse-racing events for which Seacole provided catering.


Seacole was joined by a 14-year-old girl, Sarah, also known as Sally. Soyer described her as "the Egyptian beauty, Mrs Seacole's daughter Sarah", with blue eyes and dark hair. Nightingale alleged that Sarah was the illegitimate offspring of Seacole and Colonel Henry Bunbury. However, there is no evidence that Bunbury met Seacole, or even visited Jamaica, at a time when she would have been nursing her ailing husband. Ramdin speculates that Thomas Day could have been Sarah's father, pointing to the unlikely coincidences of their meeting in Panama and then in England, and their unusual business partnership in Crimea.


Sociology professor Lynn McDonald is co-founder of The Nightingale Society, which promotes the legacy of Nightingale, who did not see eye-to-eye with Seacole. McDonald believes that Seacole's role in the Crimean War was overplayed:


"Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands".


The "Illustrated London News" received the autobiography favorably agreeing with the statements made in the preface "If singleness of heart, true charity and Christian works- of trials and sufferings, dangers and perils, encountered boldly by a helpless women on her errand of mercy in the camp and in the battlefield can excite sympathy or move curiosity, Mary Seacole will have many friends and many readers".


In 2017 Robert McCrum chose it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books, calling it "gloriously entertaining".


Seacole joined the Roman Catholic Church circa 1860, and returned to a Jamaica changed in her absence as it faced economic downturn. She became a prominent figure in the country. However, by 1867 she was again running short of money, and the Seacole fund was resurrected in London, with new patrons including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Cambridge, and many other senior military officers. The fund burgeoned, and Seacole was able to buy land on Duke Street in Kingston, near New Blundell Hall, where she built a bungalow as her new home, plus a larger property to rent out.


By 1870, Seacole was back in London, living at 40 Upper Berkley St., St. Marylebone. Robinson speculates that she was drawn back by the prospect of rendering medical assistance in the Franco-Prussian War. It seems likely that she approached Sir Harry Verney (the husband of Florence Nightingale's sister Parthenope) Member of Parliament for Buckingham who was closely involved in the British National Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded. It was at this time Nightingale wrote her letter to Verney insinuating that Seacole had kept a "bad house" in Crimea, and was responsible for "much drunkenness and improper conduct".


In London, Seacole joined the periphery of the royal circle. Prince Victor (a nephew of Queen Victoria; as a young Lieutenant he had been one of Seacole's customers in Crimea) carved a marble bust of her in 1871 that was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1872. Seacole also became personal masseuse to the Princess of Wales who suffered with white leg and rheumatism.


While well known at the end of her life, Seacole rapidly faded from public memory in Britain. However, in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her and efforts to acknowledge her achievements. She was cited as an example of "hidden" black history in Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" (1988), like Olaudah Equiano: "See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence's candle."


She has been better remembered in Jamaica, where significant buildings were named after her in the 1950s: the headquarters of the Jamaican General Trained Nurses' Association was christened "Mary Seacole House" in 1954, followed quickly by the naming of a hall of residence of the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and a ward at Kingston Public Hospital was also named in her memory. More than a century after her death, Seacole was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991.


Her grave in London was rediscovered in 1973; a service of reconsecration was held on 20 November 1973, and her gravestone was also restored by the British Commonwealth Nurses' War Memorial Fund and the Lignum Vitae Club. Nonetheless, when scholarly and popular works were written in the 1970s about the Black British presence in Britain, she was absent from the historical record, and went unrecorded by Dominican-born scholar Edward Scobie and Nigerian historian Sebastian Okechukwu Mezu.


The centenary of her death was celebrated with a memorial service on 14 May 1981 and the grave is maintained by the Mary Seacole Memorial Association, an organization founded in 1980 by Jamaican-British Auxiliary Territorial Service corporal, Connie Mark. An English Heritage blue plaque was erected by the Greater London Council at her residence in 157 George Street, Westminster, on 9 March 1985, but it was removed in 1998 before the site was redeveloped. A "green plaque" was unveiled at 147 George Street, in Westminster, on 11 October 2005. However, another blue plaque has since been positioned at 14 Soho Square, where she lived in 1857.


By the 21st century, Seacole was much more prominent. Several buildings and entities, mainly connected with health care, were named after her. In 2005, British politician Boris Johnson wrote of learning about Seacole from his daughter's school pageant and speculated: "I find myself facing the grim possibility that it was my own education that was blinkered." In 2007 Seacole was introduced into the National Curriculum, and her life story is taught at many primary schools in the UK alongside that of Florence Nightingale.


She was voted into first place in an online poll of 100 Great Black Britons in 2004. The portrait identified as Seacole in 2005 was used for one of ten first-class stamps showing important Britons, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery.


An annual prize to recognise and develop leadership in nurses, midwives and health visitors in the National Health Service was named Seacole, to "acknowledge her achievements". The NHS Leadership Academy has developed a six-month leadership course called the Mary Seacole Programme, which is designed for first time leaders in healthcare. An exhibition to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth opened at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London in March 2005. Originally scheduled to last for a few months, the exhibition was so popular that it was extended to March 2007.


A campaign to erect a statue of Seacole in London was launched on 24 November 2003, chaired by Clive Soley, Baron Soley. The design of the sculpture by Martin Jennings was announced on 18 June 2009. There was significant opposition to the siting of the statue at the entrance of St Thomas' Hospital, but it was unveiled on 30 June 2016. The words written by Russell in "The Times" in 1857 are etched on to Seacole's statue: "I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead."


A biopic feature film is being made of her life by Racing Green Pictures and producer Billy Peterson. The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Mary Seacole. A short animation about Mary Seacole was adapted from a book entitled "Mother Seacole", published in 2005 as part of the bicentenary celebrations. Seacole is featured in BBC's "Horrible Histories", where she is portrayed by Dominique Moore. Viewer complaints about the show led the BBC Trust to conclude that the episode's portrayal of "racial issues was materially inaccurate".


A two-dimensional sculpture of Seacole was erected in Paddington in 2013. On 14 October 2016, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.


An article by Lynn McDonald in "The Times Literary Supplement" asked "How did Mary Seacole come to be viewed as a pioneer of modern nursing?", comparing her unfavourably with Kofoworola Pratt who was the first black nurse in the NHS, and concluded "She deserves much credit for rising to the occasion, but her tea and lemonade did not save lives, pioneer nursing or advance health care".


In January 2013 Operation Black Vote launched a petition to request Education Secretary Michael Gove to drop neither her nor Olaudah Equiano from the National Curriculum. Rev. Jesse Jackson and others wrote a letter to "The Times" protesting against the mooted removal of Mary Seacole from the National Curriculum. This was declared successful on 8 February 2013 when the DfE opted to leave Seacole on the curriculum.


David Adetayo Olusoga (born January 1970) is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and film-maker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to "The One Show" and "The Guardian".


David Olusoga was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and British mother. At five years old, Olusoga migrated to the UK with his mother and grew up in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. He was one of a very few non-white people living on a council estate. By the time he was 14, the National Front had attacked his house on more than one occasion, requiring police protection for him and his family. They were eventually forced to leave as a result of the racism. He later attended the University of Liverpool to study the history of slavery, and in 1994, graduated with a BA (Hons) History degree, followed by a postgraduate course in broadcast journalism at Leeds Trinity University.


Olusoga began his TV career behind the camera, first as a researcher on the 1999 BBC series "Western Front". Realising that black people were much less visible in the media and historically, Olusoga became a producer of history programmes after university, working from 2005 on programmes such as "Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich", "The Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith" and "Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner?".


Subsequently he became a television presenter, beginning in 2014 with "The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire", about the Indian, African and Asian troops who fought in the First World War, followed by several other documentaries and appearances on BBC One television's "The One Show". In 2015 it was announced that he would co-present "Civilisations", a sequel to Kenneth Clark's 1969 television documentary series "Civilisation", alongside the historians Mary Beard and Simon Schama. His most recent TV series include "", "The World's War", "A House Through Time" and the BAFTA award-winning "Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners".


Olusoga was included in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the "Powerlist", a ranking of the 100 most influential Black Britons, and in the 2021 edition he made the Top 10 most influential, ranking eighth.


He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to history and to community integration. He received his medal from the Queen in January 2019.


On appointing him as a professor in 2019, the University of Manchester described him as an expert on military history, empire, race and slavery, and "one of the UK's foremost historians". Olusoga gave his inaugural professorial lecture on "Identity, Britishness and the "Windrush"" at the University of Manchester in May 2019.


In response to the global Black Lives Matter movement with protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, Olusoga's "Black and British: A Forgotten History" was re-broadcast on the BBC and made available on BBC iPlayer along with "Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners", also fronted by him.


On 13 November 2020, the BBC announced that it had commissioned "Barack Obama Talks To David Olusoga", a special programme in which President Obama discusses the first volume of his presidential memoirs, "A Promised Land". The programme aired on 19 January 2021.


In January 2021 Olusoga appeared on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs", where he discussed his childhood experiences of racism and his love of blues music. Among his choices of music were "Can't Blame the Youth" by Bob Marley and the Wailers and "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson. His luxury item was an acoustic guitar and his choice of book was "The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–40".


George Lamming (born 8 June 1927) is a Bajan novelist, essayist and poet and an important figure in Caribbean literature, who first won critical acclaim with his debut novel, "In the Castle of My Skin" (1953). He has held academic posts including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and has lectured extensively worldwide.


George William Lamming was born on 8 June 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write.


"The emigrants were largely men in search of work. My friend and fellow traveller, the late Samuel Selvon of Trinidad, was a poet and short-story writer then halfway through his first novel, A Brighter Sun. Sam and I had left home for the same reason - to make a career as a writer. This was a journey to an expectation, and between 1948 and 1960 every West Indian novelist of significance within their region made a similar journey: Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittleholzer, Ian Carew of Guyana, Roger Mais, Andrew Salkey and John Hearne of Jamaica.


In 1951 Lamming became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine "Bim", edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's "Caribbean Voices" radio series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on "Caribbean Voices", including some by the young Derek Walcott.


He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies, Kingston (1967–68). Since then, he has been a visiting professor in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Brown University, Cornell University, and Duke University and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Lamming also directed the University of Miami's Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing.


In April 2012, he was chair of the judges for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and served as chief judge for the inaugural Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing 2014.


Lamming is the author of six novels: "In the Castle of My Skin" (1953), "The Emigrants" (1954), "Of Age and Innocence" (1958), "Season of Adventure" (1960), "Water with Berries" (1971) and "Natives of My Person" (1972). His much acclaimed first novel, "In the Castle of My Skin", featuring an autobiographical character named G., can be read as both a coming-of-age story as well as the story of the Caribbean.


His 1960 collection of essays, "The Pleasures of Exile", is a pioneering work that attempts to define the place of the West Indian in the post-colonial world, re-interpreting Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and the characters of Prospero and Caliban in terms of personal identity and the history of the Caribbean.


A more recent (1995) collection of essays is "Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II – Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual".


Brown University held a two-day series of events celebrating Lamming, 8–9 March 2011.


In May 2011 the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) awarded Lamming the first Caribbean Hibiscus Award in acknowledgement of his lifetime's work. In 2014, he won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.


George Lamming Primary School, located at Flint Hall, St Michael, was named in his honour and opened on 2 September 2008.


His work is celebrated through the George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, housed at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI), with annual distinguished lecture series held annually in June, the month of Lamming's birth. His personal literary collection is housed at the Sidney Martin Library, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados.


Nadifa Mohamed (, ) is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on "Granta" magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including "The Guardian", and contributed poetry to the anthology "New Daughters of Africa" (ed. Margaret Busby, 2019).


Mohamed was born in 1981 in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Her father was a sailor in the merchant navy and her mother was a local landlady. In 1986, she moved with her family to London for what was intended to be a temporary stay. However, the civil war broke out shortly afterwards in Somalia, so they remained in the UK.


Mohamed later attended the University of Oxford, where she studied history and politics. In 2008, she visited Hargeisa for the first time in over a decade.


Mohamed resides in London and is working on her third novel.


In 2013, Mohamed released her second novel, "The Orchard of Lost Souls". Set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war, it was published by Simon & Schuster. Reviewing it in "The Independent", Arifa Akbar said: "If Mohamed's first novel was about fathers and sons ... this one is essentially about mothers and daughters." In 2014 "The Orchard of Lost Souls" won the Somerset Maugham Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.


In December 2013, Mohamed was one of 36 writer and translator participants at the Doha International Book Fair's Literary Translation Summit in Qatar.


She was chosen as one of "Granta" magazine's "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in April 2014 was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature.


Her writing has also been published in such outlets as "The Guardian" and Literary Hub, as well as in the anthology "New Daughters of Africa" (2019), which includes poetry by Mohamed.


In June 2018 Mohamed was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.


Jacqueline Margaret Kay, (born 9 November 1961), is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works "Other Lovers" (1993), "Trumpet" (1998) and "Red Dust Road" (2011). Kay has won a number of awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.


Since 2016, she has been Scots Makar, the national poet laureate of Scotland. She was appointed as chancellor of the University of Salford in 2015.


Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. They adopted Jackie in 1961, having already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by their biological parents.


Her adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a child Kay suffered racism from children and teachers at school. John Kay died in 2019 at the age of 94.


As a teenager she worked as a cleaner, working for David Cornwell—who wrote under the pen-name John le Carré—for four months. She recommended cleaning work to aspiring writers, saying: "It’s great ... You’re listening to everything. You can be a spy, but nobody thinks you're taking anything in." Cornwell and Kay met again in 2019; he remembered her, and had been following her.


In August 2007, Jackie Kay was the subject of the fourth episode of the BBC Radio 4 series "The House I Grew Up In", in which she talked about her childhood.


In 1997, Kay published a biography of blues singer Bessie Smith, which was reissued in 2021. An abridged version read by the author featured as BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week" in the last week of February 2021.


Kay writes extensively for stage (in 1988 her play "Twice Over" was the first by a Black writer to be produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group), screen and for children. Her drama "The Lamplighter" is an exploration of the Atlantic slave trade. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2007, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon, during a season marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, and was published in printed form as a poem in 2008.


In 2010 Kay published "Red Dust Road", an account of her search for her biological parents, who had met each other when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. The book was adapted for the stage by Tanika Gupta and premiered in August 2019 at the Edinburgh International Festival in a production by National Theatre of Scotland and HOME, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.


She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University. Kay lives in Manchester. She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project "Sixty-Six Books", her piece being based on the book of Esther from the King James Bible. In October 2014, it was announced that she had been appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Salford, and that she would be the university's "Writer in Residence" from 1 January 2015.


In March 2016, Kay was announced as the next Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland), succeeding Liz Lochhead, whose tenure ended in January 2016.


She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours for services to literature, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours, again for services to literature. Kay was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020.


Kay is a lesbian. In her twenties she gave birth to a son, Matthew (whose father is the writer Fred D'Aguiar) and later she had a 15-year relationship with poet Carol Ann Duffy. During this relationship, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella, whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson.


Some other poetry used in GCSE Edexcel Syllabus


Petronella Breinburg (1927 – 5 November 2019) was a Surinamese British author, playwright and professor and one of the first black British authors to write picture books about black children. "My Brother Sean", illustrated by Errol Lloyd and published by The Bodley Head in 1973, was followed by a series, including "Sean Goes to School", "Sean's Red Bike" and "Doctor Sean". She also wrote books focused on older children, including her first book "Legend of Suriname", "Us Boys of Westcroft" and "Stories from the Caribbean". Her early books, published at a time where black authored books were rare, provided one of the first opportunities for black children in Britain to read stories they could identify with.


Breinburg, of mixed European and African heritage, was born in Suriname in 1931. Her father, a policeman, died when she was 12 and the family – there were six children – went to live with her grandmother, near an old Dutch plantation. This grandmother used to terrify the children with tales about the old Dutchman who had owned the plantation.


Influenced by a lineage of storytellers, Breinburg enjoyed writing from a young age, winning local competitions from age eight and writing her first play at 13. She was educated at St. Rosa and St. Margaret's Convent in Suriname before training as a teacher. After emigrating to Guyana with her husband, she gave birth to two children. In Guyana, she was a member of the Red Cross Society for 10 years, serving for some time as Lieutenant of the Girls Life Brigade. She came to the UK with her two children to join her husband in 1961. Breinburg was a supply teacher in London, where her experience of racism and representation shaped her writing.


Breinburg obtained her doctorate in education with linguistics at University of Keele, with one year at Amsterdam University and a stint as a research fellow at the linguistic department of the University of Sheffield. She was then appointed to Goldsmiths' University of London, where she was a senior lecturer and head of the Caribbean Centre. Breinburg published books for children, teenagers, and for adults. She also wrote a number of plays and poetry.


Tamarind Books was a small independent British publisher specialising in picture books, fiction and non-fiction featuring black and Asian children and children with disabilities. It was founded by Verna Wilkins in 1987 with the mission of redressing the balance of diversity in children’s publishing, and in 2007 became an imprint of Random House Children’s Books UK.


Tamarind Books was founded by Grenada-born Verna Wilkins in 1987 after her five-year-old son came home from school with a "This is Me" booklet in which he had coloured himself pink. When she offered him a brown crayon to use instead, he refused, saying that the image he had drawn of himself had to have pink skin because it was for a book. When she researched the matter further, she arrived at the conclusion that her child and other children from the ethnic minorities were so under-represented in children’s books that they were being denied an important stage in their learning, so she decided to start publishing books to meet that need.


For twenty years, Wilkins ran Tamarind Books from her home, writing many of the books herself, working with the support of her family and a small group of friends and freelancers. New books were published only when there was enough money in the company bank account. In the early years, she sold the books herself. Later Tamarind books were distributed by commercial distributors.